LawNext: Recent Episodes

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SurePoint Technologies, a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named Jeff Steinberg its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating Eric Thurston, who had led the company since 2023, to executive chairman. Two weeks into the job, Steinberg joins LawNext to speak with host Bob Ambrogi about what his appointment means for the company's customers.

His answer to that question is direct: This is a mandate for change, not business as usual. Steinberg is candid that SurePoint still has integration work ahead of it after acquiring four companies in four years — Coyote Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, and ZenCase in 2025 — and he says the company will keep looking at acquisitions while it does that work.

Steinberg is no stranger to legal technology. He founded Redwood Analytics in 2000, an early innovator in helping law firms use their own data to understand their profitability, and sold the company to LexisNexis in 2008 (which then sold it to Aderant in 2014). He spent the years since in medical records retrieval for litigation and in other sectors, and served as a senior advisor to Aquiline Capital Partners, the private equity firm backing SurePoint. He arrives at a company whose roots go back to 1982.

Among the topics Jeff discusses:

• Why he distinguishes between machine learning and generative AI when it comes to developing systems firms need to trust completely.
• What he is hearing in his early conversations with customers about AI adoption.
• How SurePoint decides whether to build, buy, or partner.
• Why he thinks the mid-sized firm market has proven more resilient than many had predicted.
• The three priorities he has set for his first year.

For an interview with outgoing CEO Thurston, see: On LawNext: SurePoint CEO Eric Thurston on Acquiring ZenCase and His Vision for Mid-Market Practice Management.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.
• Ajax, the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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As chief technology officer at Casetext, Ryan Walker helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. But Walker came away unsatisfied. Although the legal tech tools kept getting better, he believed, clients were seeing no benefit. Billing rates kept climbing and the efficiency gains never reached them.

That spurred him to pivot from building products to forming a practice — General Legal, an AI-native law firm he cofounded and leads as CEO, built on the premise that the fastest path to transforming legal services is not retrofitting AI onto traditional firms, but rebuilding the law firm from the ground up on an AI-forward foundation. Just six months out of Y Combinator, the firm has some 400 clients, a newly launched venture financing practice, and, in what may be a first for a law firm, an MCP server that lets clients' AI agents engage the firm directly.

In this episode of LawNext, Walker — not a lawyer but a PhD mathematician — tells host Bob Ambrogi why he believes AI can now automate 95% of routine legal work, how the management services organization structure allows an investable technology company to operate alongside a law firm, and why an AI-native firm paradoxically depends on hiring highly experienced lawyers rather than supercharging junior ones. He also explains the "second brain" approach that lets the firm's work product reflect each client's strategy, what earlier failed innovators like Atrium and Clearspire got wrong, and why he thinks the real reckoning will come when major clients simply refuse to pay for work AI can do.

Walker cofounded the firm along with two other Casetext colleagues, Javed Qadrud-Din, who was head of AI at Casetext and is now General Legal's chief technology officer, and J.P. Mohler, who was an LLM engineer at Casetext and is now chief product officer and managing partner. Their ultimate ambition, Walker says, is to make General Legal the biggest provider of legal services in the world and, along the way, to break the scarcity model that keeps legal help out of reach for the people and companies who need it.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.
• Ajax, the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice?

That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to Renee Knake Jefferson at the start of today's conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work sits at the intersection of legal ethics, judicial ethics, lawyer regulation, legal education and access to justice.

She is also the coauthor of the acclaimed book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. In 2013, the ABA Journal named her a Legal Rebel for co-founding the ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State together with Daniel Martin Katz. More recently, she was elected to the American Bar Association's Council for the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, the body responsible for accrediting J.D. programs — so, as she puts it, she's gone from offering constructive criticism from the outside to working on the inside

In her "spare time" (as if she possibly has any), she writes the Substack newsletter Legal Ethics Roundup, a weekly review of all things related to legal and judicial ethics.

In today's conversation, Renee and Bob talk in depth about the access to justice crisis and what can be done to narrow the justice gap, including why the biggest barrier to legal help may be that people do not even recognize they have a legal problem. They also discuss the promise and peril of AI as a tool for closing the justice gap, why regulatory reform has not produced the domino effect many once predicted, and what lawyers, law schools, regulators and innovators can each do to move the needle.

Spoiler alert: Jefferson remains a glass-half-full optimist — and by the end of this conversation, you may be too.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.
• Ajax, the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company's biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that's been simmering since Anthropic's first legal plugin briefly rattled the stock prices of Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer back in January: Is Anthropic's entry into the legal market a major step forward for legal productivity? Or is it a threat to trust, governance and the existing legal-tech infrastructure?

In today's episode, Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic and product lead for Claude for Legal, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the inside story of Claude for Legal and his own unconventional path into leading its development. Pike, who went from Facebook to Slack to building internal tools for Anthropic's own legal team, talks about how that work turned into a product that has ignited both excitement and concern throughout the global legal industry. Among the topics they discuss:

• Why Anthropic decided legal deserved its own dedicated launch, and why now.
• What plugins, skills, connectors, cookbooks and agents actually mean in plain English.
• Why lawyers have become Claude's most active power users.
• Anthropic's decision to partner, rather than compete, with major legal tech vendors such as Thomson Reuters.
• How Anthropic thinks about human oversight and professional responsibility.
• Confidentiality, data training policies, and what firms need to know before adopting these tools.
• Anthropic's commitment to access to justice.
• What Claude for Legal might look like a year from now.

Whether you're excited about what this technology could mean for legal innovation, wary of what it means for the future of legal work, or just have questions about how it all works, this conversation offers insights.

Background links:

• Announcement: Claude for the Legal Industry.
• Webinar: How Legal Teams Put Claude to Work.
• Claude for Legal Github Repo.
• LawSites: Anthropic Goes All-In on Legal, Releasing More Than 20 Connectors and 12 Practice-Area Plugins for Claude.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced a major push into legal, much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem.

But the less talked about side of the story was potentially the more impactful – Anthropic's explicit commitment to access to justice, highlighted by a direct partnership with the Free Law Project and its CourtListener free legal research platform. Suddenly, anyone with a legal problem and a chat window could access verified, authoritative legal materials, significantly reducing the risk of using a general AI assistant to answer legal questions.

As the Free Law Project itself put it: "A response built on verified CourtListener data is categorically different from one built on even the best model alone."

In today's episode, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Mike Lissner, executive director and co-founder of the Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, and Nathan Dahlberg, the Free Law Project's AI developer who actually built the CourtListener connector. They get into what was announced and why it matters, how the technology works under the hood, and, most importantly, the bigger questions it raises — about the potential impact on access to justice, and on the legal research industry..

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to AI in Legal Tech (03:17) The Free Law Project and CourtListener (05:01) Anthropic's Commitment to Access to Justice (10:29) Understanding MCP Connectors (11:48) Potential Impact on Access to Justice (14:31) The Changing Landscape of Legal Research (17:21) User Interaction with AI Tools (20:00) Concerns About Self-Help Legal Tools (24:00) Marketing Challenges for Legal Tools (27:20) Understanding User Engagement with the Connector (29:00) Grounding AI Responses in Legal Data (30:30) The Future of Legal Research and MCP Connectors (34:10) Commercial Opportunities in Legal AI (38:55) User Experience and Privacy Concerns (43:10) Impact on Access to Justice

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Once upon a time, a legal tech vendor's goal in getting seen by potential customers was to rank on the first page of Google search. But in the age of AI, that is no longer enough. Now, when a potential buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a vendor, what matters is whether the company shows up in the answer the AI generates. And that, increasingly, depends on who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you as the authority in your category.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two legal marketing and communications leaders who are seeking to help their clients get ahead of that shift. Amy Juers is CEO of Edge Marketing, a firm she founded in 1997 that serves clients across legal technology and accounting. Valerie Chan is CEO of Plat4orm, a strategic communications firm working across legal, cybersecurity, AI, and other regulated industries.

Last week, these longtime competitors announced a strategic partnership and a new framework they call the Trusted Answer Growth System, designed to help companies adapt to how buyers research and shortlist vendors in AI-driven search.

In the conversation, Amy and Val discuss how generative AI is reshaping the buyer's journey, why earned media and third-party credibility carry more weight than ever, the new vocabulary marketers are wrestling with — from GEO to AEO — and what companies can do when AI tools get their story wrong. They also explain why, after years of competing, they concluded they were better off working together.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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When Thoma Bravo took a majority stake in Casepoint in January 2025 and merged it with the government-software company OPEXUS, it set the e-discovery pioneer on a broader course — deeper into the government market and squarely into FOIA and case management. Now the company has a new leader to see that course through: Paul Colangelo, a 25-year veteran of government and enterprise software, who was named Casepoint's CEO this week.

In this episode, recorded just before the announcement, Colangelo joins host Bob Ambrogi for his first podcast interview in the role. He talks about the mandate he's been handed 18 months into the Thoma Bravo era, why he believes mission-critical government software is "DOGE-proof, recession-proof, pandemic-proof," and how Casepoint intends to stand apart in a crowded e-discovery field on security and governance.

He also discusses the company's investment in agentic AI and the need to keep a "human in the loop," the customer tension between AI's promise and unpredictable token-based pricing, and why he expects bolt-on acquisitions ahead. Along the way, he reflects on the founders who built Casepoint and the culture he hopes to shape as he takes the helm.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Neil Araujo, the CEO and cofounder of iManage, was last on this podcast almost exactly two years ago. In the dog years of the legal industry's AI age, that feels like a long time ago. Our conversation then was about law firms still feeling their way around generative AI. But now, as you will hear in this episode, the focus is about what it actually takes to put AI to work at scale — and iManage's answer is that it starts with what Neil calls a knowledge foundation: the content, context and governance layer that makes AI responses not just fluent, but relevant and trustworthy.

Two weeks before we recorded this episode, iManage unveiled the next evolution of its document- and knowledge-management platform, one built around what iManage calls a "context fabric" — an architectural layer the company says transforms an organization's accumulated documents and activity into a "living, governed foundation" for AI agents. It also announced iManage MCP, a standardized, open-protocol connection that enables any AI systems to securely access governed iManage content without custom integrations.

In this conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Araujo discusses these and other recent developments. He also discusses where he sees the legal industry heading as AI moves from experimentation to operational reality.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Law firms sell experience — but for decades, harnessing and operationalizing that experience has been a largely manual, chaotic process. In this episode, recorded live at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference in New Orleans, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Jason Noble, president and chief of product strategy at Ikaun, to talk about how his company is changing that.

Ikaun is a managed service and technology platform that helps law firms streamline the proposal and RFP response process — from capturing and organizing matter experience data to using AI to assemble and draft competitive pitches. Jason explains how the platform works, how the arrival of generative AI transformed what was previously possible, and why Ikaun positions itself as a managed service rather than a self-serve SaaS tool.

Jason and Bob also get into the bigger picture of how law firms are responding to AI-driven changes in the competitive landscape, whether the billable hour can survive in an AI-augmented world, and whether the RFP process itself will look the same in the years ahead — or whether we're moving toward a future where agents are submitting and responding to proposals with minimal human involvement.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to Ikaun and Legal Tech Innovations

(02:30) Jason Noble's Journey and Background

(05:20) The Evolution of Ikaun and Its Focus

(07:09) Experience Management in Legal Firms

(10:30) Gathering Experience Data in Litigation

(11:48) How Ikaun's Platform Works

(14:05) The Impact of AI on Proposal Processes

(18:07) Current Landscape of RFP Responses

(20:31) Differentiating Ikaun from Competitors

(22:45) Knowledge Management vs. Experience Management

(24:01) Tailoring Solutions for Law Firms

(25:49) Qualities of Successful Law Firms

(27:24) Law Firms' Response to AI Integration

(29:54) Pricing Strategies in RFP Responses

(31:21) Competitive Landscape and AI's Influence

(33:27) The Future of Billable Hours

(35:50) The Future of RFPs and AI's Role

(39:33) Client Satisfaction and Future Directions

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Recorded live at the annual meeting of the Legal Marketing Association in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with Rachel Shields Williams, president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel was named a recipient of ALM's Monica Bay Women in Legal Tech Award.

Rachel and host Bob Ambrogi discuss how AI is reshaping the work of legal marketers, and why she believes the marketing community is uniquely positioned to help law firms move past the "I'm curious, I want to click the buttons" stage of AI adoption to sustained, repeatable value. They get into the state of innovation in big law — including Rachel's view that firms cannot use AI or money to "skip the canyon of despair" in change management — and why she thinks meaningful innovation often looks less like a headline and more like getting one percent better every week.

The conversation also covers the changing competitive landscape facing traditional firms, from AI-native entrants like Norm AI to MSOs and a resurgent ALSP market; the long-running debate over the billable hour; the four interrelated elements Rachel sees at the heart of every law firm's data — documents, clients, matters, and people; and what firm leaders should be doing right now to stay competitive over the next decade. Throughout, Rachel returns to a theme about which she calls herself an "unapologetic humanist" — technology and process will keep changing, but the firms that win will be the ones that put the right people in the room first.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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We don't usually say this, but for today's LawNext, you're going to want to watch the video version, if you can. The audio will be good, but the video will be great. You can find it on YouTube.

Why? Because we're going to be talking today about vibe coding, and you're going to want to see what our guests are showing today, not just hear them tell about it.

Those guests are Damien Riehl and Michael Bommarito. By day, Damien works on AI products at Clio and Mike is CEO of 273 Ventures, a company that provides AI strategy and services for law firms and legal professionals.

But outside their day jobs, they are also founders of the ALEA Institute, the Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI, where a central focus of theirs is the FOLIO Project, which is seeking to develop and maintain open legal standards and a comprehensive ontology to enable different legal systems to communicate with each other. FOLIO is an outgrowth of the SALI Alliance, whose ontology was largely developed by Damien.

So what does any of this have to do with vibe coding?

Well, in connection with their FOLIO project, Damien and Mike have been building an array of tools for tagging and enriching legal documents (FOLIO Enrich), for mapping law firm taxonomies (FOLIO Mapper), for browsing and editing legal ontologies (FOLIO Ontology Explorer), and much more. (See the full list of FOLIO resources.)

And they've built all of it by vibe coding. Not over months, not with a team of developers, but on their own, often in a single weekend day, using AI coding tools.

When Damien first showed LawNext host Bob Ambrogi what he and Mike were developing, Bob thought, "It's not enough for me to just write about this. It really has to be seen, in action." So he asked Damien and Mike to come on LawNext, share their screens, walk us through what they've been building, and show us what vibe coding actually looks like in action when it's applied to serious legal technology problems.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Are courts the next frontier for legal AI? Shlomo Klapper, founder and CEO of the AI-driven judicial case-preparation platofrm Learned Hand, believes they are. A former litigator at Quinn Emanuel and law clerk for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Klapper is building what he calls a "reasoning engine" for judges — AI tools designed to help them manage crushing caseloads by organizing case materials, flagging when lawyers bend the truth, and drafting bench memos and orders.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviews Klapper on the heels of significant news: Learned Hand just announced a partnership with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the largest trial court in the nation, to explore how AI can support judicial officers across the full arc of a case — from filing through drafting. The company's technology — the only AI built exclusively for the judiciary — is also used by the Michigan Supreme Court and trial courts in 10 states.

In today's conversation, Klapper discusses why courts are the next frontier for legal AI, what it takes to earn the trust of judges, and how Jevons Paradox — the idea that as legal services get cheaper, demand will explode — is reshaping the justice system. They also dig into the difficult questions around how Learned Hand addresses concerns about bias and hallucinations, and how it can overcome judges' skepticism about AI and achieve broad judicial adoption.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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E-discovery platforms have gotten great at narrowing millions of documents down to manageable sets. But what happens next — the grueling work of extracting facts, organizing them, and building a reliable case narrative — has remained largely manual. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with Daniel Lord-Doyle, cofounder and CEO of Mary Technology, about the Australian startup's bet that "fact management" is the missing layer in litigation technology.

Mary's approach is distinct from the large AI platforms that store documents as embeddings in vector databases. Instead, the company extracts every individual fact, enriches it with metadata, and links it directly back to its source — creating what Lord-Doyle calls a verifiable chain from work product to evidence. He makes a compelling case that in litigation, where fault tolerance is low and the stakes are high, the nuance lost by compression-based AI systems is exactly what matters most.

The company just closed a $7 million (Australian) seed round led by OIF Ventures and is expanding into the U.S. with a new San Francisco office and a new self-serve platform that lets smaller firms try it without a sales process. Lord-Doyle also talks about the concept of "productive friction" — why Mary deliberately won't let lawyers skip the verification step — and what he's learned about bringing an Australian legal tech product to the American market.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, Bob heads across the bay, from San Francisco to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw, where he sits down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long game.

AJ grew up in Connecticut, came west in 2002 for a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived within a few blocks of the Berkeley campus ever since. He stumbled into the legal industry almost by accident — recruited to serve as a technical expert in litigation involving how the internet worked — and quickly realized that the legal world was home to some of the most technically fascinating and underserved problems he'd ever encountered. He never left.

AJ had a prior startup, a computer vision company that was acquired, before launching Everlaw in 2011. The company was cloud-native and ML-infused from the start, built on the conviction, AJ says, that there's no single way to find the needle in a discovery haystack, and that building a genuinely useful litigation platform requires solving for collaboration, ease of use and scalability all at once.

The bulk of the conversation focuses on generative AI, and how Everlaw has approached it differently than much of the market. Rather than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI deliberately throughout the platform — document summarization, coding suggestions, deposition analysis, fact extraction — always grounding responses in the actual documents at hand and citing sources so users can verify the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a question and get a synthesized, cited answer drawn from an entire document corpus in about a minute, is the feature AJ calls a "new era" for discovery — one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift.

As Everlaw continues to grow, it also remains independent, with no private equity and no outside majority owners. As for AJ, he says he is in it for the long game, and has never included an exit slide in a fundraising deck.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Setting the Scene

03:23 The Journey to Founding Everlaw

08:36 The Evolution of Everlaw's Technology

11:06 Incorporating Generative AI into Legal Processes

14:04 Deep Dive: A New Era in Discovery

19:17 Transformative Experiences in Legal Discovery

22:27 Previewing Innovations at Legal Week

25:03 Understanding AI's Limitations in Legal Contexts

28:11 Navigating Hype in Legal Technology

30:47 The Impact of Foundation Models on Legal Software

34:36 Future Vision for Everlaw and Legal Tech

38:13 Closing Thoughts and Company Philosophy

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Continuing his on-location interview tour of San Francisco, Bob heads an hour north to Santa Rosa to sit down with Nathan Walter, cofounder and CEO of Briefpoint, over a bottle of red wine at Paradise Ridge Winery, a spot literally around the corner from Nathan's house, sitting on the edge of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that divides Sonoma and Napa counties. It is a fitting setting for a founder who grew up in Sonoma wine country, where wine is less a luxury than a way of life, and where his family's most treasured heirloom was a bottle from the year he was born.

Nathan's path to founding Briefpoint is an origin story rooted in genuine frustration with the legal system. A U.C. Santa Barbara philosophy major who drifted into law school for lack of better options, he ultimately landed in civil litigation – and grew increasingly disillusioned with how discovery was weaponized to bleed defendants dry financially, even when they had done nothing wrong. After a particularly infuriating mediation where opposing counsel openly admitted the shakedown strategy, Nathan decided to do something about it. He taught himself to code from YouTube videos, built vaporware prototypes, cold-called attorneys to test demand, and eventually found his technical cofounder through a Discord gaming community he had created to build a social life after moving to Orange County.

What followed was a years-long grind – including an 18-month stretch working days as an entry-level sales rep at another legal tech company and nights building Briefpoint, until a close acquaintance invested $100,000 of her own money so he could focus full time. Briefpoint launched in June 2022, before the ChatGPT wave, focusing narrowly on automating discovery responses – drafting objections, pulling relevant documents and generating formatted Word documents ready to sign. Nathan talks about the company's deliberate "go deep, not wide" strategy: rather than expanding into motions or other legal workflows to chase the AI hype cycle, Briefpoint is doubling down on doing discovery so exceptionally well that firms will pay for it alongside broader AI platforms, the way teams use Slack alongside the full Microsoft suite.

The conversation also covers the threat to legal tech companies posed by foundation models such as Claude and GPT, the psychology behind why attorneys are resistant to automation (Nathan has a theory about "superstitious control" and lucky jerseys), the parallels between winemaking and product development, and the advice he'd give an aspiring founder: burn the ships, go full time and put yourself in a corner with no way out but forward. As for what varietal Briefpoint would be? A Russian River Pinot Noir – not a life-changing Cab, but reliably excellent at exactly what it promises.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Legalweek, March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City.

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As Bob continues his LawNext on Location series – all recorded live in the San Francisco area at locations of each guest's choosing – he sits down with Pablo Arredondo at his home in Tiburon, a quaint Marin County town with a history stretching from Mexican land grants to naval outposts to a southern railway terminus. From Pablo's home office, the view looks out over Richardson Bay towards Sausalito and, if you look carefully, the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen in the distance. It is a setting that is entirely fitting for a conversation with someone who helped shape one of the more remarkable journeys in the annals of legal technology.

Pablo was cofounder of Casetext, the once-scrappy startup that spent a decade iterating, pivoting and persisting before striking gold with CoCounsel, the first GPT-4-powered AI legal assistant, unveiled on the nationally televised Morning Joe show on March 1, 2023. Just four months later, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in cash. Now, 2.5 years later, Pablo recently left TR, where he is, as he puts it, building a Lego Death Star with his daughter and finally paying attention to his well-being after 16 years of nonstop pursuit.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Pablo reflects on the long road to CoCounsel – from a failed crowdsourcing experiment to CARA's brief analysis tool to the pivotal moment when Casetext signed a $20,000 innovation license with OpenAI and got early access to GPT-4, 10 weeks before ChatGPT's public launch. He describes the surreal experience of those first 48 hours after CoCounsel's debut, when he and cofounder Jake Heller identified 74 distinct legal use cases the tool could handle – any one of which, he says, "would have been a company in the old world."

Pablo and Bob also dig into the bigger questions surrounding legal AI, including whether the field is advancing as fast as he expected; what the foundation models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google mean for legal-specific AI companies such as Harvey; and why he believes reasoning models and agentic AI represent the next genuinely profound leap beyond GPT-4. Pablo also candidly reflects on the TR acquisition and his work while at TR, and he offers hints on what may lie ahead for him – at least once that Death Star model is done.

It is a conversation that is part memoir, part technology seminar and part meditation on what it means to have built something that changed a profession – and his life – all recorded with a sweeping, albeit cloudy, view of the majesty of San Francisco Bay.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Legalweek, March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City.

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This episode is recorded live, and is best enjoyed on YouTube. Watch the episode here.

While Bob is visiting San Francisco for two weeks, he is sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs "in their natural habitats" – places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, Bob sits down for lunch with Alex Su, chief revenue officer at Latitude Legal, over Thai iced tea and tofu dishes at Phnom Penh House, a Cambodian restaurant in Alameda that Alex considers something of a personal institution, frequenting it for both family meals and business meetings.

Alex's career path is anything but linear. He started as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, clerked for a federal judge in Chicago, then drifted through a plaintiff's firm, a brief solo practice, and ultimately a leap of faith into legal tech sales – joining e-discovery company Logikcull in 2016. From there, he moved to Everlaw, then to Ironclad, where he served as head of community development, building a reputation that spread well beyond any job title.

That reputation was shaped in large part by TikTok, where Alex's comedic, self-effacing videos skewering law firm culture – partners, associates, privilege logs and the absurdities of BigLaw – earned him more than 100,000 followers, got shared inside Ironclad's internal Slack, and ultimately helped land him his next job. It's a story of accidental virality and deliberate reinvention that mirrors the broader shifts he sees in the legal profession.

Now at Latitude Legal, an ALSP providing on-demand legal talent to law firms and corporate legal departments, Alex represents a kind of poetic symmetry: a lawyer known for championing "alternative careers" working at an "alternative legal services provider" — a label he thinks has outlived its usefulness, given how mainstream flexible legal talent has become.

Bob and Alex also dig into the current state of legal AI – what's overhyped, what's underhyped, and why the pandemic was arguably a bigger inflection point for legal tech adoption than generative AI. Plus, Alex and Bob reflect on Bob's three decades of covering legal innovation, the stubborn persistence of the billable hour, and why the justice gap remains stubbornly wide despite all the talk of disruption.

It is a wide-ranging and candid conversation – one you may want to watch on video instead of just listening to the audio.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Legalweek, March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chapters

00:00 Intro to Today's Lunch: A Special In-Person Series

04:45 Career Transitions: From Law to Legal Tech

23:27 Going Viral: The TikTok Journey

25:10 Balancing Humor and Professional Identity

26:54 Redefining Career Paths for Lawyers

28:39 The Evolution of Legal Careers

30:35 Innovation in Legal Practice

34:07 The Impact of the Pandemic on Legal Technology

34:28 The Future of Legal Technology and AI

38:10 Navigating Uncertainty in Legal Services

40:18 The Ongoing Relevance of Traditional Legal Models

42:11 Personal Reflections and Future Outlook

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In this episode of LawNext, we talk with Ryan Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Filevine, and Sona Sulakian, former CEO and co-founder of Pincites, about Filevine's acquisition of the AI-powered contract redlining company. The deal, which closed in December, marks Filevine's second major AI acquisition of the year. Even more notably for this traditionally litigation-focused company, it represents a significant strategic expansion into the corporate and transactional legal market — a segment where Filevine saw 120% growth in 2025.

What makes this acquisition particularly compelling is its origin story: Filevine was actually a customer of Pincites before acquiring the company. After Filevine's legal team became early adopters and enthusiastic users of the product, Anderson and his team recognized that Pincites' Word-native contract intelligence platform filled a critical gap in their offerings. The acquisition brings aboard sister co-founders Sona and Mariam Sulakian and their team, who will continue developing what Filevine now calls "LOIS for Word" — a drafting and redlining tool integrated directly into Microsoft Word.

Along with host Bob Ambrogi, they discuss how the Sulakian sisters identified the market gap that led them to build Pincites, why they chose to build directly into Word rather than create a standalone platform, and what attracted them to Filevine among multiple suitors. Anderson shares his vision for building a comprehensive Legal Operating Intelligence System (LOIS) that connects contracts, depositions and all legal work into a single unified platform. They also explore the broader implications of AI for legal practice and access to justice, and how tools like Pincites and Filevine are transforming the way legal work gets done.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Legalweek, March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City.

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Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg started legal AI company Harvey in 2022 as roommates in a San Francisco apartment. Pereyra had been working on AI research at Meta and Google, while Weinberg was a first-year litigation associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Today, they still share that same apartment, but their company has grown into a global enterprise serving more than 1,000 law firms and corporate legal departments and valued at a whopping $8 billion.

In this episode of LawNext, Pereyra and Weinberg take us back to Harvey's earliest days, when they were sending thousands of LinkedIn messages trying to get anyone to look at their product. They share the pivotal moment when early access to GPT-4 transformed what they could build, the breakthrough that came when Allen & Overy became their first major client, and how they have evolved from building an AI assistant for individual lawyers to constructing what they call "essential infrastructure" for legal work.

With host Bob Ambrogi, they discuss Harvey's vision for becoming an AI operating system that integrates across the entire legal tech ecosystem, their focus on memory and agentic AI that can handle complex multi-step workflows, and the massive infrastructure challenges of deploying AI at scale across global law firms while maintaining ethical walls and data security.

Pereyra and Weinberg also reflect candidly on how two founders with no management experience have learned to scale a company now employing hundreds of people — more than 20 percent of whom are lawyers — and what it is like to go from struggling startup to being featured in The New York Times as AI billionaires while still sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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In the last in a series of interviews recorded during the ClioCon conference in Boston in October 2025, we bring you a doubleheader – two interviews with two of the legal tech company's key executives.

In the first, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Reagan Attle, chief marketing officer at Clio since 2017. In a year in which Clio made the biggest acquisition in legal tech history with its $1 billion purchase of vLex, and in which Clio is aiming to dramatically expand its market and its use of AI, what are the challenges and opportunities for the person tasked with leading the company's global brand and marketing strategy? One thing for sure, Attle says: It makes her job more complex. Listen to the interview to hear Attle's perspective.

In the second interview, Ambrogi sits down with A.J. Axelrod, who joined Clio in November 2024 as vice president of payments and financial services. He fills us in on the two financial products unveiled at ClioCon: Clio Capital, a capital-advance program offering law firms fast access to funds for growth or cash-flow management, and Pay Later, a financing option for law firm clients to pay their legal bills in installments, while the firm gets paid up front. He also talks about what else may be on the horizon for fintech at Clio.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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The biggest deal of 2025 – in fact, the biggest deal ever in legal tech – was legal tech company Clio's acquisition of vLex for $1 billion. A global legal research company founded in Spain, vLex had, just two years earlier, merged with the U.S. legal research company Fastcase, and the union of those two companies – which also included the Docket Alarm trove of court docket data – had further accelerated the development of Vincent, vLex's generative AI technology.

Now, with Clio's acquisition of vLex, comes a combustible combination that has the potential to unify the fuel of all that vLex legal research and docket data with Clio's cloud practice management technology to create an unprecedented, AI-driven platform that unifies both the business and practice of law.

Against this backdrop, I sat down with Ed Walters, the founder and CEO of Fastcase, during ClioCon in October, to discuss the acquisition and its implications for the legal industry. Walters cofounded Fastcase in 1999 along with his former Covington & Burling colleague Phil Rosenthal. After Fastcase merged with vLex, he became vLex's chief strategy officer. Since the Clio acquisition, he is now Clio's vice president of legal innovation and strategy.

Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal did finally close on Nov. 10.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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For legal technology company Clio, this was a particularly significant year, marked by major announcements – including its $1 billion acquisition of vLex – that many saw as transformative for the company. This was on full display at the company's ClioCon conference in October, where CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote laying out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do.

In today's episode, recorded live at ClioCon, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with the two key executives leading Clio's product and technology vision: John Foreman, who joined as chief product officer in May, bringing experience from major SaaS companies including MailChimp and Podium, and Jonathan Watson, the chief technology officer who's been with Clio for eight years.

They explore the company's ambitious vision to develop AI and expand into larger law firms, discuss how vertical software creates advantages for AI implementation, and explain why understanding the complete client journey enables more powerful automation. Foreman and Watson share insights on moving beyond simple chatbots to AI that can actually take action, the challenges and opportunities of expanding into the enterprise market, and what's next as they work to "finish drawing the owl."

"We've started to draw the owl for folks," Foreman says, "and we're going to finish drawing the owl, and it's going to be a beautiful owl."

Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal did finally close on Nov. 10.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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As new tools using generative AI promise to change the way we litigate and conduct discovery, what are the implications for day-to-day litigation workflows? On today's episode of LawNext, we feature a conversation with three guests about how law firms are navigating the urgency around gen AI adoption while staying grounded in practical realities.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation at e-discovery company Everlaw's annual Summit in San Francisco, where gen AI was very much the talk of the conference — from new product announcements to candid discussions about how law firms are actually putting these tools to work. His guests are:

• Adam Borgman, senior associate in the labor and employment group at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease.
• Julie Brown, director of practice technology at Vorys.
• Joshua Schnoll, Everlaw's chief marketing officer.

They talk about how Vorys has taken a disciplined approach to mapping lawyers' workflows before plugging in AI, why understanding how your professionals currently work is the essential first step before adopting new technology, and how tools like Everlaw's newly released Deep Dive are helping attorneys find insights across millions of documents that they might never have discovered on their own – including, as you will hear, a rather unexpected story involving Tums.

They also discuss the cost considerations around AI, the trust factor that still gives many lawyers pause, and what advice these experts have for firms that have not yet started experimenting with gen AI.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Legal technology company Clio recently released the 10th edition of its Legal Trends Report, its annual analysis of data and survey responses on legal practice and emerging trends, and this year's report ventured into new territory. For the first time, the report included a neuroanalytics study of legal professionals, analyzing electrical brain activity in legal professionals as they performed various work-related tasks, in order to paint a picture of their emotional strain and mental focus as they worked.

For an in-depth look at this year's Legal Trends Report, its principal author, Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, sits down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation recorded live at the 13th annual ClioCon, Clio's annual conference, which was held this year in Boston. They discuss the results of this first-ever cognitive study, as well as the report's other key findings, including what it shows about:

• AI adoption and its relationship to law firm growth.
• Clients' expectations around lawyers' use of AI.
• How potential clients find lawyers.
• The correlation between technology adoption and long-term success.

With Clio since 2012, Lenon is an attorney admitted to practice in New York who has focused much of his career on helping lawyers understand the benefits and risks of technology adoption within their practices. At Clio, he leads the development of the Legal Trends Report and contributes to legal scholarship and advancement, often speaking on law firm modernization, technology adoption, legal ethics and access to justice.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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If content is the raw material of generative AI, it only makes sense that an AI-driven contract automation platform would want to acquire the world's largest database of contracts and clauses. That is exactly what happened recently when SimpleDocs, a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, acquired Law Insider, which claims to be home to 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spanning more than 50 languages.

One aspect of this acquisition that makes it particularly interesting is that both companies were founded by the same person – and that person, Preston Clark, is our guest today. In that sense, you might say this isn't a typical acquisition story, but more the deliberate convergence of two complementary businesses that were built separately over more than a decade, each with its own DNA, but always with an eye toward this eventual combination.

In an AI market increasingly criticized for being "just GPT wrappers," Clark and his team are betting that workflow-specific tools powered by real contract data will deliver the precision and ROI that legal departments and law firms are demanding.

In our conversation, Clark walks us through the strategic thinking behind this acquisition and how this combined entity plans to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded legal AI market. He also shares his vision for the future – one that extends beyond contract drafting and review into adjacent workflows that could reshape how legal teams interact with contracts altogether.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Last week brought the 13th annual ClioCon — the annual conference of legal technology company Clio — to Boston, Mass., where cofounder and CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote in which he laid out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work. That new era is one in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do.

Many had wondered what Newton's keynote would bring, coming on the heels of the company's $1 billion acquisition of legal research and AI company vLex, the largest deal ever in legal tech. Newton did not disappoint, announcing a slew of new products and features, ambitious plans to integrate AI throughout Clio's products, and formal expansion into the enterprise legal market with a new division and a new platform. It was a keynote that left some people thrilled, others shell-shocked. Perhaps most striking was that so much of what he outlined was not off in the future, but here today.

The next day, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for this interview in which they recapped much of what Newton covered in his keynote and discussed what lies ahead for the company and its leader.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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In the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything.

One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its AI for Justice program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more quickly, wrongfully evicted tenants getting back into their homes before their possessions are destroyed, and innocent people in prison having their exoneration petitions filed years sooner.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two people at the forefront of this initiative:

• Laura Safdie is head of innovation for legal at Thomson Reuters and has been championing access to justice through technology since her days at Casetext, where she was a cofounder.
• Pablo Ramirez is executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino, a small organization of 45 staff members serving over 9,000 people a year in one of California's largest counties.

Together, they share powerful stories of how AI is enabling legal aid lawyers to be more efficient and more effective in doing what they came to this work to do – fighting for their clients.

They discuss the three pillars of the AI for Justice program – access, support and scale – and how Thomson Reuters is working to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the legal aid community. They also tackle the challenges that remain, from overcoming fear and skepticism about AI to reaching a highly disaggregated network of small, resource-strapped organizations. And they explore the bigger question: Can AI actually help close the justice gap, or are we just nibbling at the edges of an ever-growing problem?

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Recently, the legal technology company Case Status held its inaugural Client Experience Summit in Charleston, S.C., a conference devoted to exploring how AI, data and ethical practices can enable law firms to deliver a better experience for their clients.In an opening keynote at the conference, Andy Seavers, the cofounder and CEO of Case Status, unveiled several new products, including, most notably, Client Intelligence, an AI-driven platform that the company says represents a significant shift for law firms from reactive client management to predictive client engagement.

Shortly after Seavers delivered that keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who attended the conference, sat down with him for this interview to learn more about the company and its latest announcements. When Case Status first launched, it was often described as the Dominos pizza tracker for law, insofar as it enabled clients to easily keep track of the status of their case. As you’ll hear from Seavers in today’s interview, it has expanded significantly since then, into a full client experience and client intelligence platform.

Also in today’s interview, Seavers discusses his just-published a book, Future Firm, Fossil Firm, in which he lays out a blueprint for how law firms can evolve. He discusses his vision of a “future firm,” and why he believes that leadership posture, operational systems, and client experience are now the defining factors of firm success.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Nearly two years ago on this podcast, we discussed the American Arbitration Association’s innovation initiatives – and specifically its embrace of generative AI – with Bridget Mary McCormack, who became its president and CEO in 2023 after having been chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and Diana Didia, its chief information and innovation officer. On today’s episode, McCormack and Didia – now executive vice president and chief technology and innovation officer – return for an update on innovation at the AAA.

In that prior podcast, McCormack and Didia spoke extensively about the AAA's innovation culture and their early experiments with gen AI. At the time, McCormack said that anyone who thinks they know where gen AI is going, even next week, is fooling themselves. While that may still be true, the AAA has certainly made some bold moves in that direction.

Most notably, just a few days before we recorded this episode, the AAA announced something unprecedented in the dispute resolution world – an AI-powered arbitrator that it is launching in November. This is not just another AI tool to assist lawyers or arbitrators. This is an AI system that will evaluate case merits, generate recommendations, and prepare draft awards — with human arbitrators validating and signing off on final decisions before they are issued.

In today’s conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, McCormack and Didia dive deep into how this AI arbitrator works, what it means for the future of dispute resolution, and how it fits into the AAA's broader innovation strategy as the organization approaches its 100th anniversary next year. They also explore the cultural transformation within the AAA that has enabled these technological advances and what is coming next in their AI-native vision for dispute resolution.

Related episodes: * On the latest LawNext: Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur on Enhancing Access to Justice. * On LawNext: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline Justice. * On LawNext: CEO Nikole Nelson Returns with An Update on Frontline Justice’s Mission to Empower Justice Workers and Bridge the Justice Gap.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need. But what if the solution is not just about providing more legal services — what if it lies in fundamentally rethinking who can provide legal help?

In today’s episode, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two of the nation’s leading researchers on access to justice: Rebecca Sandefur, professor and director of the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and Matthew Burnett, director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

They argue that the access to justice crisis is actually a crisis of democracy. As cofounders of Frontline Justice, they have been pioneering research on "justice workers" — community members trained to help their neighbors navigate legal issues. Their recent article in the South Carolina Law Review, “Justice Work as Democracy Work: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democratization,” makes a provocative case: When people cannot access their own law, democracy itself fails. They present compelling evidence from Alaska, where nearly 200 community justice workers now serve over 40 rural communities, achieving a 1-to-25 return on investment while dramatically expanding legal aid's reach.

In today’s conversation, Sandefur and Burnett discuss the mounting evidence for justice worker effectiveness, including research from the U.K. demonstrating that trained non-lawyers often outperform attorneys on specialized tasks. They also discuss recent breakthroughs — including unprecedented support from both the Conference of Chief Justices and the American Bar Association — and examine what obstacles remain.

Sandefur and Burnett challenge the legal profession's monopoly on law, arguing that regulatory capture has estranged Americans from their own justice system. They envision justice workers as agents of democratization, expanding not just who can access legal help, but who can participate meaningfully in working democracy.

Related episodes: * On the latest LawNext: Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur on Enhancing Access to Justice. * On LawNext: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline Justice. * On LawNext: CEO Nikole Nelson Returns with An Update on Frontline Justice’s Mission to Empower Justice Workers and Bridge the Justice Gap.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
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As Leslie Witt took to the stage Sept. 3 to deliver the keynote at Kaleidoscope, 8am’s inaugural customer conference, it was the culmination of a whirlwind summer. It had been just four months since she had joined the company formerly known as AffiniPay as chief product officer, responsible for leading product transformation and strategy for established legal tech brands LawPay, MyCase, CASEpeer and Docketwise. In the intervening 16 weeks, the company had undergone a major rebrand and finalized details of its first major conference. Now, two weeks after the rebrand and as the conference got underway, Witt stood before the keynote audience detailing the company’s newest product initiatives, including its upcoming launch of its generative AI-driven 8AM IQ.

Not long after Witt wrapped up her keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with her live for this extended conversation. They spoke at the Kaleidoscope venue in Austin in a recording studio provided by 8am, where they discussed her background and career, her reasons for joining 8am, and the product announcements she had made earlier that day. Those announcements included the beta launch of an AI “Chat with Cases” feature that allows lawyers to ask questions of and search their case files, the integration of three core 8am products — LawPay, MyCase and SmartSpend — on a single technology platform, and more.

Before joining 8am in May, Witt had more than two decades of experience in leading product teams. Most recently, she had served as the chief product and design officer at the mental health and wellness technology company Headspace. She previously held senior positions at Intuit, where she led global design, research and innovation initiatives focused on small businesses.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to 8AM and Leslie Witt

01:43 Leslie Witt's Background and Experience

09:53 Brand Transformation from Affinipay to 8AM

15:44 Product Design Philosophy and Customer Engagement

20:22 Platform Integration and New Features

24:57 Future Directions and Industry Impact

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Daniel Lewis has witnessed legal technology's evolution from multiple vantage points that few others can claim. As a Stanford law student in 2012, he and classmate Nik Reed co-founded the legal research startup Ravel Law with the audacious goal of taking on LexisNexis and Westlaw using machine learning and data analytics – at a time when such challengers were few and far between. Not only was Ravel Law pioneering in its own right, but it also spearheaded and funded the Caselaw Access Project, an ambitious partnership with Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab to digitize and provide free and open access to every official court decision ever published in the United States.

After Ravel's acquisition by LexisNexis in 2017, Lewis spent the next five years leading product teams within the legal research giant, including as vice president and general manager of its Practical Guidance and analytics products. This dual perspective – startup founder turned corporate executive – helped shape his understanding of what works and what doesn't when building technology for lawyers.

Today, as CEO and global chief executive of LegalOn Technologies, Lewis leads a 600-person company that is tackling contract review with a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying solely on tech-enabled services or raw AI that can hallucinate legal advice, LegalOn combines large language models with attorney-developed playbooks to help in-house legal teams achieve up to 85% time savings on contract review. The company just raised $50 million, for a total raise of $200 million across multiple funding rounds – which Lewis says makes it the most well-funded AI company focused on in-house contract review – and announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI agents for legal workflows.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Lewis shares hard-won insights about the realities of legal tech entrepreneurship, from the "deranged" confidence required to challenge industry giants as a law student to the leadership lessons learned managing teams through multiple business transformations. He discusses why the current moment represents the most significant opportunity for legal tech innovation in decades, how AI agents will reshape routine legal work, and what he's learned about building technology that lawyers don't just try once but actually integrate into their daily practices.

Related episodes:

• From Ravel Cofounder to Knowable CEO, Nik Reed Has Learned that Building Quality AI for Legal Takes A Lot of Hard Work.
• On LawNext: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
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The e-discovery company Reveal Data recently announced that it will launch its new generative AI-powered document review platform, called “aji,” in late September. Notably, the company said it is offering full access to the platform at no cost through Dec. 31, in order to enable “the entire legal community to explore and master the next era in GenAI review innovation.”

To discuss the launch of aji, today’s episode features Reveal’s founder and CEO Wendell Jisa, together with the company’s chief technology officer, Matthew Brothers-McGrew. This launch, Jisa says, represents the culmination of a deeply personal 30-year journey in legal tech from delivering photocopies in Chicago during blizzards to leading what he believes is one of the most significant technology companies in the legal industry.

In their conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Jisa and Brothers-McGrew make the case that generative AI presents the legal profession with the opportunity to become technology trailblazers rather than laggards. Their goal, they say, is to support the profession by democratizing access to AI across firms of all sizes and types.

They also discuss Reveal’s recent launch of Reveal Private Deployment, an initiative to support customers in whatever way they want to deploy Reveal’s software, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. At a time when other companies are pushing their customers away from on-premises deployments and into the cloud, Jisa and Brothers-McGrew say this is yet another way in which Reveal is seeking to democratize access by accommodating the interests of all its customers.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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This year’s ILTACON, which starts later this week, marks the second anniversary of Harbor, a global expert services company formed through the merger of three long-established legal consulting firms: HBR Consulting, LAC Group, and Wilson Allen, and that formally launched at ILTACON in 2023.

The company, which counts among its clients some 80% of the 200 largest global law firms and 50% of the Fortune 500, has been making waves ever since, further expanding its services, making additional acquisitions, and scoring some notable hires to its executive team, all culminating in the news in June that it had received a majority investment from BayPine LP, a private investment firm devoted to driving digital transformation in market-leading businesses.

Part of what makes Harbor particularly interesting is that it sits at the intersection of corporate law departments, law firms, and technology providers – helping all three get more value from their partnerships. A key focus of the company’s consulting services has been artificial intelligence and on helping organizations prepare their data and infrastructures to support the use of AI.

Our guest today is the CEO of Harbor, Matt Sunderman, who before the merger was CEO of HBR Consulting and, earlier, president of its advisory services. In their conversation, Matt and host Bob Ambrogi explore Harbor's mission to provide legal departments with end-to-end solutions that span strategy, legal technology, operations, and intelligence.

They also discuss the current state of digital transformation in legal – from the opportunities and obstacles around generative AI adoption to the surprising reality that many firms are still only 10 to 40 percent cloud-enabled, and Sunderman offers his perspective on what law firms and corporate legal departments should be doing today to prepare for the next decade.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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What happens when a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer, tired of copying and pasting contract language, starts reading about self-driving cars? In Shashank Bijapur's case, it sparked the creation of SpotDraft, a contract lifecycle management company that just raised $54 million in Series B funding and that counts major companies such as Airbnb among its customers.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Bijapur, CEO and cofounder of SpotDraft, to explore his journey from White & Case associate to legal tech entrepreneur. It all began with that pivotal New Year's Eve moment – working on due diligence while eating Chinese food and reading about Elon Musk's self-driving cars – that made him realize something fundamental: Cars were driving themselves but lawyers were still stuck copying and pasting contract language.

The conversation traces SpotDraft's evolution from its original version as an AI redlining platform to becoming a comprehensive CLM solution. Bijapur shares the hard-won lessons of pivoting when their initial AI approach proved only as accurate as a coin toss, and how co-building with early customers who believed in their vision helped shape the product into what it is today.

They also dive deep into how generative AI is transforming contract management, get a preview of SpotDraft's new AI assistant called Sidebar, launching to the public next month, and discuss practical implementation challenges based on insights from SpotDraft's recent survey on AI adoption in legal departments. Looking ahead, they discuss where the CLM market is heading in the age of generative AI.

Throughout the discussion, Bijapur reflects on the entrepreneurial journey itself – learning to sell when trained to be demure, developing an appetite for risk after being taught to be risk-averse, and discovering that every startup milestone brings new challenges that require completely different approaches. It's a candid look at both the technical and human sides of building a legal tech company.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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If generative AI was the biggest story in legal tech in 2023 and 2024, agentic AI is proving to be the most talked-about topic of 2025. Spurring this, at least in part, has been Thomson Reuters’ announcement of its forthcoming release of a new agentic version of CoCounsel, its AI legal assistant, that will be able to plan, reason and execute complex multi-step workflows for legal professionals.

On this episode of LawNext, we will dive deep into this next generation of AI legal assistants with two guests who are at the forefront of this field, leading the development of CoCounsel’s next generation: Emily Colbert and Rawia Ashraf. Both joined Thomson Reuters back in 2013 through its acquisition of Practical Law, where they cut their teeth building practice-focused products for lawyers. Now, they are leading the charge on the evolution of CoCounsel into a new generation of agentic workflows, with Colbert overseeing CoCounsel’s litigation portfolio, while Rawia heading up product development for the transactional and corporate side.

In today’s conversation, we'll explore how AI is moving beyond simple question-and-answer chatbots to become something more like a smart associate that can chain together multiple tasks, research cases, draft documents, and walk through complex legal workflows step by step. We'll also talk about the challenges of bringing cutting-edge technology to a profession that values precision and trust, learn more about what's coming this summer in CoCounsel’s next major release for legal professionals, and get Colbert’s and Ashraf’s thoughts on how all of this will reshape the practice of law.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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When legal research giant LexisNexis and legal AI giant Harvey announced a strategic alliance last month, legal tech commentator Richard Tromans called it “possibly the most important legal tech move in a decade.” On today’s episode of LawNext, we go deep into the partnership and its implications with Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland.

Through the partnership, LexisNexis will integrate its primary law content, Shepard's citations, and AI technology directly into Harvey's platform, and the two companies will jointly develop agentic AI workflows. The partnership comes on the heels of Harvey's remarkable Series E funding round, raising $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, in which RELX, LexisNexis's parent company, was a participating investor.

So what drove this alliance? In his interview with host Bob Ambrogi, Fitzpatrick reveals it wasn't a boardroom strategy session that sparked this partnership, but rather customer demand from large law firms seeking the combined power of LexisNexis's authoritative legal content and Harvey's AI capabilities.

Fitzpatrick talks about what this means for the future of legal AI, how it addresses the persistent challenge of hallucinations in AI-generated legal content, and whether we're witnessing the emergence of a new model for legal tech partnerships. He also shares insights from recent ROI studies showing dramatic productivity gains for both law firms and corporate legal departments using AI tools.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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Supio, an AI-driven platform developed specifically for personal injury lawyers, has been generating a lot of buzz. On the heels of reporting record growth last year and raising $25 million in Series A funding in October, last month it raised another $60 million in a Series B round. But what do the lawyers who use the platform think of it? On today’s LawNext, we hear from one of those lawyers, as well as from the company’s cofounder and CEO.

Our guests today are:

• Tyler Schneider, managing partner of the personal injury law firm TorHoerman Law. Schneider was an early adopter of Supio. He and his firm used it to help obtain a $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs in a case involving allegations that cow’s milk-based infant formula caused intestinal inflammation in premature babies.
• Jerry Zhou, the CEO of Supio who cofounded it in 2021 together with his childhood friend and coworker Kyle Lam after having held product management and engineering roles at Microsoft and Avalara.

In their conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Zhou and Schneider talk about the development of Supio, its real-world impact on plaintiffs’ lawyers, and their wish lists for further development of the product. They also share their thoughts on how AI is likely to reshape PI practice more broadly.

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When Chris Cartrett was named CEO of legal technology company Aderant in 2022, he did so with the mission of aggressively advancing a cloud-first strategy throughout the company’s suite of business and financial software for law firms. Given that Aderant is a nearly 50-year-old company with many customers who still use the on-premises version of its software, that was not an easy mission to fulfill.

So three years later, what grade does he give himself in delivering on that mission? That is one of the questions I put to him during a special live LawNext interview. We recorded the interview at Aderant’s Momentum Global 2025 user conference in Dallas last month, where Aderant graciously allowed me to use its Studio A recording equipment it had set up at the conference for its own podcast.

In a wide-ranging interview, Cartrett talks about his focus on the cloud, generative AI, and customer service, and why he believes all three are so important right now. He also talks about the company’s growth, reflected in the fact that 2024 was a record-breaking year for Aderant and 2025 is on track to be even stronger. We talk about the future of Aderant, the future of law practice, and the likely impact of generative AI, and I ask him how he uses gen AI in his own daily work.

Cartrett first came to Aderant in 2014 from Thomson Reuters as senior vice president of strategy and growth and was promoted to executive vice president in 2017 before becoming president in 2021 and CEO in 2022..

A big thanks to Aderant for letting me use its recording studio and for providing me with the final recording.

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What happens when a CEO steps away from a legal tech company just before the generative AI revolution explodes, then returns two years later amid a landscape that is being dramatically transformed? For Litera’s Avaneesh Marwaha, that is exactly what happened.

As the CEO of Litera from 2016 to 2022, Marwaha led the legal tech company through a remarkable period of expansion and diversification, including growing its global customer base by over 1,500% and its annual revenues by 1200%, and overseeing some 14 acquisitions that transformed the company’s focus from document productivity to a broad range of legal workflows, ranging from transaction management and due diligence to litigation, firm intelligence, and more.

Marwaha stepped down as CEO in 2022 to become Litera’s chairman, just before the tidal wave of gen AI swept over legal technology, and then, in a surprising move last October, he returned to the CEO role. On today’s LawNext, Marwaha shares how he was drawn to return as the company’s leader by the “perfect storm” of forces reshaping the legal industry of AI adoption, unprecedented legal tech investment, and evolving client expectations.

In today’s conversation, Marwaha reveals how AI has fundamentally rewired Litera's internal operations – enabling his 1,000-person company to complete quarters' worth of development work in mere weeks and transforming everything from code generation to meeting management. He also shares his personal AI workflow, including how he uses Microsoft Copilot to review up to 20 meeting transcripts nightly, and explains why he requires every Litera employee to be using AI every day – and why he believes this mandate is reshaping the company's competitive edge.

In addition, Marwaha unpacks Litera's strategic shift from acquiring dozens of companies during his first tenure to now favoring internal development – a change driven largely by AI's ability to rapidly accelerate innovation cycle, and he discusses Litera's evolution into what he calls "the experience company" for law firms, and how this transformation reflects broader shifts in legal technology, where success increasingly depends on workflow integration rather than standalone solutions.

Marwaha was formerly on this podcast in 2020: LawNext Episode 68: Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha on Growth During A Crisis.

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Cornell Winston, president of the American Association of Law Libraries, brings a unique perspective to law librarianship, having spent 45 years in libraries across diverse settings — from a hospital library where he started as a student worker; to the former Whittier Law School; to prominent law firms Munger, Tolles & Olson and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; and, for the last 24 years, as law librarian in the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles.

Winston joined host Bob Ambrogi to record this interview just weeks before AALL's annual meeting in Portland, Ore., July 19-22, with the theme "Be Bold." It's a fitting theme for a profession that's undergone dramatic transformation, evolving from traditional book-focused roles to becoming essential gatekeepers and evaluators of legal technology and information.

In their conversation, Winston discusses the evolving challenges facing law librarians — from safeguarding disappearing government information to testing AI-driven legal research tools. They explore why he considers it critical for law librarians to have "a seat at the table" in their organizations, the opportunities for newcomers to the profession, and why Winston believes the profession’s future remains bright despite predictions of its demise.

Winston also shares insights on AI adoption, the importance of law librarians as strategic partners rather than just support staff, and how the profession continues to prove that while Google may find you a million answers, a librarian will find you the best one.

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Monica Zent is a true pioneer in legal innovation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of ZentLaw, an award-winning alternative legal services provider that broke the traditional law firm mold when she founded it in 2002. ZentLaw has since grown into a nationwide legal services provider, serving global brands and major corporations with a unique subscription-based model and flexible talent approach.

But Monica's entrepreneurial journey extends well beyond ZentLaw. She's a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including early internet startups in the 1990s. She's a patented inventor, legal tech founder, angel investor, and advisor to numerous startups. In fact, Monica describes herself as having a "career portfolio" – she's an entrepreneur who has carved her own path through the legal industry and beyond.

Her latest venture is the Law Innovation Agency, a collective that brings together a think tank component, consulting services, and investment connections to help organizations navigate the rapidly changing landscape of legal technology and AI.

Throughout her career, Zent has been a strong advocate for innovation, efficiency, and diversity in the legal profession. Her articles on legal innovation, women in technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership have appeared in publications like Inc. Magazine, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Huffington Post, and she has won numerous awards, including Corporate Counsel’s Women, Influence & Power in the Law Award in the Innovative Leadership category

On today’s show, Monica joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her entrepreneurial journey and her vision for the future of legal services and legal innovation.

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On May 5, 2025, PERSUIT, a technology company that specializes in helping corporate legal departments select and manage outside counsel, announced that it had acquired Apperio, a spend-management platform for corporate legal, in a move designed to create an end-to-end workflow solution spanning everything from matter intake to invoice payment.

“This acquisition accelerates our ability to connect every point in the outside counsel workflow with intelligence,” Jim Delkousis, cofounder and CEO of PERSUIT, said at the time. “We’re not just managing spend — we’re turning it into performance.”

This week on LawNext, Delkousis joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his vision for PERSUIT and why he believes the Apperio acquisition brings “superpowers” that will help propel the company further forward in realizing that vision. The episode was recorded on the day PERSUIT announced the acquisition.

Before founding PERSUIT nearly nine years ago, Delkousis had an accomplished career as a litigation attorney, serving as a partner at King & Wood Mallesons in Australia and later helping establish DLA Piper's Middle East practice in Dubai.

In the conversation, he will discuss how his experience on the law firm side informed his mission to shift the legal industry from time-based to value-based fee arrangements. He will also talk about the strategic vision behind the Apperio acquisition and how generative AI is accelerating the evolution of legal service delivery.

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"Everybody understands the world is volatile, but they don't necessarily understand why it's volatile or how to deal with it," says Sean West, cofounder of Hence Technologies and author of the new book, Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business. "Unruly is a play on words. ... The world is kind of ‘unruling.’ The rules and norms that were developed during globalization are falling away."

On this week’s LawNext, West joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how the collision of geopolitics, technology, and legal shifts is creating unprecedented challenges for businesses of all sizes – and their legal advisors. Their conversation explores how businesses can turn volatility into opportunity, the importance of strategic legal counsel in this environment, and why companies of all sizes need access to geopolitical intelligence.

They also discuss Hence’s recent launch of Hence Global, an AI-powered platform designed to help businesses and their legal counsel manage geopolitical uncertainties by providing customized, real-time risk analysis and insights tailored to specific business roles and needs. West explains how the platform delivers personalized, role-specific intelligence that enables legal teams to better serve their clients and organizations in an increasingly uncertain world.

Before cofounding Hence in 2020, West was global deputy CEO of Eurasia Group, a global affairs advisory firm, where he advised CEOs, general counsel and investors on geopolitical and legal risk. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

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LawDroid Founder Tom Martin on Building, Teaching and Advising About AI for Legal If you follow legal tech at all, you would be justified in suspecting that Tom Martin has figured out how to use artificial intelligence to clone himself.

While running LawDroid, his legal tech company, the Vancouver-based Martin also still manages a law practice in California, oversees an annual legal tech awards program, teaches a law school course on generative AI, runs an annual AI conference, hosts a podcast, and recently launched a legal tech consultancy.

In January 2023, less than two months after ChatGPT first launched, Martin’s company was one of the first to launch a gen AI assistant specifically for lawyers, called LawDroid Copilot. He has since also launched LawDroid Builder, a no-code platform for creating custom AI agents.

Beyond his work at LawDroid, Martin is an adjunct professor at Suffolk Law School, teaching "Generative AI and the Delivery of Legal Services," and is a co-founder of the American Legal Technology Awards, which will be holding its sixth annual ceremony this October in Boston.

In today's conversation, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Martin about his journey from practicing lawyer to legal tech founder, his perspective on how gen AI is transforming the legal profession, and his insights on implementing AI in law firms and legal aid organizations.

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In the gold rush of generative AI, it seems that every legal tech vendor wants to be a one-stop shop for legal technology. But after 15 years of developing legal tech, Nik Reed, CEO of Knowable, a legal technology company devoted to helping enterprises bring order and organization to their executed agreements, believes that lawyers should be wary of the hype. Often, the most successful AI solutions are those that focus on solving specific problems exceptionally well rather than attempting to be all things to all lawyers.

On today’s LawNext, Reed joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation that explores what makes legal AI actually work well in practice. It is a topic he has been thinking about, in one form or another, since he was still a student at Stanford Law School, where he co-founded the legal research startup Ravel with classmate Daniel Lewis in 2012. After LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, Reed moved into strategic product management there, and then joined Knowable in 2019 to lead its product research and development. He became the company’s CEO last November, just as the company launched Ask Knowable, its generative AI suite.

In a conversation that explores what makes legal AI actually work in practice, Reed emphasizes the critical importance of pristine data environments, high-quality metadata, and clearly defined use cases. “It's still hard to build really good products, especially for lawyers, and it takes a lot of hard work,” Reed says. “ And anyone that's telling you that that's not the truth is probably already a product that you shouldn't be using.”

But ultimately, he believes, AI has the potential to restore balance to legal practice by handling the rote work lawyers never wanted to do, allowing them to return to what they went to law school for – critical reasoning and solving complex problems.

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In January, a merciless firestorm swept through the Pacific Palisades and surrounding areas of Los Angeles, becoming the most destructive wildfire in the city's history. Driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and fueled by record-dry conditions, the Palisades Fire destroyed over 6,800 structures, burned nearly 24,000 acres, and dramatically altered the lives of thousands of residents.

Among them were three individuals with deep ties to the legal tech community, each of whom lost their home to the fire. This week on LawNext, we speak with those three individuals:

• Valerie Chan, founder of the legal PR firm Platform PR.
• Rick Merrill, former founder of Gavalytics and current COO of Bridgeline Solutions.
• Adam Camras, co-founder of Lawgical, longtime CEO of the Legal Talk Network, and chief collaboration officer at InfoTrack.

These three legal tech leaders share their harrowing experiences as the flames approached, the devastating aftermath of losing their homes, and their ongoing journey of recovery and rebuilding.

Their stories offer a rare and intimate glimpse into how even those with resources and professional expertise face overwhelming challenges when confronted with natural disaster. From the initial evacuation decisions to battles with insurance companies and uncertain rebuilding timelines, this conversation reveals both the practical realities and profound emotional impact of sudden, catastrophic loss.

We also want to mention a related project, California Fires Legal Resources, in which the legal tech community, spearheaded by Clio, worked together to launch a website devoted to providing legal resources related to the LA fires, both for victims of the fires and legal professionals working on behalf of those victims.

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As reported yesterday in an exclusive at LawSites blog, two leading international legal transformation organizations, the Digital Legal Exchange (DLEx) and the Liquid Legal Institute (LLI), have joined forces in a strategic union that brings together more than 1,500 members representing more than 140 multinational corporations, organizations, institutions and agencies across more than 20 countries.

On today’s LawNext, two of the principles of that union — Mark Cohen, chairman emeritus of DLEx, and Dr. Dierk Schindler, cofounder of LLI — join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their vision of creating the world’s leading think tank for legal transformation. Among the topics they discuss:

• The origins and evolution of both organizations.
• How their complementary approaches — LLI's grassroots community spanning all levels of organizations and DLEx's executive-level focus — will create greater impact together.
• What "legal transformation" means in today's rapidly evolving environment.
• How businesses are driving change in the legal function.
• The importance of mindset in transformation.
• Plans for future collaboration, including joint projects and events.

Listen to gain unique insights into how these organizations aim to shape the future of legal through collective effort and a truly global perspective.

About the Guests Mark Cohen is the chairman emeritus of DLEx and founder of Legal Mosaic. With nearly 50 years in the legal industry, Mark has been a prosecutor, partner at a major law firm, founder of his own firm, and head of an international aviation parts business. He writes for Forbes and teaches at law and business schools around the world.

Dr. Dierk Schindler is a co-founder of the Liquid Legal Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in European law and has extensive experience in private practice and in-house legal departments. Schindler has been a driving force in legal innovation and process-driven legal operations.

Related Resources * Liquid Legal Institute website * Digital Legal Exchange website * Liquid Legal: Sustaining the Rule of Law – Artificial Intelligence, E-Justice and the Cloud (book publication) * Upcoming events: Legal Tech Talk 2025 (London, June 26-27, 2025) and LLI's 2025 Summit (Düsseldorf, July 7-8, 2025)

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“The landscape we all stand on is shifting, and massive amounts of change are upon us,” Phil Saunders, the chief executive officer of e-discovery and legal technology giant Relativity, recently wrote in a post on the company’s blog. Driving that change are three transformative forces, he wrote: new legal data challenges, advancing generative AI, and legal’s journey to the cloud.

On this episode of LawNext, Saunders – who joined Relativity as CEO in 2022 after three decades in the technology sector – joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he believes that both Relativity and the legal industry at large are at a pivotal moment, and to outline his company’s vision for navigating these three forces reshaping the legal technology landscape.

Within Saunders’ blog post was a notable announcement: Starting in 2028, Relativity will require that all new matters be hosted on its cloud platform, RelativityOne – a significant milestone for a company that built its success on its on-premises Relativity Server product.

The conversation starts there, with what might be considered the last mile in the company’s transition to the cloud. Saunders also discusses what attracted him to join Relativity, how the company is approaching the opportunities and challenges presented by generative AI, its work with the Legal Data Intelligence initiative, and his longer-term strategic vision for Relativity.

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Recently, legal technology company SurePoint Technologies acquired the legal practice management company ZenCase in a strategic move aimed at enhancing SurePoint’s practice management offerings for mid-sized law firms. In this episode of LawNext, Eric Thurston, who recently marked his two-year anniversary as CEO of SurePoint Technologies, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the acquisition and share his perspective on the mid-market landscape in law.

Originally founded in 1982 as Rippe & Kingston, SurePoint has established itself as a leading provider of financial and practice management software for mid-sized law firms, currently serving nearly 1,000 customers. As Thurston explains in the interview, the acquisition of ZenCase strengthens its front-end capabilities with features tailored specifically for lawyers. The acquisition helps SurePoint "leapfrog innovation by about three years," he says, while addressing customer demands for more lawyer-friendly interfaces.

The conversation also explores SurePoint's earlier acquisition of Leopard Solutions, a business intelligence platform that provides comprehensive data on attorneys and law firms across the country, enabling everything from strategic recruiting to competitor analysis. Thurston explains how they've already integrated Leopard's analytics into ZenCase, allowing lawyers to quickly access valuable industry data.

Looking at the mid-market practice management landscape, Thurston acknowledges that it is currently fragmented, but he believes SurePoint is positioned to become "the Clio of the mid-market." He outlines the company's vision to help firms not just manage their practices but accelerate growth through better technology, data analytics, and business intelligence. With a philosophy that "you're either growing or dying," Thurston shares how he believes SurePoint continues to evolve while helping law firms do the same.

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On this week’s show: LawNext takes you to the movies. Well, to a specific movie, anyway – a documentary being made to raise public awareness and understanding of the access to justice crisis in this country.

Today’s guests are the film’s director, documentary filmmaker Laura Hand, who previously directed The Tent Mender, about homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and Maya Markovich, a legal innovation leader – and two-time previous guest on this show (here and here) – who is serving as a producer and advisor to the documentary. You may know Markovich as executive director of the Justice Technology Association and for her recent appointment as vice president of the American Arbitration Association’s thought leadership and research arm.

The documentary, called Justice: Just A Promise?, has been given unprecedented access to film inside the courthouses of the Los Angeles County court system – the largest court system in the world and one where litigants unable to get a lawyer present enormous challenges to the civil justice system.

As this episode airs, the filmmakers have just launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise the money they need to complete and distribute the film. During today’s conversation, you’ll hear about that campaign, including Hand’s surprising explanation of why she went that route to raise funds.

You will also learn all about the making of the film and how the filmmakers aim to raise awareness about a nationwide crisis that far too few are even aware of, let alone understand.

• Check out their fundraising page here.

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After building his career as an engineer at Facebook and as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jay Madheswaran and his cofounders spotted an opportunity to deploy cutting-edge AI to transform what they saw as an underserved segment of the legal market, launching Eve, an AI platform purpose-built for plaintiffs’ law firms. Eve has quickly gained traction, recently securing a $47 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and boasting 800% year-over-year growth.

But what makes Eve’s story particularly interesting is its mission to transform traditional plaintiffs’ firms into what Madheswaran calls "AI-native law firms" – where technology does not just automate tasks but fundamentally changes how legal services are delivered, in part by encoding firms’ unique knowledge and processes into intelligent systems.

In today’s episode, Madheswaran joins host Bob Ambrogi to explain his concept of AI-native law firms and describe how Eve's technology can help firms double or triple their caseloads by automating everything from case-intake analysis to document drafting, all while learning to work in each firm's unique voice and style.

He also discusses the challenges of building trust with lawyers around AI and his vision for increasingly specialized legal services in an AI-powered future.

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Earlier this month, a legal tech startup called Fortuna Arbitration launched what it says is the first true AI judge – an automated arbitration system called Arbitrus.ai that the company claims can fully replace human arbitrators in resolving legal disputes. The system promises to cut the cost of arbitration from an average of $100,000 to just $10,000, while delivering consistent, unbiased decisions within 72 hours.

On this week’s LawNext, our guests are two of the founders behind this ambitious project. Brian Potts is a partner at Husch Blackwell and an experienced commercial litigator. He is also the inventor of the LegalBoard, a computer keyboard designed for lawyers that was wildly popular when it launched. And Kimo Gandall is the CEO of Fortuna Arbitration and a current third-year Harvard Law student who, along with third co-founder Kenny McLaren, has been working on AI legal prediction systems since well before he went to law school.

They've published their testing of Arbitrus, showing zero hallucinations across 100 test cases. They believe their system will not only make arbitration faster and cheaper, but could eventually evolve into what they call an 'Arbitration State' – a private legal system that could handle a significant portion of disputes that currently clog our courts.

Is this AI judge the future of dispute resolution? Or are there fundamental aspects of legal decision-making that require human judgment? In today’s episode, we'll explore these questions and more.

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When former Wall Street lawyer Jonathan Petts joined forces in 2016 with Rohan Pavuluri, then a research assistant in Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, and Mark Hansen, a software engineer, to create Upsolve, they had a simple but powerful vision: make bankruptcy filing as accessible as online tax preparation for Americans crushed by debt.

Today, their nonprofit has helped over 16,000 low-income families discharge more than $700 million in debt through Chapter 7 bankruptcy – all at no cost to users.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Petts, now Upsolve’s CEO, and Ben Jackson, an ex-Uber driver who joined Upsolve’s founding team after his first year of law school and who is now chief product officer. They share their personal journeys that led them to create Upsolve, from Petts' experience as a big firm lawyer helping pro bono clients get fresh starts to Jackson's own struggles with $60,000 in credit card debt.

They detail how Upsolve works, who it serves, and how they maintain quality while providing free services.They also discuss how they're leveraging AI to expand their impact, their battle against unauthorized practice of law restrictions in a groundbreaking federal lawsuit in New York, and their mission to help Americans rebuild their financial futures.

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When it comes to contract negotiations, lawyers often find themselves spending countless hours haggling over standard agreements such as NDAs and SaaS contracts, with both sides often saying more or less the same thing, but in different words. What if there was a better way?

Today’s guests believe there is. Electra Japonas, chief legal officer at Law Insider and founder of the successful oneNDA initiative, and Preston Clark, Law Insider president, are on a mission to revolutionize contract negotiations by developing and open-sourcing a suite of standard agreements.

They started with oneNDA, which has been adopted by over 6,000 organizations and used in an estimated 10 million agreements annually, and they have just launched their oneSaaS standard. Now, they are setting their sights on developing a full library of standard, open-source agreements.

Japonas shares how her experience as a lawyer at the European Space Agency initially shaped her vision for contract standardization, and she explains the methodology behind the development of oneSaaS, which involved analysis of nearly 1,000 existing agreements and incorporated feedback from hundreds of legal professionals and SaaS providers.

Clark joins midway through the show to discuss Law Insider's plans to build a comprehensive ecosystem of standardized agreements, supported by AI-powered contract automation technology. He outlines how the company plans to transform routine contract work while maintaining its commitment to keeping these standards freely available to the legal community.

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In the United States, we face a staggering crisis in access to justice, with over 90% of low-income Americans' civil legal needs estimated to be going unmet. But what if there was a way to dramatically expand legal help by empowering a new category of legal helpers?

That's exactly what today's guest, Nikole Nelson, is working to achieve as CEO of Frontline Justice. After 25 years as a legal aid lawyer in Alaska, Nelson now leads this national nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing and supporting "community justice workers" – people who are not lawyers but who are trained to provide essential legal assistance to those who cannot afford attorneys.

Nelson was a guest on this show a year ago, shortly after Frontline Justice was founded and she was named CEO. She returns today to catch us up on what has happened since then across the country towards her ultimate goal of bringing justice workers to every U.S. state.

She reports that five states now have laws in place that authorize justice workers and another 20 states are now in the process of adopting or considering these programs. To facilitate these developments, her organization has launched a National Taskforce on Community Justice Worker Training.

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Earlier this month, the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States, held its annual Innovations in Technology Conference in Phoenix. This year’s conference was particularly special for two reasons. For one, it was the conference’s 25th anniversary, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Technology Initiative Grants program that was the genesis of the conference.

For another, this year’s conference followed the official retirement in November of Glenn Rawdon, the person who got the conference started in the first place and who oversaw it all these years. As program counsel at the LSC since 1999, it was Rawdon’s job to assist legal services programs with their technology efforts, manage the LSC’s technology grants, and make this conference happen every year.

Rawdon is our guest this week, as he sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to share the origin story and evolution of the two groundbreaking LSC initiatives he helped launch and oversee — the TIG program and the ITC conference (long known as the TIG conference).

From the conference’s humble beginnings as a gathering of 32 people in New Orleans in 2000, Rawdon explains how it grew into what many now consider the premier global event focused on technology and access to justice, this year drawing 700 attendees and 150 presenters from around the world. He also discusses how the TIG program, which started with a $7.5 million budget funding mainly website projects, evolved to support more sophisticated technology initiatives aimed at expanding access to legal services.

Drawing from his unique background as a solo practitioner who embraced technology in the 1980s to improve his own efficiency, Rawdon shares insights about the initially tentative but gradually expanding role of technology in legal aid organizations. He discusses key milestones like the development of document assembly tools, online intake systems, and statewide legal information websites — innovations that helped transform how legal aid is delivered.

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From legal aid attorney to legal tech innovator, Sateesh Nori brings a unique perspective to the intersection of artificial intelligence and access to justice.

After spending two decades in the trenches as a housing lawyer at legal aid offices in New York City, Nori now bridges multiple worlds – continuing his legal aid work at the Legal Aid Society of NYC while also serving as an adjunct clinical professor at NYU Law School in its eviction defense clinic and working as a senior legal innovation strategist at Just-Tech LLC, a technology consulting firm that focuses on legal services providers.

He recently partnered with Housing Court Answers, a nonprofit tenants’ rights organization in NYC, and Josef, the legal automation company, to develop and launch Roxanne, an AI-powered tool to help tenants understand their repair rights, and he believes artificial intelligence could be the key to finally making meaningful progress in closing the justice gap.

As if all that were not enough to keep Nori busy, he recently published a memoir, Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court, and gave a TEDx talk, How A Chatbot Can Save Someone From Homelessness.

Today, in a conversation recorded live at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology conference in Phoenix last week, Nori and host Bob Ambrogi discuss why he believes that AI is as transformative as electricity, how he is using it in his own work, and why he believes law schools are failing to prepare students for the AI revolution.

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Anastasia Boyko likes to say that she’s Goldilocks-ed her way through her career. True, it’s been a varied career, as she’s tried out different roles, but it is a career that has taken her full circle, from Yale Law School, where she graduated, and then eventually back to Yale Law to create a program in leadership for lawyers, and from Salt Lake City, where she grew up after she and her mother fled Soviet-era Ukraine, and then back to that city as chief innovation officer at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Along the way, Boyko has learned a thing or two about the roles of leadership and innovation in legal education, and she has strong opinions about why law schools should do better at preparing students to be both leaders and innovators. In today’s LawNext, Boyko joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the journey of her Goldilocks-ed career and her insights on leadership and innovation, as well as ac-cess to justice.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Boyko began her career in private practice as a tax lawyer. She went on to hold diverse professional positions, including law librarian, Supreme Court intern, banker, yoga teacher, wellness entrepreneur, and career coach. She returned to Yale Law as the inaugural dean of the school’s Tsai Leadership Program, where she developed an innovative leadership program for lawyers, and returned to the University of Utah’s law school, first as director of non-J.D. programs and then as chief innovation officer.

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On Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned by lawyers can practice law.

The pilot, which will last for 10 years, is designed to test whether entity regulation will increase access to justice by enhancing access to affordable and reliable legal and law-related services. Entities approved to operate under the pilot will be allowed to practice law, but only under strict conditions that limit the duration of their operations and that require active monitoring and oversight.

To discuss the development and details of this pilot, we are joined today by two guests representing the two organizations that proposed this pilot to the court and that will now be tasked with partnering to get it up and running. They are:

• Terra Nevitt, executive director of the Washington State Bar Association, and
• Craig Shank, a Washington lawyer and member of the Washington Supreme Court’s Practice of Law Board.

Their share their perspectives on how this pilot could enhance access to justice and what the development means for regulatory reform more broadly.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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On today’s LawNext: we hand over the podcast to NotebookLM to discuss the state of law practice management technology.

If you haven’t heard of NotebookLM, it is a generative AI tool from Google that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions. Its output sounds a whole lot like, well, a podcast, with two hosts chatting it up about your documents.

To quote Google’s own description, “With one click, two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on your sources. They summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth.”

So we decided to give it a try.

Back in September, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote a four-part series on his LawSites blog called, “The Shrinking Ownership of Law Practice Management Technology.” It was a deep dive into how ownership of law practice management software for solo and small law firms has been consolidated under just six major ownership groups.

We loaded the four parts of that series into NotebookLM and asked it to generate its audio overview. What you’ll hear today is the discussion it generated, followed by Bob’s thoughts on what it produced. The NotebookLM audio is about 15 minutes long, and Bob’s comments will come after that plays.

It is important to keep in mind that the audio generated by NotebookLM is not simply a summary. The two speakers do summarize key points from Bob’s articles, but they also add interpretations and perspectives that are nowhere to be found in the original source material.

Here are the articles on which the audio is based:

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 1 of 4): A Market Dominated by Just Six Ownership Groups.
• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 2 of 4): A Scorecard of Who Owns What.
• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 3 of 4): Future Development and Market Opportunities.
• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 4 of 4): Wrapping It All Up.

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You cannot have innovation without adoption. That was a theme I heard repeatedly when I attended the Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal conference in New York City in October. Our guest today, Paul Henry, would take that a step further and say you do not really have adoption without engagement.

Henry is the founder and CEO of NGAGE Intelligence, a platform that provides law firms with highly granular and comprehensive behavioral analytics to help them understand whether, how and by whom their communication, collaboration and AI tools are being used.

NGAGE was founded on the notion of employee engagement and how analytics can be used to measure and improve it. At the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Henry to learn more about Ngage and how the analytics it provides can drive adoption, engagement and governance.

A note that this was recorded live at the conference, as the morning keynote speech was being piped throughout the conference area, so I apologize for the background noise.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach
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Everlaw for Good is a program run by the e-discovery company Everlaw, through which it makes its software available at no cost to legal aid organizations, nonprofit organizations, and investigative journalists.

One beneficiary of that program is the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights nonprofit that works to seek justice on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including torture, genocide, and war crimes. At the recent Everlaw Summit, the CJA’s work using the Everlaw platform was honored with the Everlaw for Good award.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the summit, which was held in San Francisco in October, and he had the opportunity to sit down to record this conversation with two of the CJA’s lawyers, along with the director of the Everlaw for Good program. Today’s guests are:

• Claret Vargas, senior staff attorney at CJA.
• Daniel McLaughlin, senior staff attorney at CJA.
• Joanne Sprague, director of Everlaw for Good.

They discuss the Everlaw for Good program and the specific impact it has had on CJA’s work.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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In the field of legal knowledge management and innovation, Sally Gonzalez is both a legend and a trailblazer. Over the course of her 40-year career, she has worked for some of the world's largest law firms to develop and lead KM and strategic technology initiatives. She has overseen KM and information technology programs at such global firms as Norton Rose Fulbright, Dentons, Akin Gump, Covington & Burling, and Jones Day, and been a strategic consultant at major consulting firms including HBR, Navigant, PwC and, most recently, Fireman & Company,

Gonzalez surprised some of those who attended the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held in New York City in October, where she was the keynote speaker, when she announced her retirement there and was recognized by her peers for her decades of contributions to the legal industry. That made her keynote, in which she spoke about core principles for successful KM, her swan song, of sorts.

Following her keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who was at the conference, sat down with Gonzalez to record this conversation about her thoughts on KM, innovation, AI, culture, change management, and much more.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Littler, local everywhere.
• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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Recently, the Everlaw Summit, the annual customer conference of the e-discovery company Everlaw, convened in San Francisco. In his keynote address there, cofounder and CEO AJ Shankar announced the general availability, after a year of beta testing, of a suite of generative AI features for reviewing, coding and analyzing documents in discovery and litigation prep.

LawNext host Bob AmbrogiI was at the conference, and the next morning, he sat down with Shankar for this conversation about Everlaw’s development of these AI tools and Shankar’s views on how gen AI will impact legal professionals. As you’ll hear him say, he makes no bones about calling it a game changer.

With a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Shankar founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. He has been on this podcast twice before:

• In April 2019, where he discussed the company’s founding and early development.
• In November 2021, just after Everlaw became one of the first legal tech companies to achieve unicorn status, or a valuation of over $1 billion.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Littler, local everywhere.
• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal designed to enable its legal professionals to more easily access important resources and more effectively collaborate with each other.

LSNYC, whose 12 offices and more than 500 attorneys serve nearly 110,000 clients annually, developed the portal in partnership with Sente Advisors, a company that helps law firms and legal organizations develop innovative projects. Designed to be a home for user-submitted and curated knowledge that is easily searchable, LSNYC describes the portal as one part social network, one part intranet, and one part enterprise search.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the KM&I for Legal conference and had the opportunity to sit down there with two of the people who were instrumental in the portal’s design and development:

• Alexander Horwitz, chief operating officer at Legal Services NYC.
• Kate Boyd, chief operating officer at Sente Advisors.

In today’s episode, Horwitz and Boyd share the story of the problem they set out to solve, the constraints they had to work within, and how they went about doing it.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
• Littler, local everywhere.

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Recently, the law practice management company Clio launched Clio Duo, its generative AI legal assistant. On today’s LawNext, Jonathan Watson, Clio’s chief technology officer, joins the show to discuss Duo’s development, capabilities and future direction.He also talks about some of the other products Clio recently launched, including native accounting and custom reporting.

Watson and LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, in October. Watson has twice previously been on this podcast, on Nov. 14, 2023, and on Nov. 3, 2022. He has been with Clio since 2017, and has been its CTO since 2021. He was previously director of engineering at Shopify.

Note that this is the fifth and final episode we are posting that we recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference. Check out the other four episodes:

• Live from #ClioCon: Clio CEO Jack Newton on Generative AI and the New Duo AI Legal Assistant.
• Live from #ClioCon: A Clio Power Trio, with COO Ronnie Gurion, CFO Curt Sigfstead, and Board Member Mark Britton.
• Recorded Live At #ClioCon: A Deep Dive into the 2024 Clio Legal Trends Report, with Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in Residence.
• LawNext Podcast: The LegalTech Fund’s Zach Posner on Investing in Legal Tech (and His Upcoming Summit).

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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When Zach Posner was last on this podcast, it was 2021 and he was less than a year into having cofounded The LegalTech Fund, the first venture capital firm to be laser-focused on law and legal technology. Since then, his firm, of which he is managing director, has gone on to build up a portfolio of more than 60 legal tech companies in which it invests.

His firm has also launched his own conference, the TLTF Summit, which will convene for the third straight year starting Dec. 4 in Key Biscayne, Fla. After attending the first summit, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote in his review, “It was a superlative conference – one like no other conference in legal tech.”

We’ve been wanting to get Zach back on this podcast for an update, and as it happens, he was in attendance at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, where we were set up with my mics and recording equipment. So Zach and Bob sat down for this impromptu conversation about his firm, his conference, and his thoughts on the legal tech landscape.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, Clio released its ninth annual Legal Trends Report, a report that uses both survey responses and anonymized data from Clio users to paint a picture of key trends in law practice and legal technology.

This year’s report has some intriguing findings on lawyers’ adoption of AI and the types of tasks within a law office that could be automated using AI.The survey also looks at trends in hourly and flat fee billing, and includes the results of a “secret shopper” study of lawyers’ responses (or, more accurately, non-responses) to inquiries from potential clients.

To discuss all of this and more, Joshua Lenon, Clio’s lawyer in residence and one of the principal authors of the report, sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi during the conference. Here is their conversation.

Note that we have already posted two other LawNExt episodes recorded live at ClioCon, one with Clio’s founder and CEO Jack Newton, and another with what we called the “Clio Power Trio” of Clio’s COO Ronnie Gurion, CFO Curt Sigfstead, and board member and investor Mark Britton.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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This has been a significant year for the law practice management company Clio, which in July raised a record-setting $900 million financing round – the largest ever for a legal tech company, and which recently wrapped up its 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference, its largest ever with some 2,600 attendees in person in Austin, Texas, and almost as many attending virtually from all over the globe.

At the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a live interview with a “Clio power trio” of two of its top executives and a member of its board of directors. They talk about the implications of this raise and its impact on the law practice management landscape. Together for this interview are:

• Ronnie Gurion, chief operating officer and former GM and global head of Uber for Business.
• Curt Sigfstead, chief financial officer, responsible for Clio’s financial affairs, including finance, accounting, capital, treasury, taxation, and corporate development.
• Mark Britton, an investor in Clio and member of its board of directors and investor and formerly the founder, chairman and CEO of Avvo.

They share their perspectives on the financing and the opportunities it presents. They also discuss why investors are showing greater interest in legal tech, consolidation within the legal tech industry, and the possibility of Clio going public.

Note that last week’s episode, also recorded live at the conference, featured Jack Newton, Clio’s founder and CEO.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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We’ve just returned from the Clio Cloud Conference, held this year in Austin, Texas, where, in what has become an annual tradition, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton for a live interview.

At the conference, Clio launched Clio Duo, the generative AI legal assistant integrated into Clio’s flagship product, Clio Manage. In this interview, Newton discusses what Duo does and why he believes generative AI is a game-changer for lawyers, more significant even than lawyers’ move to the cloud a decade ago, but with parallels to that transition.

Newton also talks about findings from Clio’s just-released Legal Trends Report on lawyers’ adoption of AI and the concerns about AI that are still holding some lawyers back. In a broad-ranging conversation, Newton also shares his thoughts on the law practice management landscape, Clio’s expansion into the mid-firm market, and the greater integration of fintech applications in legal.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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One year ago, in September 2023, James Schellhase was named chief executive officer of the alternative legal services provider UnitedLex. The move was particularly significant, as he was only the second person ever to hold that title at the company, having succeeded Dan Reed, who cofounded UnitedLex in 2006 and had been its CEO ever since. Reed is now chairman of the board.

A year into his tenure, Schellhase joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how UnitedLex is seeking to embrace innovation and leverage technology to transform legal service delivery. He talks about what this change in leadership means for the company now and into the future, how the company is embracing generative AI to drive its technology-enabled services, and why he believes the company’s crown jewel is its India-based workforce.

Schellhase is no stranger to the legal industry. He was formerly executive chairman of McCarthyFinch, developer of a suite of AI-driven contract management software that Onit acquired in 2020, and before that was CEO of e-discovery company DiscoverReady, which Consilio acquired in 2018. Before joining UnitedLex, he was most recently CEO of risk management company Breakwater Solutions.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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At its recent customer conference in Salt Lake City, called LEX Summit, the case management company Filevine unveiled a number of product releases and updates. Among them were several products for litigators driven by generative AI, including a first-of-its-kind tool, Depo CoPilot, that helps guide a lawyer during a deposition, and another, DemandsAI, that generates settlement demand letters in the lawyer’s own voice and style.

On today’s LawNext, we do a deep dive into those new products with the two executives who oversee product development at Filevine, Michael Anderson, chief product officer, and Alex McLaughlin, vice president of product. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at LEX Summit and sat down with Anderson and McLaughlin for this live conversation.

As Ambrogi wrote in his review of Depo CoPilot, it is like having a guardian angel on your shoulder during a deposition, analyzing and transcribing the questions and answers in real time to help ensure the lawyer achieves the desired goals, avoids unclear questions and identifies inconsistent answers. In today’s episode, you will learn more about what it can do and how it works.

Note that this is our second episode from LEX Summit. In last week’s show, we featured conversations recorded there live with three of Filevine’s leaders: Ryan Anderson, the company’s cofounder and CEO; Nathan Morris, cofounder and chief culture officer; and Cain Elliott, head legal futurist.

Also, Ryan Anderson was previously a guest on this show on April 27, 2022, so if you are interested in hearing from him in greater depth, check that out.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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In today’s episode, we feature three impromptu conversations with leaders of the case management company Filevine. Last week, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was in Salt Lake City to attend LEX Summit, the Filevine customer conference. While there, he snagged three of the company’s top executives for brief, impromptu conversations about the company, its products, and the conference.

In today’s show, you will hear from:

• Ryan Anderson, the company’s cofounder and CEO.
• Nathan Morris, cofounder and chief culture officer.
• Cain Elliott, head legal futurist.

Separately, Bob recorded a longer interview about Filevine’s product announcements — including several generative AI products — with Michael Anderson, chief product officer, and Alex McLaughlin, vice president of product. Watch for that episode to post soon.

By the way, Ryan Anderson was previously a guest on this show on April 27, 2022, so if you are interested in hearing from him in greater depth, check that out.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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Matt Rasmussen had worked for some 20 years in litigation technology and support at major law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and litigation services providers, when he wondered why mobile collections had to be so time-consuming, inefficient and invasively overbroad.

As he looked into it, he realized there was a better way to manage mobile collections. Two years ago, Rasmussen and his cofounders brought ModeOne to the legal market. ModeOne’s SaaS technology offers the industry’s only selective, fully remote, data collection from smart phones and other mobile devices.

Now the company’s CEO, Rasmussen joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how ModeOne is simplifying the collection of data from mobile devices for e-discovery, legal holds, compliance, and investigations.

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On Oct. 17 and 18, 2024, two of the legal industry’s leading experts on knowledge management and innovation, Patrick DiDomenico, founder and CEO of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president of Fireman & Company, which is owned by Epiq, the global provider of technology-enabled legal services, will present the second-annual KM&I for Legal Conference in New York City.

The conference, which focuses on the latest developments and best practices in knowledge management and innovation in law firms and legal departments, comes at a critical juncture. In recent years, KM and innovation professionals in legal have seen their roles evolve significantly, as law firms have come to better appreciate their importance. Now, with the advent of generative AI, KM and innovation professionals are more essential than ever.

So as the second convening of the KM&I for Legal conference approaches, DiDomenico and Fireman join LawNext to share their thoughts on the state of KM and innovation in law firms and legal organizations, including the impact AI is having on the field. They also offer a preview of what’s in store at the conference.

By the way, if you are interested in attending the conference, you can get a 15% discount off the cost of registration with the code LAWNEXT15. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi attended the inaugural version of this conference last year, and, as he wrote in his review after the event, he found it to be substantive, engaging and thought provoking. (He also had the opportunity there to record several interviews for this podcast with some of the speakers and vendors who attended the conference.)

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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In what it says is the first AI agent for law, the legal technology company Spellbook just released Spellbook Associate, an application that can plan and execute complex, multi-step workflows in transactional matters, much as an associate would. This is the same company that introduced the first generative AI copilot for contract drafting and review back in 2022, even before ChatGPT was released to the public.

In today’s episode of LawNext, Scott Stevenson, the cofounder and CEO of Spellbook, joins host Bob Ambrogi to tell us all about the new Spellbook Associate, as well as to discuss the company’s origins and future. As you will hear, the company pivoted from its original product when Stevenson and his cofounders began exploring large language models and saw their potential for streamlining law practice.

Stevenson, a computer engineer, founded the company in 2019 together with Daniel Di Maria, a former lawyer and now chief revenue officer, and Matt Mayers, a user experience expert and now chief experience officer. When they pivoted in 2022 to launch their AI copilot for lawyers, “customers came pouring in faster than we could keep up with,” he says.

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For at least two decades, artificial intelligence has been used in e-discovery to help surface and prioritize review of potentially responsive documents from large document collections. But while technology-assisted review (TAR) has traditionally been driven by AI in the form of supervised machine learning, some vendors and e-discovery professionals are starting to experiment with the use of generative AI in its place.

So how effective is generative AI for document review in e-discovery? Is it a replacement for traditional TAR or a supplement? Are there other ways in which this rapidly evolving technology can be used in discovery?

On this week’s LawNext, we are discussing the application of generative AI in e-discovery. To do so, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three computer and data scientists from Redgrave Data, a consulting firm that specializes in e-discovery and data science. Today’s guests are:

• Dave Lewis, chief scientific officer, who has over three decades of experience in AI and statistics.
• Lenora Gray, data scientist, who has worked for more than 15 years in law firm project management and matter support roles.
• Jeremy Pickens, head of applied science, a pioneer in the fields of collaborative exploratory search and technology assisted review.

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Last month, KKR, a major global investment firm, announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft, the contract lifecycle management company. As part of the deal, the growth equity firm FTV Capital, already an Agiloft investor, is making an additional investment, and another growth equity firm, JMI Equity, is joining as a new investor.

The deal was a feather in the cap for Eric Laughlin, who joined Agiloft as CEO in 2020 after leading the Pangea3 business at Thomson Reuters. When Laughlin stepped into that role, Agiloft had been in business for 30 years, and he succeeded a predecessor who had been CEO for nearly all that time. He came aboard just as the company had raised its first-ever outside funding round, tasked with the mission of taking the company to its next level of growth.

During his tenure, the company has earned a reputation as a leading innovator in the CLM space, including in its development of features based on artificial intelligence, and it has significantly grown both its workforce and its global customer base. Laughlin has also strengthened his own reputation as a leader who believes that employee experience is as important as customer experience.

In March 2021, not long after he joined Agiloft, Laughlin was our guest on this show to talk about his plans for the company. On today’s episode, he returns to discuss how Agiloft has grown during his four-year tenure and to share his thoughts on the contract lifecycle management landscape, now and into the future.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio’s founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview.

In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today’s announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investment and what it means for Clio, its customers, and the legal industry. Newton founded the company 16 years ago and has overseen its growth into a global legal tech powerhouse, with more than 1,100 employees worldwide.

“My ambition was always to build this into something that would be a multi-decade company, a hundred-plus year company, and a company that would leave a lasting impact on the legal industry, and a company that would transform the legal industry in a really positive way,” Newton says in the interview. “And what I see this investment round as being is, number one, a huge validation of the success Clio has had in driving that transformation, but more importantly, positioning us to even have a more transformative and more impactful next chapter to our story.”

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Jacqueline Schafer, the founder and CEO of Clearbrief, was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later old me, the thought crystalized for her, “If you can show the judge the evidence that really tells your client’s story, that’s how you win.’”

Soon after, Schafer set to work building Clearbrief, AI-powered software that works within Microsoft Word to help lawyers find the best facts to support their legal writing. This week, the four-year-old company announced that it had raised an additional funding round of $4 million, bringing its total funding to nearly $8 million. Along the way, it has racked up numerous awards, including Legalweek’s 2023 litigation product of the year, Clio’s 2022 Launch//Code Developer Contest, Legalweek’s 2022 new law company of the year, and the American Legal Technology Awards’ 2021 legal tech startup of the year.

Schafer is our guest today on LawNext, as she shares her journey from practicing lawyer to startup founder, describes how Clearbrief helps lawyers in their legal writing, and discusses what this latest investment means for the company and its customers.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public’s access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a catalyst for innovation to enable courts to better serve the legal needs of the public.

In August, the program will wrap up its inaugural cohort, which placed three fellows in courts in Kansas, Tennessee and Utah. But even though those three fellowships were successful, our guest today, Jason Tashea, the program’s founding director and cofounder, says its future is uncertain because its continued funding is uncertain. “These programs are expensive, they are hard to fundraise for,” he says.

In today’s episode, Tashea, an entrepreneur, educator, and award-winning journalist, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the need for and genesis of the program, the fellowships it supported this year, and his assessment of the program’s success. He also shares his thoughts more broadly on the need for innovation in the courts to address the gap in access to justice.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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This has been a notable year for BriefCatch, a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company’s raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics.

All of that culminated in BriefCatch’s announcement last week of its hires of three legal tech veterans into key executive roles in marketing, sales and product management, all to help lead it into its next stage of growth and development: Lydia Flocchini as chief marketing officer, Darren Schleicher as chief sales officer, and Kyle Bahr as product manager of AI and other new products.

Ross Guberman, the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is our guest today to discuss the company’s history, growth, recent news, and future plans – which will include the launch of a suite of AI-enabled products. A former practicing lawyer, he was a legal writing coach and speaker when he conceived of BriefCatch, which he formally launched in 2018.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.

But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today’s episode, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project’s cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master’s degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.

Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation.

The Free Law Project’s data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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In recent months, Epiq, a global company providing technology-enabled legal services, has announced new artificial intelligence and analytics features built using the AI capabilities of Amazon Web Services. These new features include a framework for building, training and deploying bespoke machine learning models as secure APIs for customers; integration of Amazon Bedrock for custom copilot development using a range of commercially available large language models; and other features.

Joining LawNext today to provide details on all this and to explain what it means for Epiq’s clients is Roger Pilc, president and general manager of Global Legal Solutions at Epiq. With Epiq since 2019, Pilc is responsible for driving strategy and execution around organic growth, strategic acquisitions, product development, technology, and innovation for a broad range of products in areas including information governance, forensics, e-discovery processing and hosting, managed document review, and advanced analytics.

Pilc and host Bob Ambrogi talk about Epiq’s evolution from primarily a services company to one that also develops its own proprietary technology, while also integrating with a range of technology partners. They also discuss Epiq’s recent initiatives to use AI to further enhance its products, including the Epiq Service Cloud, Epiq Discovery, and the Epiq AI Platform. We also hear Pilc’s thoughts on how AI will impact the future of legal services and the future of Epiq.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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As this episode is released, Aderant, a technology company that provides business and practice management software for mid- to large-sized law firms worldwide, is in the midst of its Global Momentum user conference, taking place in Nashville. At the conference, the company made a major news announcement – the launch of Stridyn, a new cloud platform that will form the foundation for all the cloud and AI applications the company offers.

That launch marks the culmination of a year in which Aderant has continued to push its cloud-first strategy, most notably through its Expert Sierra cloud-based practice management system, and in which it has increasingly focused on the development of artificial intelligence tools to enhance law business management, including through MADDI, the AI powered virtual associate it introduced last June.

My guest today is the person leading the company through all this, president and CEO Chris Cartrett. A 10-year veteran of the company, he was named president in 2021 and took over as CEO on Jan. 3, 2022. Now, just over two years into the job, and just ahead of Aderant’s conference this week, he sat down with me to discuss the news coming out this week and for a broader conversation about the company and the legal industry.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Almost exactly one year ago, a new legal tech startup, The Contract Network, came out of stealth, with a mission to “radically accelerate the time for contract negotiations'' through an AI-powered contract collaboration platform where all parties to a deal engage in a secure and neutral environment.

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Jim Wagner, is a legal tech veteran with a track record of starting and leading successful companies in contracting and e-discovery, including having cofounded the e-discovery company DiscoverReady, having been president of the contract management and analytics company Seal Software, and, after Seal was acquired by DocuSign, having been vice president of agreement cloud strategy there.

With The Contract Network, Wagner aims to “change contracts for good” by solving the problem of contract negotiations taking too long and lacking tools for real-time collaboration, communication and transparency among all parties. On today’s LawNext, Wagner is our guest, to talk about what he sees as broken with the traditional contract negotiation process and how The Contract Network offers a better option. Given his 30-year career in this industry, he also shares his thoughts on how it has evolved and where we are today.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certified as such by the organization Fairly Trained.

To discuss how KL3M was developed and why this built-from-scratch, domain-specific LLM is significant for the legal industry, our guest for today’s LawNext is Jillian Bommarito, chief risk officer at 273 Ventures, the company that developed CLEM. Not only was Bommarito involved in developing KL3M and the data set used to train it, but she also oversaw the process of earning KL3M its Fairly Trained certification.

Regular listeners of LawNext may remember my interview last year with two of the other principals of 273 Ventures, CEO Michael Bommarito, who is Jillian’s husband, and Chief Science Officer Daniel Katz, who were on this show just after they conducted the first experiment in having GPT take the bar exam. All three, along with Katz’s wife Jessica Katz, had formerly founded the legal AI and consulting company LexPredict, which was acquired in 2018 by the global law company Elevate.

In today’s conversation, Bommarito talks about what went into developing the model and creating the dataset to train it, and discusses what it offers the legal market and why and how a law firm would use this model over others that are commercially available.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician, developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns.

But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha, expanding its platform to help law firms manage the new normal of hybrid offices and return to work, and it has continued to evolve to become an all-in-one platform for managing in-office needs and helping firms better plan and use their office space.

Pasha, who is our guest on this episode, says that, in his view, the company’s real focus is not space, but people, and helping law firms and businesses understand how to optimize their spaces for the people who work in them today, and how to plan their spaces for the years ahead.

Side note: The recording of this conversation came about somewhat serendipitously, when host Bob Ambrogi was scheduled to meet with Pasha for a briefing during the Legalweek conference in January. When Ambrogi showed up at Maptician’s booth, the company’s publicist offered to record the conversation, and this is the result. Thanks to Maptician for allowing us to share it through this podcast.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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With the tagline “Making Knowledge Work,” the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported, it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.

But over the 30 years since its founding, it hit some speed bumps, of sorts, after it went through a series of acquisitions that led to its ownership by Autonomy and then by Hewlett Packard after HP acquired Autonomy in 2011. The HP-Autonomy deal famously turned into a fiasco when HP claimed Autonomy had fraudulently inflated its value, causing it to write off nearly $8.8 billion of the $11.1 billion purchase price, and the repercussions of that deal continue to reverberate, with Autonomy’s founder currently on trial in San Francisco for criminal fraud charges.

With iManage, through no fault of its own, caught up in that morass, its original founding management team, led by Neil Araujo, swooped in and bought back the company in 2015. It was, Araujo now says, an opportunity to reboot and apply everything they had learned about what to do and what not to do to build a successful company.

Neil Araujo is our guest in this episode, to share the story of how iManage became the success it is today and to give us a preview of what lies ahead on its product and development roadmap, including its plans for expanding its use of generative artificial intelligence. .

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project, it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.

The massive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases, some dating as far back as 1658. While Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab did all the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017 — footed the bill.

Harvard completed that digitization in 2018, making those cases available for free to the general public, but until March 1, 2024, any commercial use of the cases was restricted by the agreement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the full release of the cases, free of any restrictions.

On today’s LawNext, we will get the inside story of the history of the Caselaw Access Project and talk about the significance of this final lifting of all restrictions on the data. How did the partnership ever come about in the first place? What was the scanning process like? What does this data mean for the future of access to law, particularly in the face of generative AI?

To do all of that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:

• Daniel Lewis, the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, who is now CEO of the contract review company LegalOn.
• Adam Ziegler, the former director of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and the Caselaw Access Project (who recently wrote a first-person account of the project)..
• Jack Cushman, the current director of the Library Innovation Lab.

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the show, but had to cancel as of the recording time.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.

Our guest today, Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company is on a mission to innovate and even revolutionize litigation services and the litigation workflow. Already, its products are used every day by lawyers throughout the United States to file court cases, track court dockets, search court records, and arrange service of process, and it integrates with most major law practice management platforms.

InfoTrack in the U.S. actually grew out of a company founded in Australia in 2012, when it was spun out of the LEAP law practice management platform. InfoTrack expanded first to the U.K. and then in 2016 to the U.S.

Since coming to this country, it has expanded both organically and through acquisitions, including in 2020, when it acquired two legal tech companies, LawToolBox, the court calendaring company, and One Legal, a California provider of litigation support services such as court filing, service of process, and document retrieval, and in 2021, when it acquired Lawgical, the parent company of ServeNow, Serve Manager, and the Legal Talk Network.

Watts has been with the company since before it spun out from LEAP, and says he was employee number one when it expanded to the U.S. He and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the company’s history, where it is today, and its plans for future growth.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.

With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them -- legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance.

One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality.

On today’s episode, we’ll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer:

• Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation.
• Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.
• Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America.

One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry’s first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product.

At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr’s cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections.

Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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On this episode of LawNext: A conversation about Thomson Reuters’ strategy around generative artificial intelligence with two of the executives most directly responsible for its development and implementation.

In a year dominated by discussion of generative AI and its potential impact on the legal profession, Thomson Reuters has played a leading role. It started in June, when the company announced its $650 million acquisition of the legal research and AI company Casetext and the CoCounsel generative AI tool Casetext had developed in collaboration with OpenAI.

Then, in November, Thomson Reuters made good on its promise to integrate generative AI within its flagship legal research platform, introducing AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision. Soon after that, it rolled out generative AI within Practical Law, its legal know-how product.

What does this all mean for legal research and legal software, now and into the future? Today we go deep into TR’s AI development with two of the company’s leaders in this area:

• Mike Dahn, senior vice president and head of Westlaw product management.
• Joel Hron, head of artificial intelligence and TR Labs.

We talk about the development of AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision, the company’s broader AI product strategy, its acquisition of CoCounsel and where that fits in its AI strategy, how the company is protecting against hallucinations and ensuring security, and the future of AI at Thomson Reuters and more broadly.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.
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In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035.

In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebecca Sandefur, one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice (who was on LawNext in 2020); Matthew Burnett, senior program officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF); Jim Sandman, president emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (on LawNext in 2019); and other notable names.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nikole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice. Before starting there in November, Nelson had been executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation, where she was instrumental in launching a statewide community justice worker project that won the 2019 World Justice Challenge. She was also instrumental in bringing about an Alaska Supreme Court rule change in 2022 allowing justice workers supervised by Alaska Legal Services to provide limited scope legal help in certain situations.

Nelson describes how justice workers helped Alaska Legal Services better serve the legal problems of people across the state’s remotest regions, and how new models of justice workers in other states could similarly help reach those who are not now receiving adequate help for their legal problems. She also recognizes that Frontline Justice faces obstacles in achieving its mission, and she shares her thoughts on how it can overcome them.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap.

Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC’s first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab’s advisory board.

Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today’s episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice, and since joining the AAA, she is credited with having “supercharged” its innovation efforts – particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI.

Also critical to those innovation efforts has been Diana Didia, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at the AAA, who had helped ignite the association’s innovation efforts well before McCormack arrived and whose work not only set the stage for continued innovation but has been critical in helping the organization drive forward into embracing generative AI.

Our guests on today’s LawNext, McCormack and Didia – along with many others on their team – have been working full bore over the past year to drive further innovation at the AAA and to integrate AI into its own work and into the broader field of dispute resolution. They recently launched the AAAi Lab, a website supporting AAA users, arbitrators, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI, and also ClauseBuilder, a generative AI tool for writing clear and effective ADR clauses.

When we spoke, they were preparing to present this week on the AAA’s innovation efforts and its adoption of AI as part of a panel at Legalweek in New York.

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At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?

This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district from using third-party service providers such as PacerPro, RECAP or DocketBird. That order came on the heels of a memorandum from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that – while it didn’t outright ban the use of such service providers – it did urge courts to warn filers to be cautious about using third-party services and software.

Were these actions justified? Is there reason to be concerned about third-party providers? And what exactly is the best way to protect sealed documents?

To answer these questions, the legal tech company PacerPro brought together a panel of experts for a live program presented during the annual meeting of the National Docketing Association in Boston in October. On the panel were:

• Josh Blandi, CEO and cofounder of UniCourt.
• Sara Collins, vice president of product management, File & ServeXpress.
• Gavin McGrane, cofounder of PacerPro.
• Snorri Ogata, chief technology officer at Tech Unicorn and formerly chief information officer at the Los Angeles Superior court and, before that, at the Orange County Superior Court, two of the largest court systems in the United States..

I moderated the panel and recorded it for this podcast. Thanks to the panelists, the NDA, and PacerPro for allowing me to do that.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he and his team decided to build the solution they needed for themselves.

By 2018, they had dubbed the software ZenCase, and in 2021, after continuing to develop and refine it, they migrated their first 50-plus user law firm onto the platform and officially launched it commercially to the legal market at large.

On today’s LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Fraser, who is now the CEO of ZenCase, and Olivia Mockel, its president and COO. Mockel recently moved to ZenCase after several years in leadership roles at other practice management companies, including most recently as CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis.

So what makes ZenCase different from other practice management platforms and what types of law firms is it suited for? In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Fraser and Mockel about all that and more, including how they are incorporating generative AI and their plans for future development.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

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What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley, who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter, and Ilona Logvinova, managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.

Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference in New York City, sharing their views and insights on innovation from their unique perspectives. Shortly after they spoke, they sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record this conversation about innovation in legal.

Note that since we recorded this conversation, Dooley has left Goodwin Procter.

This is the third LawNext episode featuring conversations recorded at the conference. To listen to the prior two, check out:

• Two KM Keynotes – Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in Legal, in which we spoke with the conference’s two keynote speakers.
• The Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of Centari, featuring interviews with two of the startups that attended the conference.

The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.

Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents
• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

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Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City.

First up is Nicole Clark, cofounder and CEO of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in January 2002.) Then, in the second part of the show, we speak with the cofounders of Centari, an AI-powered knowledge management and dealmaking platform, Kevin Walker, the company’s CEO, and Bryan Gilbert Davis, its CTO.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and recorded both of these interviews live there, where both of these companies were sponsors and exhibitors. The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.

For more from the conference, check out the last episode of LawNext, which featured interviews with the two keynote speakers from that conference: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.
• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the "one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking"

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Today’s episode features two interviews on disruption and innovation in legal, with the two keynote speakers from the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas.

This conference, held in New York in October, was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. This was the first year of this conference, which was organized to fill the gap left when another KM conference – one that had long been held in New York – moved to Chicago.

The two-day conference featured two keynote speakers. Andrea Alliston kicked off the first day with a talk on leading through change, complexity and disruption. Mark Smolik gave the second-day keynote, speaking on the topic of winning strategies for new business: insights on innovation from a chief legal officer.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and sat down live with each of the speakers after their keynotes for the interviews in today’s episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• TrialPad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

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Dru Armstrong was named CEO of AffiniPay, the parent company of LawPay, in July 2021. Less than a year later, AffiniPay shook up the legal tech landscape by acquiring MyCase, one of the leading law practice management platforms, in a deal that also included four other practice management products: CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, Soluno for billing and accounting (which it recently sold), and Woodpecker for document automation.

One reason that deal was so notable was that, until then, LawPay had been the legal tech equivalent of Switzerland – a neutral integration partner with virtually every practice management platform out there. But in acquiring one of the major players in the market, that legal tech Switzerland seemed to suddenly lose its neutrality.

Now, two and a half years into the job as Affinipay CEO, Armstrong is our guest on this episode of LawNext to discuss that acquisition, where the company is today, and why the marriage of fintech and legal tech matters to legal practitioners. She also shares her plans for the company’s future, including how it will incorporate generative AI across its various products.

Armstrong and host Bob Ambrogi spoke live in Miami at the TLTF Summit, a conference produced by the Legal Tech Fund, a VC fund focused on legal tech, where she spoke on a panel on the intersection of fintech and legal tech. She was previously on this podcast in June 2022, at the time the MyCase acquisition was announced, and was also on our Legaltech Week podcast.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

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Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five “cluster projects” that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact.

The students – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today’s LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work:

• Whitney Triplet, who is in her final semester at Southern University Law Center.
• Paul Campbell, a part-time student in his fourth year at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.

Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.

In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes:

• On LawNext Podcast: Two Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal System.
• On LawNext Podcast: The Legal Fellows Tackling Systemic Racism in Law.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts.
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

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On this episode of LawNext: An interview recorded live with Erika Harold, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, an organization charged with working to enhance civility and professionalism and to eliminate bias within the legal profession.

A former litigator, Harold was named executive director in April 2022, to succeed retiring executive director Jayne Reardon, who has also been a guest on this podcast. A nationally recognized advocate of bullying prevention efforts, Harold led the commission this summer in launching a statewide initiative to assess the prevalence and impact of bullying in the legal profession and recommend best practices for preventing it.

Erika is also a former Miss America – the sixth Black woman ever to hold that title – and, as you’ll hear, she entered that competition to help fund her education at Harvard Law School, from which she graduated debt free. In 2014, she ran in the Republican primary for Congress to represent Illinois's 13th congressional district. In 2018, she was the Republican candidate for Illinois attorney general.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down live with Harold to record this conversation during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• TrialPad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

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On today’sLawNext, it’s a Clio double header, featuring two separate interviews with two of Clio’s top product-focused executives – one with Jonathan Watson, its chief technology officer, and the other with Hemant Kashyap, chief product officer – both recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.

Even though I interviewed Watson and Kashyap separately, their roles at Clio are intertwined. As CTO, Watson was previously responsible for both technology and product. That changed last June, when Kashyap joined the company as its first chief product officer. Now, they tell me, they often work as partners on developing products and delivering them to Clio’s customers.

At the conference, Clio introduced an array of major new products and product updates, in what it called its most expansive product update ever in its 15-year history. These included Clio Duo, a generative artificial intelligence tool that will be built natively into all Clio products starting in 2024; a personal injury add-on for Clio offering a suite of features for PI lawyers; and Clio File, an electronic court filing and service feature built directly in Clio Manage, making it the first law practice management platform to directly incorporate e-filing.

In both of today’s interviews, we talk about those new products and others, as well as the company’s longer-term product roadmap. Both Watson and Kashyapp also share their thoughts on generative AI and its potential impact on legal technology and legal practice.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents
• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

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Did Pras Michel’s lawyer botch his defense by relying on an AI program to create his closing argument? That’s what the former Fugees rapper claims in asking a court to overturn his April conviction in an illegal foreign influence scheme.

Michel says his lawyer, David Kenner, made a “frivolous and ineffectual” closing argument because he relied on an experimental AI program called EyeLevel.ai. Michel also alleges that Kenner and cocounsel Alon Israely had undisclosed financial interests in the AI company that motivated them to use the AI in his case as a marketing ploy.

But Neil Katz, the cofounder and COO of EyeLevel.ai, calls those claims “creative fiction” and “total nonsense.” Katz joins LawNext today to give his version of what happened in the Michel case and to tell us more about EyeLevel.ai, a company he says helps businesses and legal professionals build hallucination-free AI applications using private data.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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• Caret, the award winning practice management platform work or document and workflow automation.

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On Oct. 9, during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, the law practice management company Clio released the 2023 edition of its annual Legal Trends Report. Since it was first published in 2016, the report has established itself as a benchmark of the state of law practice and technology adoption among smaller law firms.

Among the findings in this year’s report were two pieces of particularly good news: Law firms have seen a remarkable increase in productivity in the years since that first report came out in 2016, and legal professionals are actively embracing technology to boost their efficiency and performance. This year’s report also introduces a new metric for measuring a law firm’s financial health: Lockup.

With much to unpack from this year’s Legal Trends Report, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio and one of the principal members of the team that develops the report, to get all the details. They spoke in a live interview recorded during the Clio conference.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Trial Pad: Organize, annotate, highlight, and callout documents; then dynamically present at trial or mediation
• Caret, the award winning practice management platform work or document and workflow automation.

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This week, LawNext veers slightly off-topic for a conversation about wrongful convictions. But, as you’ll hear from our guests, there is a legal tech angle, even to this.

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Brian Banks, whose aspirations for a career in the NFL were sidetracked when, at age 16, he was falsely accused of sexual assault, resulting in his accepting a plea bargain that put him in prison for five years. It was an experience that has made Banks a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform.

Joining Banks for that conversation was Michael Semanchik, the lawyer who helped clear Banks’ name while working as managing attorney of the California Innocence Project. Recently, Semanchik launched a new project, The Innocence Center, where he is executive director. He also hosts one of the best new podcasts of 2023, the soon-to-be-renamed California Innocence Center Podcast.

For Banks, there was a happy ending to the story, in that he did clear his name and he even got to play in the NFL. But wrongful convictions continue to plague the criminal justice system. Today we’ll hear Banks’ story and explore what the system can do to keep other innocent people out of prison.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
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In his keynote address at the recently concluded 2023 Clio Cloud Conference, Jack Newton, the founder and CEO of Clio, said that we are at a time in the legal industry when leveraging technology is more important for lawyers than ever before. Technology, he said, enables lawyers to amplify their impact, and when they do that, they can achieve exponential outcomes.

This was the 11th year of the Clio Cloud Conference, and the 15th year in business for the company that produces it. In a recent post about the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote that Clio has grown over the years to become one of the largest and most influential companies in legal tech; and that Newton has become somewhat of an industry icon, whose ClioCon keynote is always a seminal event of the conference.

A few hours after Newton delivered his keynote, Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for a wide-ranging conversation about the conference, the company, and the state of law practice and the legal profession, including findings from the just-released 2023 edition of the Clio Legal Trends Report.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• TranscriptPad is an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts.

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Soon after starting her own law practice, Kimberly Bennett decided there had to be a better way than the billable hour to charge for her services. She wanted predictable pricing for her intellectual property clients and predictable income for herself. That led her to subscription-based legal services, charging her clients a flat monthly fee, and it worked so well for her that she became not just an adopter of the model, but an evangelist – a frequent speaker and writer on starting and scaling a subscription-based law practice.

In 2021, Bennett took that passion for subscription services beyond law practice and into legal technology. She became cofounder, together with Blaine Korte, of Fidu, a cloud platform designed to provide lawyers with everything they need to build a scalable subscription or flat-fee based law practice. Just a few weeks ago, Fidu won the Clio Integration Award for Best Practice of Law App.

Bennett was previously on this podcast in August 2020, before she cofounded Fidu, and we talked at length then about her career, her law practice, and her adoption of the subscription model. In today’s interview, we focus on Fidu and discuss how it can help a lawyer convert an hourly practice to a subscription or flat-fee one. We also talk about Bennett’s experience going from law practice to entrepreneurship, particularly as a Black woman.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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On July 27, June Hsiao Liebert took office as president of the American Association of Law Libraries, the association that represents more than 3,600 law librarians and legal information professionals throughout the world. The first Asian-American president of AALL, Liebert takes office at a time when some are saying that advances in artificial intelligence could endanger the future of the law library professional. What’s her take on the state of the profession today and its prospects for the future? That is the subject we explore on today’s show.

In her day job, Liebert is the director of information services at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. Having worked as a chief information officer, library and information governance director, law professor, and legal technology consultant, she has an extensive background in both IT and information management. She is a 2021 Fastcase 50 award honoree, was recently named a fellow-elect of the College of Law Practice Management, and serves as the immediate past co-chair of the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Alumni Board.

Note that the opinions she expresses during the podcast are hers alone and not those of O’Melveny & Myers. Also, any law-related usage of AI that she refers to in the podcast are done purely for testing purposes using private and secure systems only.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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As generative AI sweeps through the legal profession, lawyers face challenges in learning to use it responsibly and properly. This summer, one of the world’s largest law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, began to address that challenge by partnering with the legal skills training company AltaClaro to develop a training program for its summer associates on prompt engineering and the responsible use of generative AI.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Abdi Shayesteh, the founder and CEO of AltaClaro, a company that takes a unique experiential approach to lawyer training. They talk about the genesis and development of that AI training program, and what it covers. Shayesteh also provides an update on the company’s growth and development since he was last on this podcast in January 2021 – a period during which the company raised a seed financing round of $2.5 million and substantially expanded its menu of course modules.

When Shaesteh, a serial entrepreneur who became a lawyer, saw how poorly prepared new associates were to practice law, he began to research education science and came up with the concept for AltaClaro. Today, its customers include law firms who use it to train associates and individual lawyers seeking to develop and enhance their skills in areas such as drafting contracts, handling M&A transactions, or closing a commercial loan deal.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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Stories are increasingly common of lawyers who leave law practice to start legal technology companies, but few achieve the level of success as an entrepreneur of Matt Spiegel. He was a criminal defense lawyer in 2009 when he founded MyCase, one of the earliest cloud-based law practice management companies. In 2012, he sold MyCase to AppFolio, and then left the company in 2015 to start a software company that helped organizations manage trade shows and events. In 2017, he returned to law to start his current company, Lawmatics, a client relationship management (CRM) platform for law firms.

Spiegel was previously on episode 16 of this podcast in 2018, not long after he founded Lawmatics. He developed the product because he saw a gap in the legal market for software that would help firms automate their marketing and run their businesses as sales organizations. In the years since, he has raised $12.5 million in funding, expanded the platform with time-and-billing and e-payments capabilities, and added a generative AI feature to help law firms create and edit client emails and email marketing campaigns.

In this episode of LawNext, Spiegel shares his story as a serial legal tech entrepreneur, discusses why he founded Lawmatics, describes how the platform automates legal marketing and relationship management, and talks about his future plans for the company and the platform.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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It has been nearly a year and a half since Sheryl Hoskins joined Litera as its new CEO in April 2022. She came into that role following a period in which the company saw significant growth, fueled in part by a series of some 17 acquisitions, through which the company expanded from a primary focus on document technology into such areas as contract review, transaction management, firm intelligence, talent management, governance, and more.

Since then, she has continued to drive further growth, most recently laying out an ambitious strategy around generative AI that will bring a series of product releases and enhancements over the coming months. Today, Litera is a company with more than 2.3 million global users, nearly 1,000 global employees, and 15,000 global customers, including 99 of the Am Law 100 and 90% of the largest law firms worldwide.

Before coming to Litera, Hoskins had more than 20 years of experience in the global technology industry and an established track record managing global teams. She spent the first decade of her career at General Electric and McKesson Corp, where she held domestic and international leadership roles. Most recently, she was CEO of restaurant management platform Upserve. She also spent six years as an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army.

In her first-ever appearance on a podcast, Hoskins joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her career, her decision to join Litera, the state of the company today, and her vision for its future.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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Recently in Orlando, Fla., at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded a series of brief live interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Last week on this podcast, we featured the first set of those interviews – with 12 of the legal tech startups that were participating in ILTACON’s Startup Hub.This week we are featuring interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were attending the conference.

In these 11 short interviews, we speak with:

• David Wong, chief product officer, Thomson Reuters.
• Mike Fouts, chief business officer, ShareFile.
• Carol Lynn Grow, co-owner and COO, LawToolBox.
• Ted Theodoropoulus, CEO, Infodash.
• Jerry Levine, chief evangelist and general counsel at ContractPodAI.
• Monica Harris, product business manager, Cellebrite Enterprise Solutions.
• Ahmed Shaaban, cofounder and managing director, Fulcrum Global Technologies.
• Hossein Jabbar, CEO, PaayaTech.
• Richard Sayles, head of data analytics, Sapling Data.
• Michael Murray, director of technology, Veritext.
• Daniel Bonner, director of client solutions, Level Legal.

Be sure to also listen to last week’s interviews with the legal tech startups.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is just back from Orlando, Florida, where he attended ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Mic in hand, he recorded a series of brief interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Over the next two episodes of this podcast, we will share those interviews, starting today with the legal tech startups at ILTACON.

Once again this year, the conference featured a Startup Hub in the exhibit hall, where 27 startups had booths showing their products. Although Bob was not able to interview all 27, he did have the opportunity to speak briefly with a dozen of them. Today’s episode features those 12 brief interviews. We speak with:

• Joshua Aaron, CEO and cofounder, Aiden Technologies.
• Anthony Seale, CEO, Legatics.
• Yannic Kilcher, cofounder and CTO, DeepJudge.
• James Ding, CEO and cofounder, DraftWise.
• William Dougherty, cofounder, Capacity.
• Horace Wu, CEO and founder, and Paul Farrell, director of customer success, Syntheia.
• Noah Wittman, cofounder and CEO of Priviom.
• Ariel Nacson, cofounder and chief customer officer, CiteRight, together with Colin LaChance, CEO, Jurisage Inc.
• Mat Rotenberg, cofounder and CEO, Dashboard Legal.
• Yohei Fujii, cofounder and CEO, BoostDraft.
• Floor Blindenbach, founder and CEO, Organizing4Innovation.
• Julien Steel, head of product, Henchman.

In the next episode, we’ll feature interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were there.

Thank You To Our Sponsors:

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.

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Recently, Silicon Valley-based Gunderson Dettmer, an international law firm of more than 400 lawyers that exclusively represents clients in the innovation economy, launched ChatGD, a generative AI chat app for its lawyers and legal professionals that the firm designed and built itself. The launch appeared to make the firm the first in the U.S. to develop a proprietary internal tool using generative AI technology and possibly also the first firm anywhere to launch such a tool.

On today’s episode of LawNext, the two people who spearheaded the development — Joe Green, the firm’s chief innovation officer and also of counsel, and John Scrudato, the firm’s legal engineering and data strategy manager, join host Bob Ambrogi to share the story behind ChatGD. They explain why the firm wanted to develop its own generative AI app, describe what it does and how legal professionals can use it, and share how it has been received so far by the lawyers who have used it.

As you will hear, Green and Scrudato see the development of the app as somewhat of a learning exercise — for the firm and for its lawyers — in anticipation of the enormous impact generative AI is likely to have on both legal professionals and clients. “We view this whole stage as very experimental and learning oriented,” Green says in the interview. “This is about getting the tool in the hands of lawyers in a safe way that they can really start learning about how to get value out of it.”

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.

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Today’s episode offers a different perspective on the DoNotPay controversy – and ended up having an unexpected twist.

Earlier this year, DoNotPay, which described itself as the world’s first robot lawyer, and its founder Joshua Browder became the subject of harsh criticism after paralegal Kathryn Tewson tested several of DoNotPay’s self-help legal apps and concluded they were little more than smoke and mirrors – in some cases getting the law wrong, in others failing even to deliver the promised output.

In the wake of Tewson’s allegations, this podcast recorded an exclusive interview with Browder, in which he called the criticism “a bit of a nothingburger.” I followed that Interview with one with Tewson, in which she described in detail how she tested the DoNotPay products and responded to Browder’s dismissal of her critique.

Following those events, our guests today, Maya Markovich, executive director and cofounder of the Justice Technology Association and executive in residence for Justice Tech at Village Capital, and Tom Gordon, executive director of Responsive Law, an organization that represents the consumers’ voice in the legal system, co-authored an op-ed in which they argued that reforms in the regulation of the practice of law, such as those implemented in Utah, could have prevented the DoNotPay debacle, since DoNotPay would have had to have been licensed and regulated.

They submitted their op-ed to the American Bar Association’s Center for Innovation, which agreed to publish it in the Center’s biannual innovation trends report, slated to be released Aug. 1. In anticipation of that publication, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded the interview you’re about to hear with Markovich and Gordon, in which they discussed their op-ed and their views more broadly on regulatory reform. The interview was scheduled to post Aug. 1, in conjunction with the op-ed’s publication that day.

But then the plan hit an unexpected twist. Instead of publishing the op-ed that day, the Center notified the authors that it had canceled the publication because of what it described as “political challenges” within the ABA, but that it had neglected to inform them of that.

Because this interview was recorded before the ABA canceled the op-ed, you will hear references to the ABA’s publication of the op-ed. But since that never happened, Markovich and Gordon allowed us to publish the op-ed on LawNext. Ambrogi has also written a blog post detailing the whole sordid story.

Show links: * Opinion: DoNotPay Controversy Illuminates Urgent Need for Regulatory Reform. * Citing ‘Political Challenges,’ ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn’t Publish.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.

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On July 18, 2023, the top legal officers of three Boston-area technology companies came together for a live panel discussion about the city’s unique contributions to the legal tech landscape, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. The panelists graciously agreed to allow LawNext to record the conversation, and this episode is that recording. The three panelists are:

• Margaret K. Minister, general counsel for Evisort, an AI-driven contract lifecycle management company that was founded out of Harvard Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• William “Mo” Cowan, chief legal and external affairs officer at Devoted Health, a tech-enabled all-in-one healthcare company founded to dramatically improve overall health and well-being for seniors by caring for them like family. Cowan is a former interim U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
• Matt Rowe, chief legal officer at Parallel Wireless and former general counsel to Shoobx, the equity management platform acquired by Fidelity in January 2023.

The panel took place as part of the inaugural meeting of LegalTech Boston, a group formed to bring together the community of those involved in legal tech in the area. The event was hosted by the law firm Gunderson Dettmer and sponsored by the professional training company SkillBurst Interactive.

The first voice you’ll hear on this recording is that of Joe Green, chief innovation officer at Gunderson Dettmer. Following Joe is Anusia Gillespie, chief strategy and growth officer at SkillBurst Interactive, and the driving force behind organizing this event. Because it was a live event, you will also hear members of the audience making comments and asking questions.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

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Recently, Derek Miller, a veteran legal technology executive who, as president and CEO of inData Corporation for nearly three decades, oversaw Trial Director, one of the most widely used trial-presentation software products ever, joined Lit Software, the developer of a suite of litigation apps for iPad and Mac, as chief growth officer, to help drive the company’s continued expansion, particularly into larger firms, corporations and insurance companies.

Lit Software, founded in 2010 by Ian O’Flaherty and Tara Cheever, is the company that developed TrialPad, trial presentation software that was the first legal-specific app developed for the iPad. It went on to develop TranscriptPad, for reviewing transcripts; DocReviewPad, for reviewing documents; and ExhibitsPad, for organizing trial exhibits. Its Lit Suite bundles these apps in a single subscription.

Given that Miller’s joining the company represents a bridge, of sorts from established trial software to a newer generation of mobile-first products, it seemed an apt occasion to take a deeper dive into the trial software market — where it’s been, where it is, and where it’s heading. To do that, Derek Miller and Tara Cheever join host Bob Ambrogi to share their experiences and perspectives.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

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In a first for a state bar, The Florida Bar is providing its entire membership of more than 111,000 lawyers with access to legal trust accounting software – a move designed to both help lawyers better comply with trust accounting rules and help protect members of the public from trust accounting errors.

The initiative was spearheaded by F. Scott Westheimer, a partner in the Sarasota firm Syprett Meshad, who was sworn in June 23 as the bar’s new president, and it was made possible through a relationship between the bar and the legal financial management company Nota, owned by M&T Bank.

On the latest LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Westheimer, together with Paul Garibian, the CEO of Nota, to discuss this precedent-setting initiative and what it could mean for lawyers and the public in Florida.

Florida lawyers interested in learning more about Nota’s availability in their state can do so at this link.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to extract, query, and transfer practice management.

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In October 2020, legal industry veterans Joe Borstein and Paul Stroka set out to change the legal tech sales paradigm by founding LexFusion as a go-to-market representative of a curated collection of companies across major categories of legal technology. As the company nears its third anniversary, Borstein joins LawNext to reflect on its successes and failures and to share where it is today.

In addition, Borstein shares his perspective on the recent acquisition of Casetext by legal tech behemoth Thomson Reuters for $650 million in cash. As it happens, not only was Casetext one of the companies that LexFusion represented, but Borstein is a former executive of Thomson Reuters, where he worked as global director of Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services (the former Pangea3).

Given that the Casetext deal was driven by its development of CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant powered by GPT-4 and developed in cooperation with GPT’s developer OpenAI, Borstein also offers his views on the impact he sees generative AI having on the legal industry broadly and on the conversations he is having with law firm and corporate legal leaders.

This is Borstein’s fourth appearance on LawNext. His previous episodes were:

• On LawNext Podcast: LexFusion’s Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty on the 2022 Legal Market in Review.
• On LawNext: Joe Borstein and Basha Rubin on the Launch of LexFusion.
• LawNext Episode 38: EY’s Purchase of Pangea3, with Pangea3’s Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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Every great trial lawyer will tell you that the key to success in litigation is finding the story in a case. But when a case involves mountains of digital evidence, finding that story isn’t always easy or economical. That’s the problem the global legal services firm Novus Law aims to address.

Marking its 20th anniversary this year, Novus Law uses an award-winning process, derived from lean manufacturing principles, to find and document the story in litigation and investigations, and to do it more accurately, more efficiently, and more quickly than can be done through traditional legal processes. It is the only company to have twice won an InnovAction Award from the College of Law Practice Management.

Today’s guest is Ray Bayley, the cofounder, president and CEO of Novus Law. He founded the firm in 2003, after having been managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ North American business process outsourcing organization and a member of its 15-member management committee, responsible for overseeing its $9 billion, 70,000-person U.S. operations. He is also the former CEO of a business process outsourcing company with large-scale operations in India.

In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Bayley discusses what makes the Novus process unique and shares some case studies of how the process has benefitted law firms and corporations.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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One of the hottest sectors of the legal tech market these days is contract lifecycle management, or CLM. But Evan Wong believes that, for many inhouse legal teams, CLM is not necessarily the best route for them to streamline workflows. Rather, he believes workflow automation is often the better way for legal teams to transform their operations.

Wong is the founder and CEO of the low-code/no-code workflow automation company Checkbox. He says that law department technology needs to be more focused on workflow automation processes than on CLM. In fact, he says that CLM can actually be counterproductive for legal teams, depending on their size and maturity.

At the same time, workflow automation platforms address the same benefits of CLM — such as efficiency, accelerating contract turnaround times and reducing administrative burdens — but without the pressure of high initial costs, long implementation times and change management.

Wong was just 17 when he founded his first company, and he founded Checkbox shortly after he graduated from college, earning him and his cofounder James Han a place in the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30. Shortly before this episode came out, Wong turned 30.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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Noella Sudbury became interested in the issue of criminal records expungement soon after law school, while working as a criminal defense lawyer. Over and over again, she saw clients put in the hard work to get out of the criminal justice system and rebuild their lives, only to have doors slammed in their faces because of their records. That set her down a path that led her last year to found Rasa Legal, an innovative justice tech company, licensed under Utah’s legal services sandbox, that is making the process of expunging a criminal record simple and affordable.

Last month, Inc. named Sudbury to its Female Founders 200 list, a selection of women founders who have moved the needle in business and in their communities. Last year, Rasa was selected as the 2022 Access to Justice winner at the American Legal Technology Awards. Also last year, the Utah State Bar honored Sudbury with its 2022 Distinguished Service Award and, in 2019, Utah Business Magazine named her its 2019 Woman of the Year.

In 2016, after practicing criminal law in private practice and as a public defender, Sudbury was appointed director of the Salt Lake County, Utah, Criminal Justice Advisory Council. She later joined the cabinet of then Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams as a senior policy advisor on criminal justice. In 2019, she led the successful effort that resulted in the unanimous passage of Utah’s Clean Slate law, which made Utah only the second U.S. state to automate the criminal record expungement process for misdemeanor offenses.

It was over the course of that career that she came to see that technology could play a critical role in automating and simplifying the process of expungement, and it was that realization that led her to found Rasa Legal.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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On this episode of LawNext, we’re taking you to the conference floor of the CLOC Global Institute, the annual conference of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium that was held May 15-18 in Las Vegas, for a series of brief interviews with 22 of the legal tech companies that exhibited there.

Since the first CLOC Global Institute in 2016, this conference has become a leading event for legal operations professionals and for anybody who works in corporate legal. For that reason, its exhibit hall draws many of the leading legal tech companies that cater to corporate legal, including an abundance of companies offering some flavor of contracts tech, as well as legal services providers, e-discovery providers, and others.

LawNext’s producer Ben Ambrogi attended the conference, where he ventured into the exhibit hall, mic in hand, and interviewed a cross-section of the companies he met there, garnering brief introductions to what they do and any news they were announcing. Together, the interviews offer a snapshot of what you might have seen had you attended CLOC, or maybe of what you missed even if you were there.

Companies interviewed in this episode are: AO Docs, Axiom, Bigfork Tech, Casepoint, Cobblestone, ContractPodAI, ContractSafe, eBrevia, ECFX, Epiq, Exigent, Hanzo, Icertis, Ironclad, LexCheck, LinkSquares, Paragon, Robin AI, SimpliContract, SpotDraft, WeLocalize, and Zycus.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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This year marks the 10th anniversary of Logikcull, the company that CEO Andy Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang founded with the goal of automating and democratizing e-discovery. But the company actually evolved out of an earlier company the pair founded in 2004, Logik Systems, to digitize archaic paper-based discovery workflows where lawyers would print emails to paper to review them. While that first company saw rapid growth and even made the Inc 500 in 2009 at number 181, the Great Recession took the wind out of its sails and caused the two founders to reassess their business model.

Aiming to automate what they had previously done manually, they eventually launched Logikcull as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. Not only did they aim to automate the process, but also to democratize it by making that automation affordable and accessible for anyone.

Ten years after launching Logikcull, Wilson joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the growth of the company and the evolution of its platform, which Wilson says is seeing record usage. Among other things, Wilson discusses the challenges the company faced in getting lawyers to trust their documents to a cloud-based platform, how lawyers’ perspective on the cloud has changed in recent years, and how a new generation of AI could impact e-discovery in the future.

This is Wilson’s second time on LawNext. In April 2019, Ambrogi interviewed him in-person at Logikcull’s headquarters in San Francisco. Among the many changes for the company since then is that it has shut down those offices and one 100 percent virtual.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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As vice president, Data Analytics and Operational Excellence, at Wolters Kluwer, Abhishek Mittal is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision making in core operational processes. He leads a large global team of process engineers, design thinkers, data scientists and domain experts to develop expert solutions for both internal processes and new products.

In 2021, Wolters Kluwer’s Business Intelligence Group named him a Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award winner for his leadership in developing and advancing the AI technology that drives Wolters Kluwer's products such as LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer, for which he helped the company receive a patent; LegalVIEW Predictive Insights; Intelligent Invoice Conversion; and CLM Matrix contract lifecycle management.

Mittal joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he combines data analytics and operational excellence in developing new products. He also discusses how he leads and manages a diverse global team of professionals that includes both data and technology professionals alongside legal subject matter experts — groups that may talk about problems in different ways and have divergent ideas about how to resolve them.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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Over the past year, the sibling legal technology companies MyCase and LawPay have published a series of reports on law practice, including benchmark reports based on anonymized data from the two companies’ customers, as well as an in-depth 2022 year-end legal industry report, based on a survey of over 2,300 legal professionals. Together, they provide an in-depth look at the state of legal practice in the wake of the pandemic.

All of the reports were written by Nicole Black, who joins host Bob Ambrogi on this episode to share the findings from these reports and the picture they paint of how the pandemic has transformed the practice of law, particularly for solo and smaller firm lawyers. Black is head of SME and external education at MyCase, as well as an author and legal tech journalist, who writes regular columns for Above the Law, The ABA Journal, and The Daily Record.

Among the topics they discuss are the overall state of solo and small firm practices, the pandemic’s impact on firm’s financial health, the pandemic’s impact on legal tech adoption, the types of software lawyers find most important, the remote-working tools most used by lawyers, the significant increase in the use of online payments, lawyer productivity rates, the advantages of “passive” timekeeping, and much more.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI, the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson Sonsini, the law firm known not only for representing tech pioneers, but also for its own tech initiatives. Now Lexion has just raised another $20 million in a Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, with those prior investors again participating.

The company, says its cofounder and CEO Guarav Oberoi, is on a mission to use AI to help corporate operations teams and legal departments close deals faster by accelerating business contracting across sales, procurement, legal, HR, security, and more. His resume includes having been a product manager, engineer, and founder for over a decade, and, before Lexion, he started and sold two software startups, BillMonk and Precision Polling, and founded a large business unit at SurveyMonkey.

Guarav joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company’s founding and growth, its latest fundraising round, and his thoughts on the contracts market overall and the impact that new generations of AI will have on its future development.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.

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It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world’s largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.

It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and potentially even threaten the longstanding legal research duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis. So what does it mean for the companies? What does it mean for their customers? And what does it mean for the legal market more broadly?

To explore these questions and more, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the four founders of the two companies:

• Lluis Faus, cofounder and CEO of vLex and now global CEO of the combined entity, known as the vLex Group.
• Angel Faus, cofounder and chief technology officer of vLex.
• Ed Walters, cofounder and former CEO of Fastcase and now chief strategy officer of vLex.
• Phil Rosenthal, cofounder and former president of Fastcase and now chief growth officer of vLex.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.

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With the news last week of the merger of legal research companies Fastcase and vLex, it seemed a good time to revisit our 2019 interview with the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal. The occasion of this interview was the company’s 20th anniversary, and we recorded it live, on the exhibit hall floor, at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.

In this interview, Walters and Rosenthal recount how, as two young associates at the law firm Covington & Burling, they came to found Fastcase in 1999. They also recall some of their greatest successes and worst mistakes over the years as founders, and offer their predictions for the future of Fastcase. How do their predictions in 2019 stand up in 2023? Well, you’ll have to listen to find out the answer to that.

Although Fastcase started as a legal research company, in recent years, it had diversified and expanded into areas such as legal analytics, legal publishing, legal news, and even legal document automation. That diversification had already started when we spoke to Walters and Rosenthal in 2019. The year before, they had acquired the legal dockets and analytics company Docket Alarm, and, as you will hear, they were already seeing analytics as a key component of their future growth.

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In the 15 years since he and Rian Gauvreau cofounded the legal practice management company Clio in 2008, Jack Newton has learned a thing or two about what it takes to build a successful company. As its CEO since the start, Newton has overseen the growth of the company from fledgling startup to a centaur with annual recurring revenue of over $100 million, a valuation of over $1 billion, and a workforce of nearly 1,000 employees. Newton has won numerous awards for his leadership, including Canada’s most admired CEO and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year. He is also an advisor to and investor in a number of startups.

As Clio marks its 15th anniversary in 2023, Newton joins host Bob Ambrogi to share 15 lessons he has learned along the way regarding what makes a successful company and a successful leader. He also reminisces about the early days of starting Clio and his early successes and challenges. Notably, he and Gauvreau founded Clio in the middle of the Great Recession, and one of the lessons he shares in this episode is his belief that a recession is a great time to build a company.

For anyone who has founded or is thinking of founding a legal tech startup, this episode is a must-listen. Even for those who are not tech founders, but law firm founders, many of Newton’s lessons apply. Let us know your thoughts on today’s episode by tweeting us, @LawNextpodcast.

Read more about Clio’s products Clio Manage and Clio Grow at the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world’s first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s just-released latest version of its GPT model.

“GPT-4 leaps past the power of earlier language models,” said Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer for Casetext. “The model’s ability not just to generate text, but to interpret it, heralds nothing short of a new age in the practice of law.”

Not only that, but Casetext played a central role in a study to have GPT-4 take the bar exam. Just two months ago, I had legal scientists Dan Katz and Michael Bommarito on this show to talk about their experiment having GPT-3.5 take the bar exam. Spoiler alert: It failed. With the release of the more powerful GPT-4, Katz and Bommarito collaborated with Casetext to conduct the study again. This time, GPT not only passed all three components of the exam, including the essay portion, but it scored in the top 10th percentile.

So what does GPT-4 mean for legal professionals? How might it change law practice? To discuss all of this, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the three top executives of Casetext:

• Jake Heller, CEO.
• Laura Safdie, COO & general counsel.
• Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer.

They discuss what makes CoCounsel different than other AI products in the legal market, how they avoid the problem of “hallucinations,” how products such as CoCounsel may change law practice, and how they can help close the justice gap.

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Two years after D. Gordon Smith was appointed dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.” Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean in the school’s history.

So how did he do in pursuit of that goal? During his tenure, he drove a number of innovations around innovation and technology, including the launch of LawX, a legal design lab committed to tackling access-to-justice issues with solutions that address pressing legal problems such as debt collection, eviction and asylum. He also served on two Utah Supreme Court task forces that led to the creation of the Utah Sandbox.

Also during his tenure as dean, he more than tripled the amount of scholarships available to students, saw the law school’s ranking rise from 46th to 23rd, pioneered a law and corpus linguistics program, and launched a global leadership program.

Recently, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the school’s Provo, Utah, campus, and sat down with Smith in his office to reflect on his nearly seven years as dean.

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• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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On this episode of LawNext, we take a closer look at Smokeball, the law practice management company whose roots are in Australia but that is firmly entrenched in the United States. In fact, after Smokeball was founded in 2010, its very first customer was a law firm in Chicago.

Appropriately, then, it was in Chicago last week, during ABA TECHSHOW, that host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a face-to-face conversation with two of Smokeball’s top executives, Jane Oxley, chief revenue officer for Smokeball internationally, and Ruchie Chadha, president of Smokeball in the U.S.

On the day that they spoke, Smokeball had just announced the expansion of its practice management platform with the addition of Smokeball Intake, an intake workflow system that the company says is designed to enable law firms to provide their clients with the kind of digital experience they expect from a modern law firm.

In this interview, Oxley and Chadha say this announcement is just the start of a period of major global acceleration and innovation for the product throughout the next year. They describe some of features that they believe distinguishes Smokeball from other practice management platforms. They also talk about what’s ahead for Smokeball and share their thoughts on the broader law practice management market.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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Kathryn Tewson was a little-known paralegal when, on Jan. 24, she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That day, she published a scathing series of tweets recounting her investigation of DoNotPay, the company that describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” She concluded that the company’s supposed AI-driven products were little more than smoke and mirrors and that its representations about its products constituted consumer fraud.

Her findings stirred intense interest both on social media and in the traditional media. Soon after she published her findings, DoNotPay’s founder Joshua Browder announced he was taking down the products she tested. Now, Tewson has filed a legal action against DoNotPay and Browder in New York state that is the first step in a potential consumer class action.

Last week on this podcast, Browder was our guest to respond to Tewson’s allegations and other criticisms of him and his company that have come out over the past month. In the interview, he dismissed much of the controversy as “a bit of a nothingburger.” Today, Tewson joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to share her story of how she came to investigate DoNotPay, what she uncovered, and why she has now taken the first steps towards a potential class action. She also responds directly to some of what Browder said in last week’s show.

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• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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On this episode of LawNext: Joshua Browder, founder of DoNotPay. Browder achieved international recognition when, at just 17 years old in 2015, he founded DoNotPay, touted as the world’s first robot lawyer, to help people appeal parking tickets. The company claims the app has saved motorists in the U.S. and UK many millions of dollars. DoNotPay went on to release a series of apps designed to help consumers – and, more recently, small businesses – solve common legal problems, all without the need for a lawyer, and, along the way, it has raised some $28 million in venture funding.

In recent weeks, however, Browder has been the subject of harsh criticism, both on social media and in the news media. The criticism came on two principal fronts. One was what many viewed as a pair of ill-conceived publicity stunts – first when Browder offered to pay a lawyer $1 million to argue a case in the Supreme Court guided via AirPods by DoNotPay’s artificial intelligence, and the other when Browder said he would send a pro se litigant into traffic court guided by DoNotPay’s AI whispering in his ear. He canceled that plan after claiming that state bar officials threatened him with prosecution.

Then came a scathing series of tweets by Kathryn Tewson, a paralegal in Washington state who tried out several of DoNotPay’s self-help legal tools, only to conclude that they were effectively smoke and mirrors, in some cases getting the law wrong, in others failing even to deliver the promised product. Following all that, Browder announced that he was taking down the legal tools from DoNotPay and would henceforth focus only on consumer rights.

What does Browder say about all this? In this exclusive LawNext interview, he describes it all as “a bit of a nothingburger.”

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Last week, Documate, the no-code document automation platform, rebranded as Gavel, a move designed to better reflect the company’s mission to become the platform of choice for legal professionals and legal organizations wanting to “productize” the delivery of legal services by packaging services as online legal products.

Gavel founder and CEO Dorna Moini joins LawNext this week to discuss how her company has evolved from document automation to come to support law firms, courts, legal aid organizations, and even legal tech companies such as Hello Divorce, as they build tools to automate legal services. She also discusses how a law firm can get started on productizing its own services, why a firm would want to to this, and whether some practices are better suited for productization than others.

Moini was an associate at the law firm Sidley Austin in San Francisco when she left in 2017 to found what was originally called HelpSelf Legal and focused on automating legal help to domestic violence victims. Interest from others within the legal industry in her automation platform led her to pivot the next year as Documate and focus on building automation. Over the years, as more and more of her customers built out full legal products using Documate, she decided to rebrand again as Gavel, a name that Moini believes invokes a trusted process.

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When this podcast launched in July 2018, the very first guest on the very first episode was Nicole Bradick, who six months earlier had launched the legal technology design and development company Theory and Principle. As the company marks its fifth anniversary, Bradick returns to LawNext with news that the company is branching off in a new direction, launching T&P Studio, an arm of the business devoted to co-developing legal tech products in partnership with others.

The new business will work with partners in the legal industry who have ideas for products but who may not have the product team, budget or other elements needed to bring a product to market.T&P will validate partner ideas and then manage all areas of product strategy, design, development, and launch. Depending on the terms of the partnership, the T&P team will also participate in ownership, go-to-market strategy, sales and marketing.

After five years, how has Theory and Principle evolved and what has Bradick learned about building SaaS products for the legal market? Why is the company branching off in this new direction and what kinds of products is it looking to co-develop? What makes good design for a legal tech product? On this episode of LawNext, we discuss those questions and more.

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Axiom, a company that is one of the longest-running alternative legal services providers, this week stepped into the world of regulated legal services as it formally launched Axiom Advice & Counsel, an Arizona law firm. The move was enabled by the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision last May to grant Axiom a license as an alternative business structure.

That follows from Arizona’s historic decision in 2020 to become the first U.S. state to eliminate the ban on non-lawyer ownership of law firms – a development we’ve discussed several times on this podcast, including when our guest was Arizona Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer, who was not only among the justices who approved the changes, but who chaired the task force that recommended them.

How will this new corporate-owned law firm differ from traditional firms? What types of clients will it serve and what should they expect? And what does this mean for the future of Axiom? Joining host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the launch of Axiom Advice & Counsel is Catherine Kemnitz, chief strategy and development officer at Axiom, as well as its chief legal officer.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Over the course of 2022, the principals of LexFusion conferred with 435 law departments and 250 law firms. Why? Simply put, because that is what the company does. It is a go-to-market company that defines its purpose as “to grease the gears of commerce and rapidly increase the adoption of legal innovation.” On behalf of a group of curated legal innovation companies, it works with legal departments and law firms to help them understand how innovative products can benefit them.

As a result of those conversations, they came out of 2022 with a unique perspective on the legal market. In a recent post at the Legal Evolution blog, they discussed their take-aways from those conversations and shared some of what they have been telling law departments and lawyers.

“We executed NDAs with multiple law departments and law firms so we could dig beneath surface-level discussions of practical innovation into the painful realities of budgets and politics,” they wrote. “We uncovered far more chronic pain than even we anticipated.”

What was the source of that chronic pain and what advice did LexFusion offer? In this episode of LawNext, two of the cofounders of LexFusion, Joseph Borstein, CEO, and Casey Flaherty, chief strategy officer, join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the year that just ended and what it portends for the year ahead.

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Since the December release of Open AI’s GPT-3.5 model, and the related ChatGPT, speculation has been rampant about how this next generation of artificial intelligence might upend the legal profession. But as others have been speculating, two legal scholars and scientists, Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito, put GPT 3.5 to the task, having it perform that most anxiety-inducing of tests along the path to becoming a lawyer – taking the bar exam.

How did it do? Katz and Bommarito recently published the results in their article, GPT Takes the Bar Exam, and on this episode of LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why they did this experiment, how it turned out, and what it all means for the future of AI in law.

Katz is professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and academic director of both The Law Lab at Illinois Tech, Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology & Data Science in Hamburg, Germany. He is cofounder and CSO of 273 Ventures, and formerly cofounded the legal AI company LexPredict, which was acquired by Elevate in 2018.

Bommarito is cofounder and CEO of 273 Ventures and a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 20 years of experience in the financial, legal, and technology industries. A cofounder with Katz of LexPredict, he also co-founded Telly, an open source telemetry platform, and licens.io, an information security and compliance data company. He is an adjunct professor at Michigan State University College of Law.

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On Nov. 7, 2022, at the NetDocuments Inspire 2022 conference for its customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi moderated a fireside chat with four legal innovation leaders on the trends driving their organizations and legal teams and how they are addressing current challenges to set up their organizations for the next decade of success. NetDocuments and the four panelists have graciously consented to sharing the recording of that chat with the listeners of LawNext.

The four panelists were:

• John Hunter, Chief Information Officer, Council of Europe.
• Mike Lucas, Chief Information Officer, Wilson Sonsini.
• Maurice Tunney, Director of Technology and Innovation, Keystone Law.
• Craig Umbaugh, Denver Office Managing Partner, Hogan Lovells, and also Global Head of the firm’s Sports, Media, and Entertainment Group

The theme of the conference focused on patterns of work, patterns of knowledge, and patterns of success, and so the fireside chat was organized around those themes. The panelists discuss major challenges they have addressed with regard to the evolving nature of the workplace, how they capture their organizations’ internal knowledge and use it strategically, and how, in a time of such volatility, their organizations are preparing for continued success in the future.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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Brianna Joaseus and Edrius Stagg are two law students at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, La., who spent nine months earlier this year tackling systemic racism in the legal system. On the latest LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their projects and how their work impacted their goals for their legal careers.

Joaseus and Stagg were two of 18 law students from six law schools who participated this year in the second year of a fellowship program sponsored by the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation and the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network, in partnership with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium. (Two students from the program’s first year were featured on this podcast in July 2021.)

The project Joaseus designed focused on the problem of racial bias in real estate appraisals. Her proposal would reduce appraisal bias by creating a digital checklist for appraisal professionals, developed using LexisNexis resources, that would help identify “red flag” situations in which the appraisal process may be unfair or biased.

Stagg’s project focused on the problem of jury pools that are not racially diverse or representative of their communities. His proposal was to create a “Jury Wheel 2.0” data visualization dashboard that would leverage available technology to ensure that a jury-duty summons is sent to the correct address and represents the demographic make-up of the community.

Both students stand as inspiring examples of those who are shaping the future of the legal profession and their schools are examples of how law schools can do more to drive change in their communities. Of course, credit also goes to LexisNexis, which organized this program and committed $180,000 in funds plus the time and mentorship of numerous employees.

In addition Southern University Law Center, the schools that participated this year were: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law, Howard University School of Law, North

Carolina Central University School of Law, Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, and the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.

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Factor, the managed services company that spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, describes itself as providing “complex legal work at scale” for the corporate legal market it serves. But more recently, it has begun to position itself as falling within a new category of alternative legal services. It calls this new category “integrated law,” and describes it as bringing together the expertise of traditional law, the efficiency of new law, and the business alignment of in-house law.

On this episode of LawNext, Varun Mehta, CEO of Factor since 2020, joins host Bob Ambrogi to take a deeper dive into this concept of integrated law. They also discuss how the managed services market is evolving in the post-pandemic market, how the current labor market is impacting corporate legal departments and managed services providers, and how Factor is evolving in the face of these issues.

Mehta, a veteran of the legal tech industry, was named Factor’s CEO in 2020, just before the global pandemic. Several months later, the company received an investment it characterized as one of the largest in the global legal solutions market. Earlier this year, the company appointed Jonathan Pedersen, a former Skadden partner and co-general counsel of of investment banking at Credit Suisse, as executive vice president and global practice lead to oversee all of Factor’s engagements.

This is a return visit to LawNext for Mehta, who was previously on this podcast in February 2021.

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Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, one of the speakers was Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis for Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. He was there to speak about a unique partnership between LexisNexis and NetDocuments called Highlights, which embeds LexisNexis case analysis and intelligence technology directly into the NetDocuments platform, enriching legal documents and making them easier to find and retrieve.

A broader theme of both Pfeifer and the conference was that of patterns of knowledge and of how enriching legal documents not only makes them easier to find and retrieve, but also enables law firms and legal departments to better see the patterns in their data and use those insights to better serve their clients. For Pfeifer, it is all part of the vision he and LexisNexis have long espoused of data-driven law practice.

After Pfeifer spoke at the conference, he sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the LexisNexis partnership with NetDocuments and his broader thoughts on the future of data-driven law. This is the last of three LawNext episodes recorded at the Inspire conference. The first featured an interview with NetDocuments’ two top executives, CEO Josh Baxter and CTO and cofounder Alvin Tedjamulia. The second featured Dan Hauck, the company’s chief product officer.

Pfeifer was previously on LawNext in 2018, where he spoke in greater depth about his concept of data-driven law practice.

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Over seven years as a litigator of complex commercial and antitrust cases, Dan Hauck had become frustrated over how difficult it was for legal teams to collaborate around matters. In 2014, he left his law firm, Bryan Cave, to start ThreadKM, a matter-centric legal collaboration platform. As the product evolved, it developed integrations with the document management platform NetDocuments, and in 2017, NetDocuments acquired ThreadKM, resulting in the NetDocuments product ndThread.

Now, Hauck is chief product officer at NetDocuments, where he is responsible for the company’s strategic vision, partnerships, products, user interface and roadmap. Over the past year, he was instrumental in the company’s launch of PatternBuilder, a product for building applications and automating legal documents, and its acquisition of Worldox.

Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Hauck for a live conversation about the company’s product strategy and roadmap. Spoiler alert: His vision for the platform spans automating and linking every stage of the legal document workflow.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Last week, the cloud-based content management company NetDocuments was in Denver for its annual three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was there also, where he sat down for an exclusive live interview with the company’s two top executives, Josh Baxter, who has been CEO since 2018, and Alvin Tedjamulia, one of the company’s original three founders and its CTO since 1999.

Just before Bob flipped-on the record button, Josh and Alvin revealed that, the next morning, Alvin would be announcing his retirement – a major announcement not just for the company, but for the legal tech industry more broadly, as Alvin is a veteran of 40 years in the industry and has been a visionary leader in bringing legal to the cloud.

Josh, Alvin and Bob talk about that news, and also about the company’s history, where it is today, and where it is heading over the next 5-10 years. Also, Josh and Alvin reveal who will succeed Alvin as the company’s next CTO.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Ronnie Gurion, chief operating officer 

With 20 years of experience leading marketplace, e-commerce, and SaaS businesses to achieve rapid global expansion and growth, Gurion plays a pivotal role in shaping Clio’s next chapter. As the previous GM and global head of Uber for Business (U4B), Gurion brings a wealth of global market activation experience, having grown the business rapidly during his tenure. When he’s not developing high-performing, collaborative global teams, Gurion can be found skiing with his wife and two kids.

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Service of process and other documents is an essential function of law practice – one most lawyers deal with on a regular basis. But for Colorado lawyer Eric Voogt, he saw service of process as a broken system, one in which it could be difficult for an attorney to line up a process server or know the status of the service, and one that he believed was long overdue for a technological upgrade.

So Voogt decided to do something about it. In 2016, he founded Proof, an on-demand process serving platform that provides legal professionals with instant access to experienced process servers and real-time tracking from a phone or laptop. Earlier this year, Proof raised $7 million in a Series A funding round, and it says its platform is now used by more than 3,500 law firms and government agencies.

In early October, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Voogt live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, where it had just been announced that Proof would be one of three third-party products to be the first to be fully embedded within the Clio law practice management platform. They discuss why Voogt founded the company and how it is disrupting service of process.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Jonathan Watson, Clio’s chief technology officer. 

With over 20 years of leadership experience in large-scale SaaS and live gaming solutions, Watson’s unique approach and passion for intertwining product development, design, user experience, and engineering have accelerated Clio’s product growth while earning Clio best-in-class NPS and customer retention rates. 

Outside of the office, he’s an endless tinkerer who is always exploring creative pursuits including 3D printing, cooking, and making his daughter laugh.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Reagan Attle, chief marketing officer at Clio. 

Known for building and leading high-performing and award-winning teams, Attle has 20 years of experience and has played a major role in Clio’s growth to date, having led the announcements of and go-to-market strategies for Clio’s Series D and E funding rounds, acquisitions of Lexicata, CalendarRules, and Lawyaw, and the launch of Clio Payments and Clio’s new mission and brand. 

When she’s not transforming the legal experience for all, building competitive moats through authentic brand trust, and evolving the company’s thought leadership, she can be found playing classic Nintendo games with her son.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Shubham Datta, vice president of corporate development at Clio.

Datta oversees the development and execution of Clio’s strategic growth strategy through acquisitions and investments. He brings to Clio years of M&A experience on both sides of the table as a strategic acquirer and sell-side advisor, with experiences in sourcing, deal execution and integration. Prior to Clio, Shubham was a corporate development lead at Shopify working on acquisitions and investments.

In his spare time, he’s usually hosting or editing The Backbone podcast, cheering on the Raptors or thinking about what to eat next.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, about the recently released 2022 Legal Trends Report.

An attorney admitted to the New York Bar, Lenon brings legal scholarship to the conversations happening both within Clio and with its customers. Lenon has worked extensively to educate lawyers on technology’s capability to enhance their practice, while also teaching tech companies about the unique needs of the legal system.

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Among the most divisive issues facing the legal profession today is that of revising the rules that regulate law practice – and more specifically the questions of whether to liberalize the rules to allow those who are not licensed lawyers to own law practices or to engage in the practice of law. Two states, Arizona and Utah, have implemented regulatory schemes loosening restrictions on law practice, and other states are considering similar revisions to their rules.

Now, Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession has published a comprehensive study of the data coming out of Arizona and Utah, giving us what may be the first real evidence-based look at this issue. It finds that the reforms in those states are spurring substantial innovation, that they are critical to serving lower-income populations, and that they do not pose any substantial risk of consumer harm.

On today’s LawNext, we are joined by the two principal authors of that study: David Freeman Engstrom, co-director of the Rhode Center, and Lucy Ricca, director, policy and programs, at the Rhode Center, and formerly executive director of the Utah Office of Legal Services Innovation — the office that oversees the so-called regulatory sandbox in that state. They walk us through how they conducted the study, what they found, and what they would like to see come of the findings.

Read the report: Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Curt Sigfstead, chief financial officer. He is responsible for managing Clio’s financial affairs, including finance, accounting, capital, treasury, taxation, and corporate development. With over two decades of technology finance experience, Sigfstead has held numerous senior finance leadership roles at companies including Clearco and J.P. Morgan. He sits on multiple nonprofit boards including C100, which supports Canadian technology entrepreneurs through investment and mentorship. When he’s not disrupting the status quo through mission-driven work he can be found running the trails of Northern California, mapping out a route for his first Clio virtual 10km.

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In an episode of LawNext recorded in person at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton discusses the “antifragile” law firm, a concept he introduced in his conference keynote — derived from the book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — that certain firms thrive in the face of stressors and adversity, as we saw so clearly during the pandemic.

So what is an antifragile law firm and how does a firm become antifragile? Newton and host Bob Ambrogi discuss the concept in greater detail. They also talk about the tenth anniversary of ClioCon, Clio’s seventh-annual Legal Trends Report, the competitive landscape for law practice management technology, and the future course of Clio, including whether an IPO is on the horizon.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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An increasing number of startups are defining themselves not as legal tech, but as justice tech. So what, exactly, is justice tech, who are some of the companies that represent it, and what is the business opportunity they present for potential investors? Our guest this week is Maya Markovich, executive director of the Justice Technology Association, an organization formed earlier this year to support companies in the justice tech sector.

She is also executive in residence for justice tech at Village Capital, the largest organization in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage startups, where she recently co-authored the report, Supporting Tech for Justice-Impacted Communities: Strategies to Supercharge Justice Tech Investing, a framework to help investors maximize the probably that a justice tech investment will have a positive impact on individuals involved with the justice system.

Until last year, Markovich was chief growth officer at Nextlaw Labs, the legal tech incubator created by Dentons, one of the world’s largest law firms.

We discuss the justice tech landscape, the opportunities for investors in justice tech, and how the sector is likely to develop over the coming years.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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At a time when law firms are struggling to retain talent and wrestling to balance hybrid workplaces, the Texas-based corporate law firm Vela Wood did something unique: It sent its employees and their families to Portugal for a month. Why did it do it? How did it do it? What did clients think? And are there lessons for other firms?

For the answers to those questions and more, our guests this week are the two name partners of the firm: Kevin Vela, who is the firm’s managing partner, and Radney Wood. As you will hear, theirs is not a traditional corporate firm in many respects, as they are selective in the clients they take on and committed to work-life balance among their employees.

Travel was already integral to the firm’s culture, in the belief that it helps develop more motivated and well-rounded employees. Partner Wood has traveled extensively throughout the world and founded a company to facilitate remote work for professionals. Several years ago, the firm adopted its Desk Independence program to encourage individual employees to work from other countries.

But the Portugal trip — which the firm dubbed VW Abroad — took that to a new level, offering its entire staff the opportunity to work from Portugal for a month and bring their families. It offered a $3,000 stipend for travel, arranged a co-working space, and helped with travel and other activities. About half the staff took them up on the offer.

Both Vela and Wood say the trip yielded benefits they had not even anticipated. And they are already planning next year’s trip.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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For those who have to go to court without a lawyer, navigating the justice system can be daunting. Courtroom5 is a unique justice tech company that addresses that problem by providing pro se litigants with the training, tools, documents and support they need to represent themselves. For litigants who need extra help, it also offers access to à la carte lawyer services.

Our guest this week, Courtroom5’s cofounder and CEO Sonja Ebron, was motivated by her own experiences as a pro se litigant to develop a way to help others who find themselves in the same situation. With a doctorate in electrical engineering and experience as an entrepreneur, she and cofounder Debra Slone, a PhD librarian and former library school professor, launched Courtroom5 in 2017.

Courtroom5 is also a founding member of the Justice Technology Association, formed earlier this year to support technology companies that help people navigate legal matters. Ebron and Slone were both named to the 2022 Fastcase 50, which honors law’s “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.”

Listen to learn why Ebron founded Courtroom5, how it helps those who cannot afford a lawyer, and what she sees as the future for her company and the broader landscape of justice tech.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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For those who have to go to court without a lawyer, navigating the justice system can be daunting. Courtroom5 is a unique justice tech company that addresses that problem by providing pro se litigants with the training, tools, documents and support they need to represent themselves. For litigants who need extra help, it also offers access to à la carte lawyer services.

Our guest this week, Courtroom5’s cofounder and CEO Sonja Ebron, was motivated by her own experiences as a pro se litigant to develop a way to help others who find themselves in the same situation. With a doctorate in electrical engineering and experience as an entrepreneur, she and cofounder Debra Slone, a PhD librarian and former library school professor, launched Courtroom5 in 2017.

Courtroom5 is also a founding member of the Justice Technology Association, formed earlier this year to support technology companies that help people navigate legal matters. Ebron and Slone were both named to the 2022 Fastcase 50, which honors law’s “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.”

Listen to learn why Ebron founded Courtroom5, how it helps those who cannot afford a lawyer, and what she sees as the future for her company and the broader landscape of justice tech.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Devshi Mehrotra was a computer science undergraduate at the University of Chicago when she and classmate Leslie Jones-Dove developed JusticeText, an platform that makes it easier for public defenders to review and analyze the massive quantities of police body cam and other video footage that is becoming increasingly common in criminal cases.

At the time, Mehrotra never envisioned it as a company or a career. But a year after graduating, as video of police misconduct brought the country to a national reckoning around racial justice and criminal justice reform, she realized that it was exactly what she was meant to do. For someone with no background in law or entrepreneurship, it was, she says, a terrifying leap of faith.

Since then, JusticeText has built a solid base of public defender offices as customers and it recently raised a seed financing round of $2.2 million. Meanwhile, Mehrotra and Jones-Dove have gained recognition and accolades for their innovative product and their social-justice mission, including having both been named to the Fastcase 50 for 2022, having been named by Smithsonian Magazine as among Sixteen Innovators to Watch in 2022, and having been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021.

In this episode of LawNext, Mehrotra joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how and why she built JusticeText and of what the future holds for the still-nascent company.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Devshi Mehrotra was a computer science undergraduate at the University of Chicago when she and classmate Leslie Jones-Dove developed JusticeText, an platform that makes it easier for public defenders to review and analyze the massive quantities of police body cam and other video footage that is becoming increasingly common in criminal cases.

At the time, Mehrotra never envisioned it as a company or a career. But a year after graduating, as video of police misconduct brought the country to a national reckoning around racial justice and criminal justice reform, she realized that it was exactly what she was meant to do. For someone with no background in law or entrepreneurship, it was, she says, a terrifying leap of faith.

Since then, JusticeText has built a solid base of public defender offices as customers and it recently raised a seed financing round of $2.2 million. Meanwhile, Mehrotra and Jones-Dove have gained recognition and accolades for their innovative product and their social-justice mission, including having both been named to the Fastcase 50 for 2022, having been named by Smithsonian Magazine as among Sixteen Innovators to Watch in 2022, and having been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021.

In this episode of LawNext, Mehrotra joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how and why she built JusticeText and of what the future holds for the still-nascent company.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Last week, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, said that it had acquired majority ownership of vLex, the international legal research platform that lays claim to having the largest collection of legal information on a single service.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined from London by Masoud Gerami, managing director, vLex Global Markets, who oversees vLex in the UK, Ireland, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. They talk about this latest news and what it means for vLex, and also talk more generally about the company and its research platform.

Gerami joined vLex in 2019, when it acquired Justis Publishing Ltd., a 33-year-old UK-based online legal publisher. He had been managing director at Justis since 1986. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Swansea University.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Last week, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, said that it had acquired majority ownership of vLex, the international legal research platform that lays claim to having the largest collection of legal information on a single service.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined from London by Masoud Gerami, managing director, vLex Global Markets, who oversees vLex in the UK, Ireland, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. They talk about this latest news and what it means for vLex, and also talk more generally about the company and its research platform.

Gerami joined vLex in 2019, when it acquired Justis Publishing Ltd., a 33-year-old UK-based online legal publisher. He had been managing director at Justis since 1986. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Swansea University.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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On her LinkedIn profile, Natalie Knowlton describes her work as “succession planning for an outdated legal industry.” It is an apt description for someone who has spent her career studying reform of the U.S. legal system — and particularly now, as she launches Access to Justice Ventures, a think tank devoted to reinventing the legal system to provide justice for all by eliminating systemic barriers.

For the past 14 years, Knowlton has been at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, most recently as director of special projects, leading the organization’s work in family justice and regulatory reform, and where she remains an advisor on regulatory innovation.

But she is now devoting the majority of her time to her new think tank, which she is launching together with Zack DeMeola, who was previously director of legal education and the legal profession at IAALS (and who was on an episode of this podcast last year discussing reregulation of legal services), where their immediate focus will be on reforming the rules that regulate legal services delivery to allow broader classes of providers.

Having spent her career studying the empirical evidence for what works and what doesn’t in the justice system, Knowlton and host Bob Ambrogin dive into some of the most pressing issues faced by the legal profession, including regulatory reform, broader licensing of paraprofessionals, court reform, and the justice gap, and we hear about her vision for what the future of legal might look like.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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On her LinkedIn profile, Natalie Knowlton describes her work as “succession planning for an outdated legal industry.” It is an apt description for someone who has spent her career studying reform of the U.S. legal system — and particularly now, as she launches Access to Justice Ventures, a think tank devoted to reinventing the legal system to provide justice for all by eliminating systemic barriers.

For the past 14 years, Knowlton has been at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, most recently as director of special projects, leading the organization’s work in family justice and regulatory reform, and where she remains an advisor on regulatory innovation.

But she is now devoting the majority of her time to her new think tank, which she is launching together with Zack DeMeola, who was previously director of legal education and the legal profession at IAALS (and who was on an episode of this podcast last year discussing reregulation of legal services), where their immediate focus will be on reforming the rules that regulate legal services delivery to allow broader classes of providers.

Having spent her career studying the empirical evidence for what works and what doesn’t in the justice system, Knowlton and host Bob Ambrogin dive into some of the most pressing issues faced by the legal profession, including regulatory reform, broader licensing of paraprofessionals, court reform, and the justice gap, and we hear about her vision for what the future of legal might look like.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Each week, the leading journalists in legal tech choose their top stories of the week to discuss with our other panelists.

This week's topics:

00:00 - Introduction

04:22 - Facebook Knows Everything About You. And Is Willing To Share (Selected by Steve Embry)

17:18 - Mitratech's New Acquisition Blurs Line Between Legal, HR (Selected by Steven Lerner)

25:00 - The end of the billable hour... implanted brain trackers? (Selected by Joe Patrice and Bob Ambrogi)

34:10 - Mixed Messages from the ABA, As It ‘Reaffirms’ Rule Against Nonlawyer Ownership while also Encouraging Innovation (Selected by Bob Ambrogi

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In the world of legal technology, perhaps no company looms larger than Thomson Reuters, whose products such as Westlaw, Practical Law, HighQ, Findlaw, 3E and many others span virtually every aspect of law practice and are used by legal professionals throughout the world.

Our guest this week, Kriti Sharma, is chief product officer, legal tech, at Thomson Reuters, a role she stepped into less than a year ago, in October 2021. She is an internationally recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and was formerly the VP of artificial intelligence and ethics at UK software company Sage Group.

Sharma is also the founder of AI for Good UK, a foundation that works to make AI tools more ethical and equitable, and developer of rAInbow, a digital companion for women facing domestic violence in South Africa.

She has been named in the Forbes "30 Under 30" list for advancements in AI. She was appointed a United Nations Young Leader in 2018 and is an advisor to both the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs and to the UK Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.

Her TED talk on keeping bias out of AI has been viewed more than 2M times.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Should the legal industry have a common set of data standards for classifying the work we do? The SALI Alliance – short for Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry – believes we should, and it recently released version 2.0 of its Legal Matter Standard Specification, which sets out an ontology of some 10,000 tags.

The argument for standards, SALI says, is that they will simplify and improve the delivery of legal services by providing greater transparency and increasing the effectiveness of budgeting and resourcing, while also facilitating interoperability among clients, legal services providers, and technologies.

To discuss this, our guest on LawNext is Damien Riehl, who is part of the all-volunteer leadership team of the SALI Alliance and who has played a key role in developing and expanding the specification. In his day job, Damien works at Fastcase, where he is VP for litigation workflow and analytics content.

A coder since 1985 and for the web since 1995, Riehl clerked for the chief judges of state and federal courts, practiced in complex litigation for over a decade, has led teams of cybersecurity and world-spanning digital forensics investigations, and has led teams in legal-software development.

He is also an appointee to the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, where he has helped recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies — all related to connected and autonomous vehicles.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Last week, on the last day of the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, the nationwide organization of law librarians and legal information professionals, Elizabeth Adelman took office as the association’s new president. A key focus of her term will be on increasing the pipeline of those coming into the profession and working to enhance diversity within both the AALL and the profession at large.

As she comes into office, the AALL has just adopted a strategic plan that sets out five goals for 2022-2023. In addition to increasing the pipeline and enhancing diversity, the plan also calls for championing excellence among legal information professionals, providing expanded opportunities for professional growth; and advocating for issues that impact legal information professionals.

In her day job, Adelman is vice dean for legal information services and director of the Charles B. Sears Law Library at the University of Buffalo School of Law. An AALL member for 21 years, Adelman has a law degree from Albany Law School, a master’s degree in library science from the University at Buffalo.

In this conversation recorded live at the AALL annual meeting in Denver, Adelman and host Bob Ambrogi talk about her plans for her year in office and her thoughts on the state and future of the profession.

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For 28 years, John Mayer has been executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, or CALI, a non-profit consortium of some 200 law schools that describes itself as “the innovative force pushing legal education toward change for the better.” Along the way, CALI’s mission expanded to include addressing access to justice, primarily through its development, in partnership with Chicago-Kent College of Law, of A2J Author, an expert system designed to help self-represented litigants complete court forms and navigate legal processes.

In this episode of LawNext, Mayer joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the history and mission of CALI and to share his thoughts on the use of technology to enhance legal education. They also talk about how and why A2J Author was developed and how it is used by courts and legal services organizations to help those who are without legal representation. Mayer also shares his thoughts on the future of innovation in law and on the future of CALI.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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It was a mighty bold move for the legal technology company Mighty. After seven years in business serving personal injury lawyers, the company recently pivoted to launch Mighty Law, a law firm that directly competes against those PI firms by offering lower fees, greater transparency, and tech-driven efficiencies.

For founder and CEO Joshua Schwadron, the move was motivated by what he sees as the misaligned incentives of PI lawyers. Rather than pass along to their clients the savings that they realize from using technology, he believes, the fee and cost structure for PI firms incentivizes them to inflate settlements and drive up costs.

Seeking to provide PI plaintiffs with lower fees and greater transparency, Schwadron, who is also a lawyer, has converted his tech company into a dual-entity structure. The law firm, Mighty Law, will represent the clients, while a separate tech and services company, Mighty, will support the law firm’s operations and also provide services and support to clients to assist them in what Schwadron calls their post-accident journey.

On this week’s LawNext, Schwadron joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about why he made this pivot and what he believes it means for consumers and the PI industry.

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Sang Lee believes that algorithm-based assessments can help law firms make better, more ethical and less-biased decisions when hiring associates and laterals. The SaaS company she founded in 2019, Thine, leverages custom hiring algorithms and industrial and organizational (IO) psychology to create assessments that it says can reduce inconsistencies in how law firms evaluate candidates, promote equity, and create pathways to greater diversity.

A research report commissioned by Thine last year found that there is a widely held belief among legal professionals that traditional recruiting processes are stale and limiting. Having spent more than 20 years working in legal recruiting and coaching, Lee has clear ideas about why that is so, how assessments can help reimagine the recruiting process, and what else law firms should do to improve their hiring and retention and achieve a more diverse workforce.

Lee was an associate at LeBoeuf Lamb in 1998 when she pivoted into recruiting. In 2004, she founded her own attorney search firm, and then in 2013, founded Volta Talent Strategies, where she continues to provide talent-related coaching, training, and consulting to law firms. A first-generation Korean-American, Lee was named to the Fastcase 50 in 2021 and to the Global Top 100 Leaders in Legal Strategy and Consulting by Lawdragon in 2021. In 2019, she was honored by the Girls Scouts Council of Greater New York as a Woman of Distinction.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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LawVu is a New Zealand company that says it is revolutionizing legal operations by waging war on a multiplicity of point solutions and providing in-house legal teams with the first truly connected platform for matter, contract and spend management.

LawVu recently conducted a survey of in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals and found that 77% of them spend more than an hour a day just jumping between systems in order to get a complete view of their work. It also found that 90% of in-house legal teams use three or more software vendors, yet say their biggest technology pain point is the lack of integration among these platforms.

Our guest today on LawNext is Sam Kidd, who cofounded LawVu together with Tim Boyne in 2015 and is now its CEO. He recently returned home from an extended visit in the U.S., where he is preparing to open an office in Seattle. The U.S. is LawVu’s biggest market, he says.

He talks about why he believes multiple point solutions are holding back legal departments, how LawVu addresses that problem, and what is ahead for the company.

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The law practice management platform Litify is unique in several ways. For one, it is built on top of Salesforce, the sales and marketing automation platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. For another, it was developed by a team of people who came out of Morgan & Morgan, the largest plaintiffs’ law firm in the United States.

Since its launch in 2016, Litify has raised $50 million in Series A funding, acquired the e-billing company LegalStratus, and expanded its customer base to include a range of mid-to-large sized law firms and corporate legal departments, and has even developed an off-the-shelf solution for smaller firms. It recently announced a major partnership with global legal services provider Epiq.

Joining this episode of LawNext is Ari Treuhaft, chief operating officer at Litify and formerly head of product at Morgan & Morgan, where he oversaw the firm’s transition to the Litify platform. He explains why Litify considers itself a new category of legal tech, one that enables both outside counsel and in-house legal teams to operate on the same platform. He also lays out future plans for the company, and shares his thoughts on recent developments in the practice management market.

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As this episode is being released, news is breaking that is likely to have a profound impact on the law practice management market: AffiniPay, the parent company of the electronic payments platform LawPay, has acquired the law practice management company MyCase, along with several other practice management products that MyCase acquired over the past year. Just ahead of today’s announcement, the CEOs of the two companies sat down for an exclusive podcast interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to answer questions about the deal. They discuss how the deal came about, what it means for each company’s customers, and what its impact might be on the broader market. Joining Bob are: * Dru Armstrong, who became CEO of AffiniPay in July 2021. With degrees in both law and business from the University of Chicago, she was previously CEO of Grace Hill, a company that provides software for owners and operators of real estate properties. * Jim McGinnis, who was named MyCase CEO in January 2021, after having most recently been EVP/GM of Wolters Kluwer’s Tax and Accounting North America Professional Segment.

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If ever there was a process ripe for disruption, notarization would seem to be it. A function that may date back to Ancient Egypt, it has changed little for centuries – still typically done in person, on hard-copy paper, using physical seals, and recorded in written ledgers. Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Notarize, believes society has grappled for too long with how to scale this simple process of authenticating signatures. His company is striving to do that, both for consumers who need a one-time notarization and for businesses for which notarizations are part of the normal course.

Since its founding in 2015, Notarize has become the category leader in transforming this traditional paper-based process into a digital one. Along the way, it has raised $213 million, grown to nearly 500 employees, and was recently ranked 24th on the Financial Times’ list of The Fastest Growing Companies of 2022.

Kinsel, who is also a partner at the venture capital firm Polaris Partners, was previously cofounder and CEO of Spindle until it was acquired by Twitter in June 2013. Earlier, he was at Microsoft incubating new concepts and bringing them to market. He serves on the board of Lob and was the lead investor in Drizly.

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Lawyers are largely limited to practicing law in the states in which they are licensed. But now, calling that rule anachronistic, the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers has asked the American Bar Association to amend the model rules that govern law practice to allow lawyers admitted in any U.S. jurisdiction to practice law and provide legal advice to clients anywhere in the country. “Our proposal advocates that a lawyer admitted in any United States jurisdiction should be able to practice law and represent willing clients without regard to the geographic location of the lawyer or the client, without regard to the forum where the services are to be provided, and without regard to which jurisdiction’s rules apply at a given moment in time,” APRL President Brian Faughnan said in a letter to ABA President Reginald M. Turner.

On this episode of LawNext, Faughnan joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why APRL has concluded that the change is critical to a “21st Century approach to the practice of law.” They discuss the APRL study and report that called for replacement of the current Rule 5.5 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, APRL’s proposed new version of 5.5 that would allow multi-jurisdictional practice, and why Faughnan believes there is a strong likelihood that the ABA will at least give strong consideration to the change.

In his day job, Faughnan is a shareholder in the Tennessee law firm Lewis Thomason, where his practice includes representing lawyers and law firms in disciplinary matters.

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No one has worked harder, worked longer or had more success at the cause of making government information accessible to the public than Carl Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.Org. From putting the SEC’s EDGAR database online in 1993 – effectively shaming the SEC into putting it online itself two years later – to his 2020 U.S. Supreme Court victory defeating the state of Georgia’s claim of copyright in its official legislative code, to his 2022 federal court win allowing him to publish private-industry technical standards that are incorporated by reference into thousands of federal, state and local laws, Malamud has devoted his career to freeing the law.

On this episode of LawNext, Malamud joins host Bob Ambrogi to recap some of the significant milestones of his more-than 30-years of battling government bureaucracies. Among the topics they discuss: how his 1993 publication of the SEC’s EDGAR database on the Internet became a turning point for government information online; how his work with Aaron Swartz – the younger computer programmer who later killed himself after being indicted by the U.S. attorney – and other to open access to PACER documents led to creation of the RECAP database of free PACER filings; how his publication of Georgia’s official legislative code led to a watershed Supreme Court ruling; and why, in recent years, he has turned his attention to India, of which he said, “If there is to be a revolution in access to knowledge, it has to be in India.”

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Last week, Filevine, the Utah-based case management company, raised $108 million in a Series D funding round. Founded in 2014 with an original focus on litigation and personal injury law, the company has been steadily expanding its platform into other areas of law practice — including larger firms, insurance defense, corporate legal, and government — and it plans to use this funding to further fuel that expansion. Filevine’s cofounder and CEO Ryan Anderson is this week’s guest on LawNext in an episode recorded the day the company announced this latest raise. Before starting Filevine, Anderson was a founding partner at a western-states law firm focused on personal injury, mass torts and employment class-actions.

In his work as an attorney, Anderson says, he was constantly bombarded with urgent tasks and problems. Rather than continue being bombarded, he decided to turn his attention to building a system that would help solve the problems. He teamed up with a group of software engineers who shared his vision for cloud-based collaboration and clean, intuitive design, and in the basement of his law firm, Filevine was born.

Since then, the company has expanded to nearly 400 employees, made two major acquisitions — first of Lead Docket, a lead tracking and intake management product, and then of Outlaw, a contract and document editing platform — and, in just the last year, brought on more 700 new customers.

Listen to our interview to learn more about Filevine’s story and what Anderson believes lies ahead for the company.

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For 23 years, Pro Bono Net has been working to harness the potential of technology to connect pro bono attorneys to those most in need of their services and to provide legal tools to help individuals advocate for themselves. In 2021 alone, the non-profit helped more than 8.4 million people connect to a legal resource and helped self-represented individuals create more than 900,000 legal documents and court forms.

It does this through state-level programs such as LawHelp.org, which connects people to legal aid programs and self-help tools, and TenantHelpNY.org, which helps tenants avoid eviction; national programs such as Citizenshipworks.org, which helps people apply for citizenship, and OlmsteadRights.org, which provides legal resources for people with disabilities; and tools such as LawHelp Interactive, which is used by programs across the country to help individuals create legal documents.

Our guest today, Mark O’Brien, cofounded Pro Bono Net together with Michael Hertz, and has been its executive director since 2005. They saw the potential for technology to be a “force multiplier” for solving the problems of delivering justice in the United States, O’Brien says in the interview, but it was never just about the technology, but rather about how technology could be an enabler of human capacity.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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In his day job, Jonathan Pyle is the contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where he is responsible for compliance, reporting, and implementing new uses of technology to analyze, streamline, and expand service delivery. But in the legal tech world, Pyle is better known as the developer of Docassemble, a free and open source document assembly application that has been widely adapted for a range of applications.

Pyle developed Docassemble as a tool for automating the practice of law. It is used to create guided interviews that can be used for document assembly or for other uses, such as helping users find legal resources or obtain legal information. It has been used to power such products as Upsolve, a free service that assembles Chapter 7 bankruptcy forms, and the document-assembly platform Documate.

Pyle joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he came to develop Docassemble and why he released it as open source software. He also shares examples of how it has been used in the legal market and describes his plans for further development.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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She has been called the patron saint of solo and small law firms. For two decades, Carolyn Elefant has helped solo and small firm lawyers start and build their law practices. You know her as the creator of MyShingle.com, the longest-running blog on solo and small law firm practice, and she just released the third edition of her book that is a bible for lawyers going off on their own, Solo by Choice: How to Start a Law Firm and Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be.

Elefant joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her insights and advice on starting and building a practice and to talk about what is new in this latest edition of her book. They talk about the reasons a lawyer would start their own firm, the biggest mistakes lawyers make when starting out, how to decide on a practice area, how to bring in clients, and whether solo and small firm lawyers can achieve success and a good living.

In addition to writing Solo by Choice, Elefant is coauthor of the ABA book, Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, and the self-published book, The Legal ClauseIt: Plug & Play Engagement Agreements and Power Pacts for Small Law Firms. She has been listed as an Energy and Environmental Super Lawyer for Washington, D.C. since 2012, and has been named an ABA Legal Rebel (2010), a Fastcase 50 Innovator (2011) and an ABA Woman of Legal Tech honoree (2014).

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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As head of managed services and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, Jeffrey Solomon oversees a database that tracks over $150 billion in legal spend data. Legal departments are able to use this data in multiple ways, including to benchmark outside firms’ billing rates and to evaluate staffing of legal matters.

In this episode of LawNext, Solomon joins host Bob Ambrogi for a deep dive into how corporate legal departments are using data and analytics to drive more strategic decision-making around setting and managing legal budgets and legal spend. They also talk about how access to this data is shaping corporate clients’ conversations with their outside firms around efficiency and use of technology.

Solomon oversees a team at Wolters Kluwer that leads innovation initiatives through ideation, market research, development, and go-to-market for a portfolio of AI-powered products and managed services. He has been with ELM Solutions since 2013. Before that, he was with TyMetrix, which Wolters Kluwer acquired in 2003.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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As Time By Ping, a company devoted to helping lawyers break free from timekeeping, announces its Series B raise of $36.5 million, cofounder and CEO Ryan Alshak joins LawNext for an exclusive interview about the financing, the company, and its mission to help lawyers break free from timekeeping and get back time in their days. As Alshak shares in the interview, the roots of the company’s mission are very personal to him. Soon after starting the company, his mother fell ill with cancer, causing him to balance managing a startup and spending time with her. After her death in 2018, he found inspiration for the company’s mission: to give people back time in their days to be with the people who are important to their lives.

He wrote about his mother and how she inspired him in a moving 2018 essay, “Life is not waiting for the storm to pass, it’s learning how to dance in the rain.”

In our LawNext interview, Alshak describes how Time By Ping’s time-automation software can free lawyers from manual timekeeping. He also discusses how this latest financing round will help the company pursue its longer-term vision, which is to rebuild the model for how lawyers work from selling time to selling outcomes, and eventually to focus their effort on creative work in ways that best leverage their most important asset.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Is there a better way to train lawyers to draft and negotiate contracts? Laura Frederick thinks so. This former Tesla and BigLaw commercial contracts attorney is the founder of How to Contract, a learning platform that trains lawyers and professionals how to draft and negotiate contracts in the real world. She is also managing attorney of her own firm, Laura Frederick Law, in Austin, Texas, where she focuses on drafting and negotiating vendor supply, services, and technology agreements. As a lawyer in the technology transactions group at law firm Morison & Foerster and then as an inhouse commercial counsel at major corporations including Tesla, Frederick saw how hard it can be for younger lawyers to learn the skills they need to effectively draft and negotiate agreements.

In August 2020, she began posting daily contracting tips on LinkedIn. Her tips were so popular that she turned them into a book, ​​Practical Tips on How to Contract: Techniques and Tactics from an Ex-BigLaw and Ex-Tesla Commercial Contracts. Out of the tips and the book emerged the idea for How to Contract, where she provides practical training on contracting. In January 2022, she held her first How to Contract conference, with nearly 400 attendees.

Frederick joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her innovative approach to teaching contract skills, and she shares her thoughts on the current array of contracting technology products on the market.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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In this second of a two-part interview, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Carr, a trailblazing general counsel who describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream. As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted how legal departments hire and compensate outside counsel, creating models that today are considered standard operating procedure at many companies.

After retiring from FMC in 2014, he went on to work with Valorem Law, one of the earliest law firms to focus on making alternative fee arrangements the norm. Valorem became the progenitor of ElevateNext, the law firm affiliate of the global law company Elevate. Carr returned to a GC role in 2019 at Univar Solutions, where he sought to build the law department of the future. Now retired, he teaches, writes, and pursues his hobby of driving race cars.

Last week, in part one of the interview, Carr spoke with host Bob Ambrogi about how he landed on the “radical fringe” of reforming legal services, and he discussed some of the trailblazing initiatives he created at FMC, including the Alliance Counsel Engagement System, or ACES, a method of hiring outside counsel so unique that he was encouraged to patent it.

In this second installment of the interview, Carr discusses another of the initiatives for which he is known, the Litigation Value Challenge, which came to be emulated by the Association of Corporate Counsel and many of its members. Carr and Ambrogi also dive into his recent post at Bill Henderson’s Legal Evolution blog, Four Waves of Change in #LawLand, in which he lays out his framework for making the legal system better.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions.
• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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One of the most innovative general counsel ever, Jeffrey Carr describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Yet many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream. As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted how legal departments hire and compensate outside counsel, creating models that today are considered standard operating procedure at many companies.

After retiring from FMC in 2014, he went on to work with Valorem Law, one of the earliest law firms to focus on making alternative fee arrangements the norm. Valorem became the progenitor of ElevateNext, the law firm affiliate of the global law company Elevate. Carr returned to a GC role in 2019 at Univar Solutions, where he sought to build the law department of the future. Now retired, he teaches, writes, and pursues his hobby of driving race cars.

In this first of a two-part interview, Carr joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about how he landed on the “radical fringe” of reforming legal services and to discuss some of the initiatives he created at FMC, including the Alliance Counsel Engagement System, or ACES, a method of hiring outside counsel so unique that he was encouraged to patent it.

They also discuss Carr’s recent post on the Legal Evolution blog, Four Waves of Change in #LawLand, in which he lays out his framework for making the legal system better.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Two years into the pandemic, what has been its impact on e-discovery and what lies ahead for the industry? The 2022 State of the Industry Report takes a deep dive into these questions, surveying lawyers, consultants, software and service providers, and others to paint a picture of where the industry is today and what trends will dominate in the year ahead.

Joining us on LawNext to discuss the report is Doug Austin, who conducted the survey and wrote the report. Austin, publisher of the blog eDiscovery Today, is an established e-discovery thought leader with over 30 years of experience providing e-discovery best practices, legal technology consulting and technical project management services to commercial and government clients.

This is his second year surveying the state of the industry, with sponsorship from EDRM. Topics the report covers include remote work by e-discovery professionals, attendance at legal technology conferences, use of predictive coding, issues around data from mobile devices and collaboration apps, top e-discovery and e-discovery business trends for the year ahead, and the top challenges not being talked about.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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At a time when corporations are demanding greater accountability, transparency and predictability from their legal departments, automation of manual processes is a critical strategic priority, offering the promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness. But what does it really mean for a legal department to digitally transform itself and how should it go about it?

In this special edition of LawNext, three leading corporate general counsel and an expert consultant share their stories of digital transformation and their advice for others embarking on their own transformations. Panelists featured in this episode are:

• Bill Deckelman, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, DXC Technology.
• Todd Machtmes, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Salesforce.
• Nishat Ruiter, General Counsel, TED Conferences.
• Stuart Fuller, Global Head of Legal Services, KPMG Law, KPMG International.

This conversation was originally recorded as part of the Legal Leaders conference presented on Oct. 26, 2021, by Reuters Events. I served as moderator of the panel and Reuters graciously granted me permission to make the discussion available to listeners of LawNext.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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As a litigator in Los Angeles, Nicole Clark saw that state court data could be a secret weapon for winning, but she also saw how difficult it was for her and other lawyers to access that data. That inspired Clark to found Trellis in 2018, to collect and provide access to that data so that other litigators would not have to operate blind.

Recently, Trellis raised $14.1 million in a Series A funding round that Clark plans to use to expand the company’s coverage into additional states and its customer base into additional industries. Eventually, Clark hopes to see the use of court analytics become the industry standard, commonplace among litigators and expected by clients.

On this episode of LawNext, Clark joins host Bob Ambrogi to explain why she started Trellis and how she sees its court and judge analytics as critical tools for today’s litigators. She also recounts how the company has expanded its coverage so far and describes her plans to eventually cover the courts in every U.S. state.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Bobby Balachandran, founder and CEO of governance, risk and compliance company Exterro, has just been named LegalTech CEO of the Year in the Legaltech Breakthrough Awards. In a year in which so many legal tech companies have seen significant growth, it is a notable honor. But Balachandran is hardly resting on his laurels. He is already eyeing an IPO in the year ahead.

A computer scientist by training, Balachandran founded Exterro in 2008, quickly convincing a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company to sign on as his first customer. In 2018, Exterro received a reported $100 million investment – at that point one of the largest investments ever in a legal tech company – and went on to make two major acquisitions – of data privacy company Jordan Lawrence and digital forensics company AccessData.

Balachandran joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his leadership philosophy as a legal tech CEO, his company’s formation and growth, his views on the legal tech market, and his plans for his company in the years ahead.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.
• Legalweek New York, back in person for 2022.

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When COVID-19 first swept across the United States in March 2020, it forced courts across the country to shut down, bringing trials and other legal proceedings to a screeching halt. A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts examined how courts responded in the aftermath of that shutdown, and it concluded that they did pretty well overall, rapidly embracing technology and revolutionizing their operations.

But the study, How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations, also found that courts’ accelerated adoption of technology disproportionately benefited those with legal representation, while posing disadvantages for those without legal representation, particularly those whose access was limited by lack of technology, physical disabilities or limited English proficiency.

We take a deep dive into the report with Qudsiya Naqui, a lawyer and officer on the Civil Legal System Modernization team at Pew that conducted this research and produced the report. Naqui is a podcaster herself, host of Down to the Struts, a podcast about disability and design that focuses on building more inclusive systems and structures that acknowledge the breadth of human diversity.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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In July, the e-discovery company DISCO became one of just a handful of legal technology companies ever to go public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. That made it the third legal tech company this year to go public, after no U.S. legal tech company had gone public since 2002.

On this episode of LawNext, Kiwi Camara, DISCO’s cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss DISCO’s public offering and its implications for the company and the broader legal tech market. He also shares his thoughts on the key factors driving the explosion of interest in legal tech, and offers his predictions on where the legal market is heading.

At age 16, Camara earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and at age 19, became the youngest-ever graduate of Harvard Law School. After a clerkship with 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harris Hartz, Camara studied for a doctorate in economics at Stanford, taught corporate law at Northwestern, and was a founding partner of Camara & Sibley LLP in Houston.

It was while practicing at Camara & Sibley that he saw the need for a better product to automate the work of gathering and sifting through evidence, leading to the founding of DISCO in 2013.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Earlier this month, e-discovery company Everlaw became one of the few legal technology companies to join the elite ranks of unicorn status — companies valued at over $1 billion — with the announcement of a $202 million Series D funding at a valuation of over $2 billion. It had already been a big year for the company, which saw 80% year-over-year growth, the launch of several new products, and its first-ever user conference.

To discuss these developments, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by AJ Shankar, Everlaw’s founder and CEO, He brings us up to date on the company’s latest developments and his plans for further expanding the product and its market, including expanding Everlaw’s platform beyond e-discovery into broader areas of legal technology.

Shankar was previously on this podcast in April 2019, where he discussed the company’s founding and early development. Those interested in learning more about Everlaw may want to listen to that episode as well. Shankar was a computer scientist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, when he founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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It has been a year of notable developments for the practice management company MyCase. After starting the year with the arrival of a new CEO, Jim McGinnis, the company went on to make two significant acquisitions — of case management platform CASEpeer and document automation software Woodpecker — and this week is holding its first-ever customer conference, where McGinnis announced a third acquisition — of cloud-based legal accounting platform Soluno — and a roadmap of new features that includes native accounting.

On this episode of LawNext, McGinnis joins host Bob Ambrogi to bring us up to date on everything happening at MyCase, discuss the company’s recent acquisitions and what they mean for customers, and share details on the company’s product roadmap and longer-term vision.

Before joining MyCase in January 2021, McGinnis was EVP/GM of Wolters Kluwer’s Tax and Accounting North America Professional Segment, where he helped build CCH Axcess as a leading SaaS solution in the accounting profession. Earlier, he was vice president at Intuit, where he led marketing and product management for the professional division and led the accountant segment as part of Intuit’s QuickBooks business. He has also held senior leadership positions at Activision, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
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This week on LawNext: A look at the innovative Tech Edge J.D. program at Santa Clara University School of Law. As law schools come under fire for failing to teach the practical skills students need to succeed in the real world, this program does the opposite. It aims to change the return on investment in legal education by providing law students with the essential legal, technology and business skills that will prepare them to hit the ground running as tech lawyers in Silicon Valley.

To discuss the program, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the program’s founding director, Laura Norris, who also created and directs the school’s Entrepreneurs’ Law Clinic, and who also teaches courses for engineering students on IP and startup law. In June, the Silicon Valley Business Journal named Norris to its list of 100 Women of Influence, an annual list of women leaders who are “doing extraordinary things in an extraordinary time.”

Prior to joining the Santa Clara Law faculty, Norris was in private practice representing technology startups and entrepreneurs. She was also the first vice president of legal affairs at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. In 2014, she was one of only two academics named by The Recorder as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Tech Law.

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This marks the 20th year in business for Nextpoint, and it is shaping up to be a momentous one for the Chicago-based e-discovery and case preparation company. Having been bootstrapped since its founding, Nextpoint recently closed its first round of outside financing. Having never made an acquisition, it recently acquired deposition software company WarRoom. And this week, Nextpoint is holding a virtual user conference, On Point 2021, where it will lay out its roadmap for the future of the product.

On this episode of LawNext, Nextpoint’s founder and CEO Rakesh Madhava joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these recent developments and to share the story of how he founded and built the company. As you will hear, Madhava’s path to becoming a founder was not a typical one, and the path the company has taken since he founded it as one of the first cloud-based e-discovery platforms also was not typical.

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• Agiloft, a trusted provider of agile software for contract and commerce lifecycle management.
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This week, the College of Law Practice Management named Digitory Legal winner of its 2021 Innovation Award for a unique partnership with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to drive diversity, equity and inclusion among its outside counsel by applying analytics to billing data to get a deeper understanding of the type and quality of work firms are assigning to diverse lawyers.

As our guest Catherine Krow, Digitory Legal’s founder and CEO, explains, the company’s primary mission is to bring predictability and transparency to legal billing and pricing. But the company also has a strong commitment to driving DEI in the legal industry. It has been using its analytics to help firms gain insights into whether diverse lawyers are getting the same career-advancing opportunities as the non-diverse lawyers, and to then apply those insights through what Krow calls “mindful staffing.”

Krow left a partnership at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, one of the world’s largest law firms, to start Digitory Legal, and has never looked back. In addition to this week’s COLPM award, the company last year was named disruptor of the year by Litera’s Changing Lawyer awards. Krow joins us today to share the story of her company and to talk about using data to drive DEI.

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You would be hard-pressed to find two people in legal technology more experienced in user interface and user experience design than Nicole Bradick and Andy Wishart. Bradick is founder and CEO of the legal tech design and development firm Theory and Principle. Wishart is chief product officer at contract lifecycle management company Agiloft and formerly was co-founder and chief technology officer of Contract Express, the contract automation software that Thomson Reuters acquired in 2015.

While both individually have years of experience designing legal tech products, Bradick and Wishart also recently worked together on a project to redesign Agiloft’s UI and UX. That collaboration offers a case study in product design and of why good design matters in a legal technology product.

In today’s episode, they share the story of why Agiloft initiated the redesign, the process by which Bradick and her team went about making recommendations, and how Agiloft is incorporating those recommendations into its product roadmap.

This is a return appearance on LawNext for Bradick, who was the guest for our very first episode.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
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The ABA Journal dubbed Fred Rooney the father of legal incubators. He developed the first incubator in 2007 at City University of New York Law School, spawning the launch of some 70 incubators in the years since, many with Fred’s guidance or based on his model. While most are in the U.S., Rooney is now helping create incubators worldwide, in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Bulgaria and Pakistan. In fact, as we recorded this episode, Rooney was just back from the Gaza Strip, where he was developing an incubator for young Palestinian lawyers funded by the United Nations.

The legal incubator model that Rooney created serves dual missions. It helps young lawyers develop the business and practice skills they need to launch their own community-based legal practices, providing them space, mentoring and training. It also helps lawyers build practices that address the needs of low- and moderate-income individuals by offering affordable, community-based services. A recent ABA survey concluded that incubators are effective at supporting the career development of lawyers interested in starting solo and small-firm practices.

Rooney believes that for lawyers to do good in their communities, they first need to do well -- to be sufficiently successful to be able to offer low- and pro-bono services. Incubators, he believes, give young lawyers the leg up they need to both do well and do good. On this episode of LawNext, he tells how he came to build the first incubator, explains how they operate, and relates how he began to build them outside the U.S.

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Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms, Conga acquired Contract Wrangler. For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Neil Peretz, it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to simply identify key clauses, but that would actually be able to provide answers to what was in those contracts.

What is it like to start, build and then sell a legal tech company? What were the challenges Peretz faced in developing the product and building a market? How did he see his product as distinct from other CLM platforms in the market? What was it like to see the company he started get acquired? On this episode of LawNext, we discuss those questions and others.

Peretz learned firsthand about the challenges of managing too many contracts as general counsel for multiple venture-backed financial services companies, including Aliya Financial Technologies and Better Finance. Even before becoming a lawyer, he was developing software to solve real-world problems, first as co-founder and CEO of PocketMail Group, which launched the first affordable mobile email service, and then as COO and CFO of Libraria/Sertanty, which used computer models to predict novel chemistries.

Peretz holds law degrees from the UCLA School of Law and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), bachelors and masters degrees from Tufts University, and a specialization certificate from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

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Gavin McGrane was a litigation attorney in San Francisco when he saw an opportunity to improve how legal professionals interface with the federal courts electronic records system, PACER, and to enable them to better tap into the data and knowledge contained within that system.

In 2012, he founded PacerPro, originally focusing on providing an enhanced interface to the PACER system, but, in the years since, developing it beyond that, into a system that also enables law firms to automate the process of collecting and distributing court documents and properly filing them within a DMS or knowledge system.

Now, with a recent Series C investment, PacerPro is working to further develop its product and expand its coverage from federal courts into state courts.

On this episode of LawNext, McGrane joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the history and evolution of the company and discuss where he sees it going next.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services.

So critical is the issue that GPSolo, the magazine of the American Bar Association’s Solo, Small Firm and General Practice Division, has devoted its most recent issue to the topic, assembling a roster of contributors who are among the nation’s leading experts on regulatory reform.

In this special LawNext episode in conjunction with GPSolo, five of those contributors come together to share and discuss their views on reregulation:

• Zachariah DeMeola, director of legal education and the legal profession at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.
• Joseph Gartner, director and counsel, ABA Center for Innovation.
• Judy Perry Martinez, past president of the ABA and former chair of the ABA’s Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, whose 2016 Report on the Future of Legal Services influenced many of the reform initiatives now underway.
• Patrick Palace, the past president of the Washington State Bar Association and current member of the executive council of the National Conference of Bar Presidents and the board of the ABA Center for Innovation, who served as editor of the GPSolo issue.
• Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer of the Arizona Supreme Court, who chaired the Arizona Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, which recommended rules ultimately adopted by the court that created a new tier of legal services provider and eliminated the ban on non-lawyer ownership.

Note: For previous LawNext episodes featuring some of these panelists, see:

• Supreme Court Justice Ann Timmer on Arizona’s Sweeping Regulatory Reforms (2021).
• Incoming ABA President Judy Perry Martinez (July 29, 2019).
• LawNext Episode 34: Alternative Legal Models – A Panel Discussion (with Patrick Palace and others)(April 9, 2019).

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On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission is to lead the school’s next chapter of innovation.

But she also arrives as a profound moment of social change in our society and in the legal profession, a moment that has raised new questions about the nature of legal education and the role of law schools in helping to shape the profession. As she steps into this role, where does she start and what challenges does she face?

On this episode of LawNext, Osofsky joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her new role and to share her thoughts on legal education, bar admission, legal innovation, and legal regulatory reform.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
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Zach Posner cofounded The Legaltech Fund in 2020 as the first venture capital firm laser-focused on law and legal technology. But even with that industry focus, he takes a broad view when it comes to what he considers legal tech, looking for startups that have “legal in the middle,” but that may also span fintech, govtech, or consumer tech.

Posner, a three-time entrepreneur before becoming an investor and now managing director of The Legaltech Fund, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he created a fund devoted to legal tech, the opportunities he sees there, and the kinds of companies in which he is interested in investing.

He also shares his advice for entrepreneurs pitching a VC firm and offers his views on the broader investment and innovation landscape in legal tech.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Does the billable hour get a bum rap? Nicholas d’Adhemar, founder and CEO of the London-based spend management company Apperio, believes so. The real culprit for out-of-control legal costs is something else altogether, he believes. By identifying it, d’Adhemar says, both clients and law firms will be better positioned to manage legal costs.

In this episode of LawNext, d’Adhemar joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he believes hourly rates, done right, are often a fairer measure of legal costs than fixed or capped fees. He also discusses his founding of the company in 2013, its development since then, and its drive, launched last year, to significantly expand its market in the United States.

Before founding Apperio, d’Adhemar worked six years as a lawyer for a large international law firm. After completing his MBA at INSEAD, he spent three years working as an investment manager in a private equity firm. Those experiences, he says, taught him that the fewer the surprises in billing, the happier the client and the law firm — the lesson that inspired him to found Apperio.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Sixteen months after UpCounsel announced it would shut down, it is not only alive and well, but showing double-digit revenue growth, consistent profitability, and accelerating demand for legal services through its lawyer marketplace. Now it is launching a crowdfunding campaign with the mission of bringing legal to the people.

[The crowdfunding campaign opens to the public July 28, but listeners of this podcast can access the private friends and family campaign, with early investor benefits including a lower valuation cap.]

On this episode of LawNext, we look at the Phoenix-like story of how UpCounsel came back from near death, saved at the eleventh hour by new owners and a new management team that reinvented its business model, and why the company is now turning to crowdfunding to raise capital to fuel its growth and development.

To tell this story, we are joined by two of the company’s top executives:

• Chief Executive Officer KJ Erickson, a serial entrepreneur who Rolling Stone named in 2017 as one of 25 people shaping the future.
• Chief Revenue Officer Paul Drobot, a sales veteran who previously led sales at legal tech companies Atrium and Logikcull.

This episode is part of a two-part series on UpCounsel that also includes the LawSites blog post: Exclusive: As UpCounsel Launches Crowdfunding Campaign, the Phoenix-like Story Of Its Rise from Near Shutdown.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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With his contract-management company having just raised $40 million in Series B funding, Linksquares cofounder and CEO Vishal Sunak is aiming for some big goals, including “to build legal tech solutions that simply weren’t possible before.”

In announcing the raise, which brings the company’s total funding to $61.4 million, Sunak vowed that the company will develop its AI technology to “offer functionality no one has seen before,” and that it will soon introduce “a first-of-its-kind product that will change the way businesses complete the contracting process.”

Sunak returns to LawNext to discuss this latest funding round and his vision for the future of legal contracting. He was previously a guest on the show in the episode posted on June 2, 2020. That episode goes into more detail about the history of the company and its development.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.

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Mary Shen O’Carroll pioneered the field of legal operations during her 13 years as director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming the influential organization CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – and was elected its president in 2019.

In April, she walked away from both of those roles, leaving Google and stepping down as CLOC president, to join the contract lifecycle management company Ironclad as chief community officer, where she will scale and lead the company’s global community. “In Ironclad, I see the same mix of magic ingredients of community, vision, and talent that I saw in my early days at Google,” O’Carroll said in announcing the move.

On this episode of LawNext, O’Carroll joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her new role and the experiences that brought her here. She also shares her thoughts on the accelerating growth of legal operations in recent years and the increasing prominence of CLOC.

Listeners may also be interested in the April 19, 2021, episode of LawNext, in which Ironclad’s CEO Jason Boehmig was interviewed.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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The past year has laid bare, in shockingly explicit detail, the racial inequities of the justice system. Now, LexisNexis and the Historically Black Colleges and University Law School Consortium have partnered to launch a fellowship initiative for 12 law students to spend nine months working to end this systemic racism and further the rule of law.

On this episode of LawNext, we discuss this initiative with two of the fellows who are participating in it, as well as with the president of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, which is providing $120,000 to support each fellow with a $10,000 stipend. LexisNexis is also providing each fellow with dedicated mentorship and recurring professional development sessions to enhance their skills in technology, data analytics, and leadership.

Joining host Bob Ambrogi are:

• Ian McDougall, executive vice president and general counsel of LexisNexis and president of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation.
• Kailyn Kennedy, a fellow from North Carolina Central University School of Law, who received a fellowship to create webinar programs that offer a space for communication, questions, knowledge, and solutions to be shared about the racial discrepancies in legal employment.
• Oscar Draughn, a fellow from Florida Agricultural And Mechanical University College of Law, who received a fellowship to create a database of pro se litigant resources in Florida via a digital app with step-by-step tutorials.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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As the legal profession continues to transform and evolve, how can a law firm or legal department be “future ready”? What are the characteristics that define future-ready organizations and foretell their continued success?

Just out from Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is its 2021 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report, documenting the top trends affecting legal professionals and looking at how well prepared law firms and legal departments are to address them. And given that this year’s report comes in the wake of the global pandemic, it considers the events of 2020 and their impact on the profession now and into the future.

To discuss the report and share their insights on it, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two top executives from Wolters Kluwer:

• Martin O’Malley, executive vice president and managing director of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory worldwide.
• Dean Sonderegger, senior vice president and general manager of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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New findings show that law firms that piloted the Mansfield Rule have grown the racial and ethnic diversity of their leadership by more than 30 times the rate of other firms. These firms have also exceeded the norm in the rates at which racially diverse lawyers progressed into partnership and at which women lawyers progressed into leadership roles.

As the legal industry continues to struggle with diversity, these are notable results – especially considering that the Mansfield Rule is an idea borrowed from the NFL’s Rooney Rule and hatched in a hackathon. The basic idea is simple: firms commit that they will consider candidate pools that are at least 30% diverse when hiring senior associates and partners, promoting into equity partnership, and filling management positions.

But as Lisa Kirby, chief intelligence and knowledge sharing officer at Diversity Lab, explains, there is more to it than a simple percentage. Kirby, a former lawyer who oversees Mansfield Rule certification, joins host Bob Ambrogi to explain what the Mansfield Rule is, how it promises to drive diversity in law firms and legal departments, and how its scope and reach are expanding.

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The past year has seen the launch of several legal technology marketplaces, but Theorem LTS aims to be something more — an integrated legal technology ecosystem to power workflow-driven tech adoption by law firms and legal departments, as well as a marketplace for vendors to sell their products and connect with customers.

Founder Joshua Maley is a former lawyer and venture investor who started the company because he perceived that legal professionals had no viable way to understand all the products and services available to them on the market, and specifically at the point of pain within their workflows. “The Holy Grail of enterprise adoption and engagement is to deliver these solutions within the workflow, and that’s where our focus is,” Maley says.

After nearly two years of developing and testing the platform, Maley is now formally launching it. He joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he started Theorem and how he believes it will help drive broader technology adoption by law firms and legal departments.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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There is an element of serendipity in the story of Nehal Madhani and his company Alt Legal. Even though he had been an insolvency lawyer who had never practiced trademark law, an early attempt at entrepreneurship — and at registering his own trademarks — showed him the need for better software to automate trademark applications. After creating and launching that product, he heard from his customers that their greater need was software to track the thousands of trademarks they’d already filed. Pivoting to address that need, he launched Alt Legal.

Eight years later, and without ever taking significant outside investment, Madhani has grown Alt Legal into a leading platform for trademark docketing in the U.S. and Canada. More recently, he announced a partnership with a global trademark data company that will expand Alt Legal’s trademark docketing automation to every jurisdiction in the world.

On this episode of LawNext, Madhani joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his journey from insolvency lawyer to successful legal tech founder, as well as to discuss the mission of his company and his vision for its future.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
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One of the most dynamic areas of legal tech right now is practice management, which has seen a surge of investments and acquisitions over the past year. And one of the companies that best represents that trend is Paradigm, which was founded two years ago as ASG LegalTech and rebranded this year as Paradigm, to represent its goal of bringing about a paradigm shift for legal technology.

Paradigm is a portfolio company composed of three popular practice management platforms — PracticePanther, Bill4Time and MerusCase — and its most recent acquisition in September 2020, the electronic payments platform Headnote. Since acquiring Headnote, it has integrated its e-payments technology into both PracticePanther and Bill4Time, with plans to also add it to MerusCase.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two principals of Paradigm:

• Sarah Schaaf, a former lawyer and the founder of Headnote and now general manager of Paradigm’ payments division.
• Colin Li, chief financial officer and chief revenue officer at Paradigm.

We talk about the company’s growth and future plans, the state of the practice management market, the increasing importance of e-payments technology, and their thoughts on future developments.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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There is broad agreement that if law schools are to adequately train students for careers in law, then technology is a critical part of the curriculum. Despite this, many law schools get a failing grade when it comes to teaching tech. So how, exactly, should law schools teach tech? And what topics should such teaching cover?

April G. Dawson has given a lot of thought to those questions.A former computer programmer and litigator, she is now associate dean of technology and innovation and professor of law at North Carolina Central University School of Law, where her research focuses on legal pedagogy, the use of technology in legal education, and law and technology.

Recipient of the 2021 Technology, Law and Legal Education Section Award.from the Association of American Law Schools, she has written and spoken about how to design legal technology courses and who should teach them, most recently at the American Bar Association’s 2021 Techshow. She also speaks on how law school faculty can use tech to better engage with students and enhance their own productivity.

In this episode of LawNext, Dawson shares her insights on why it is important for law schools to teach technology and how they should design and implement tech instruction.

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Last August, Arizona became the first state to eliminate the ban on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. In ordering that change, as well as a package of additional reforms, the Arizona Supreme Court acted on the recommendations of a task force that had called for fundamental changes in the regulation of legal services, all with the goal of enhancing access to justice,

On today’s episode of LawNext, we are joined by Arizona Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer, who was not only among the justices who approved the changes, but who chaired the task force that recommended them. Justice Timmer discusses why the task force recommended such sweeping changes, why the court adopted them, the status of their implementation, and the implications for access to justice.

Justice Timmer was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2012. Previously, she served on the Arizona Court of Appeals from 2000 to 2012, serving three years as its chief judge, and where she chaired the court’s Legal Services Task Force. She is chair of the Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Advisory Committee, a member of the National Conference of Bar Examiners board of trustees and has been elected as a member of The American Law Institute.

Among her many honors, Justice Timmer was named 2020 Woman of the Year by the Arizona Capitol Times and she was recognized as one of the Most Influential Business Women in Arizona in 2020.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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LexLab, the legal innovation hub at UC Hastings Law School, recently wrapped up the fourth cohort of its legal tech accelerator program with a demo day at which the seven startup participants got to pitch their products to potential investors.

But this demo day, in fact this entire cohort, was noticeably different than prior ones, in that it was the first to take place 100% virtually, without the benefit of having the startups come and work on site in LexLab’s offices on the Hastings campus in San Francisco.

In this episode of LawNext, we speak with LexLab’s director, Drew Amerson, and Tiyani Majoko, cofounder of Anü, one of the startups that participated in the program, about the accelerator program and about the good and bad of the experience of conducting it virtually.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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A new $110 million Series E financing round for legal technology company Clio puts its valuation at $1.6 billion, making it the first law practice management company to achieve unicorn status and one of just a few legal tech companies to pass that milestone. 

In an exclusive LawNext interview, Jack Newton, Clio’s cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss this news and what it means for the company and its customers, as well as to share his thoughts on what this means in the broader context of the rapidly growing legal technology market. 

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Possibly the hottest market in legal tech today is contract lifecycle management, and one of the most talked-about companies in that market is Ironclad, a six-year-old startup that recently raised a $100 million Series D – at a reported valuation of $1 billion – and that just made its first acquisition, of the clickwrap transaction platform PactSafe.

What makes Ironclad different than other CLM companies, says cofounder and CEO Jason Boehmig, is that it is not just building incrementally better workflows, but is creating a new standard of digital contracting that will drive the businesses of the future.

Boehmig is today’s guest on LawNext. In 2014, he left his job as a corporate at law firm Fenwick & West to co-found Ironclad with CTO Cai GoGwilt after realizing that contracting was still mired in the analog age. He built Ironclad one log at a time, he tells host Bob Ambrogi, and is now looking ahead to eventually taking the company public.

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• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, Holger Zscheyge is widely regarded as a leading authority on legal technology and innovation. President of the European Legal Technology Association, he is also founder and managing director of Infotropic Media, a Moscow-based legal publisher and producer of legal technology conferences, and a cofounder of Moscow Legal Hackers.

Zscheyge was a guest on LawNext in 2018, when host Bob Ambrogi interviewed him live in Moscow at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference about the state of legal tech adoption in Russia. A lot has changed since then, so Zscheyge, who took office as ELTA president last November, returns to LawNext to share his perspectives on legal tech and innovation in Europe and Eastern Europe as they stand today.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Zscheyge and Ambrogi discuss legal tech use by law departments and law firms, the pandemic’s impact on legal tech adoption, regulatory-reform initiatives that parallel those in the U.S., and the need for law schools to better teach legal tech and innovation.

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• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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It was recently announced that Andrew Ballheimer, who retired last October as global managing partner at Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy, one of the largest law firms in the world, has joined the board of directors of the managed services company Factor, which spun off in 2019 from the alternative legal services provider Axiom.

Some are saying the move represents a bridge between traditional law firms and new forms of legal services delivery, and that it signals a future in which law firms and ALSPs more commonly work together to better serve their clients.

Andrew Ballheimer joins us on today’s LawNext to discuss this news, together with Chris DeConti, head of strategy at Factor and formerly executive vice president at Axiom. They discuss the significance of Ballheimer’s move and how they believe partnerships between law firms and ALSPs can benefit clients. They also share their thoughts on innovation in the legal industry, and on what the future holds for firms such as Allen & Overy and companies such as Factor.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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Jeffrey Marple, who has gained a national reputation for law department innovation in his role as director of innovation for corporate legal at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, has moved to Keesal Propulsion Labs, a company that assists Fortune 500 law departments in automating their business and legal processes, where has taken the position of director of digital transformation strategy.

In an exclusive LawNext interview, Marple and Rudy DeFelice, cofounder and CEO of KP Labs, join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss Marple’s move to the company, which spun off in 2018 from the California law firm Keesal, Young & Logan. They also share their insights on the state of law department innovation, the challenges law departments face in innovating, and where the industry is heading.

For Marple, his move to KP Labs comes after 21 years at Liberty Mutual, where, in his most recent role, he led the investigation, testing, and implementation of new technology, processes, and business models to improve how legal professionals work. In 2019, the Association of Corporate Counsel named Marple's department the "Legal Operations Team of the Year."

DeFelice, the company's cofounder and CEO, is a lawyer and technology entrepreneur. After practicing law early in his career with the firms McDermott, Will & Emery and Kelley Drye & Warren, he went on to found three technology companies, including one venture-backed legal technology company, Realpractice, which was acquired in 2012.

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This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Gordon Smith has just been appointed to a second five-year term as dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. Two years after becoming dean in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.”

As we recounted when Smith was first on LawNext in 2019, he has worked hard to make that vision a reality, launching the nationally recognized LawX legal design lab, developing courses to teach non-traditional skills such as leadership, storytelling, and business ethics, launching clinical programs around unique skills such as entrepreneurship and conflict resolution; and spearheading development of the Law and Corpus Linguistics project.

But much has changed in law and legal education since 2019, due predominantly to the pandemic and its impact on how law is taught, how lawyers are licensed, and how legal services are delivered. So as Smith begins his second term as dean, we check in on how the pandemic has impacted the school’s teaching of innovation and entrepreneurship, and ask Smith about his plans for the next five years and his thoughts on the future of legal education and licensing.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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No sector of the legal technology market is hotter right now than contract lifecycle management. And while that sector is crowded with companies that are relative newcomers, one of the companies making the biggest waves is 30 years old.

Over the past year, Agiloft, the no-code CLM company, raised $45 million in growth equity funding – its first outside funding ever – named a new CEO and management team, saw its sales increase 124%, and won several industry awards and recognitions, most recently the Business Intelligence Group product Innovation award for its AI Core contract management software.

Joining LawNext today is Eric Laughlin, who took over as Agiloft’s CEO last August. Agiloft’s former CEO for nearly 30 years, Colin Earl, hand-picked Laughlin – who spent many years at Thomson Reuters in a series of executive roles, leading TR’s legal managed services offerings and its corporate segment – to take the company to its next level of growth.

Laughlin and host Bob Ambrogi discuss the CLM market and why it has surged in recent years, and Laughlin shares his view on where his company fits into that market, now and into the future.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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You have just been named global chief innovation officer for one of the world's largest law firms. Where and how do you start? That is one of the questions we put to Amol Bargaje, whom Mayer Brown named to that position on Feb. 9, 2021.

Coming into this newly created role, Bargaje has plenty of experience on which to draw. He has been at Mayer Brown since 2018 as global director of IT Practice and Client Solutions, and was formerly chief innovation officer at Sullivan & Cromwell and chief information officer at Jenner & Block.

Bargaje worked most of his career in IT leadership, but pivoted to focus on innovation in 2016 because he wanted to be in a role that put him shoulder to shoulder with the firm's clients.

He joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about what innovation means to him, why it matters for a firm and its clients, how he conceives and develops innovation initiatives, and what he sees as the most significant trends impacting his firm and the legal industry.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Contract lifecycle management has become one of the hottest sectors of legal tech in recent years, and within that sector, Evisort, founded in 2016, has become one of the hottest companies, experiencing four-times revenue growth in 2020 and having just completed a $35 million Series B funding round, for total funding of $55 million.

But Evisort cofounder and CEO Jerry Ting sees his company’s AI-driven technology becoming something more – becoming, in effect, an operating system for companies and legal departments, helping them speed up their contracting and reduce associated costs.

So what makes Evisort stand out in this market and what’s ahead for the company and the CLM sector more broadly? Ting joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss those questions and more.

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In January 2020, Axiom Managed Services, one of two companies spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, rebranded as Factor, a move the company characterized as a relaunch, and named a new CEO, Varun Mehta, a veteran of the legal tech industry who had previously helped found the e-discovery managed services firm The Clutch Group.

It has been a year of challenges and opportunities for Factor, an ALSP that describes itself as delivering complex legal work at scale. While Mehta could never have anticipated that he was taking the helm in a year that would be defined by a global pandemic, it was also a year in which the company received an investment it characterized as one of the largest in the global legal solutions market, built out a powerhouse management team, and partnered with major law firm Allen & Overy to provide LIBOR remediation.

This week on LawNext, Mehta joins host Bob Ambrogi to reflect on his first year as CEO and the company's progress so far, as well as to share his vision for what lies ahead for Factor and for the managed services industry more broadly.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Have you ever wanted to found a tech company but needed the right idea? A California company called LaunchFactory has the ideas and is looking for founders to take them on – including in the legal tech space.

The company takes a decidedly unique path to launching companies. Rather than invest in existing startups, it identifies and vets startup ideas and then recruits entrepreneurs to launch them.

It provides these founders with $300,000 in seed capital, domain advisors, incubation tools and office space.

For 2021, one of the companies for which LaunchFactory is seeking founders is in legal technology, a vertical the company’s founder and CEO Brad Chisum believes is ripe for disruption. A second company this year, involving data privacy, borders on legal tech.

On today’s LawNext, we’re joined by Chisum, who founded LaunchFactory after selling his former company to Google for $85 million, and by Alessandro Rinaldi, who, as director of innovation, leads the ideation of new startups.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Barely six months into his new position as senior vice president and general counsel for The Coca-Cola Company, Bradley M. Gayton has taken dramatic action to increase diversity and inclusion among the company’s outside counsel, telling firms that they must meet minimum diversity commitments or face consequences ranging from fee reductions to outright firing.

While even he describes this as a bold move, he is no stranger to bold moves. Before moving to Coca-Cola in September, he spent 29 years at the Ford Motor Company, where he rose from law student intern to become that company’s top lawyer, managing a team of over 600 people across more than 20 countries, and where he developed a track record of innovation, not only around diversity and inclusion, but also in the use of legal technology and in his advocacy for pro bono service and access to justice.

On this week’s LawNext, Gayton joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his latest diversity initiative as well as his career and his insights on technology and innovation.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.
• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.
• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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This year marks the 10th anniversary of Kira Systems, the first company to develop AI-powered contract analysis, technology that is now becoming commonplace in the legal profession. To mark the anniversary, Kira’s cofounders are releasing a book, AI For Lawyers: How Artificial Intelligence is Adding Value, Amplifying Expertise, and Transforming Careers.

When CEO Noah Waisberg, a former lawyer, and CTO Dr. Alexander Hudek, a computer scientist, launched Kira in 2011, they thought it would be easy to develop machine-learning software to review contracts. They quickly found out otherwise. It was two years before they had a product to sell and nearly three before they earned a penny of revenue.

This week on LawNext, Waisberg and Hudek join host Bob Ambrogi to share their story of founding and building Kira Systems into one of the world’s leading legal technology companies, used by law firms throughout the world.

They also discuss their new book, the topics it covers, and the “friends” from the legal tech industry who helped them write it.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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As we begin to look ahead to a post-pandemic world, what will the legal market look like in 2021 and beyond? Has the pandemic’s impact on law firms resulted in a tipping point that will forever alter law firms and the business of law?

A report by the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Institute, 2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market, speculates that the combined effects of the pandemic may have so softened partner resistance to fundamental change as to create a tipping point in favor of a significant redesign of our legal delivery systems — including law firms.

Joining LawNext this week is the lead author of that report, James W. Jones, senior fellow at Georgetown and director of its Program on Trends in Law Practice. Formerly a law firm managing partner, corporate general counsel, and management consultant to the legal industry, Jones specializes in strategy and trends in the legal profession.

In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Jones details the financial and organization impacts of the pandemic on law firms and shares his thoughts on whether 2020 was indeed a tipping point for law.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Legal technology company AltaClaro describes itself as “rocket fuel for legal skills training. It uses a unique experiential framework based on education science, with mock transactions and live feedback, all done online.

Our guest this week on LawNext is AltaClaro’s founder and CEO Abdi Shayesteh, who says he first developed his entrepreneurial bent as an 11-year-old Iranian immigrant helping his father manage a small café in San Diego, and then as a 17-year-old founding a clothing company to support himself through college.

When, later in life, he became a lawyer and saw how poorly prepared new associates were to practice law, he began to research education science and came up with the concept for AltaClaro, a company that combines education science with technology to deliver practical skills training for lawyers. Today, its customers include law firms who use it to train associates and individual lawyers seeking to enhance their skills.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

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Just a few days into 2021 came news that could end up being one of the biggest legal technology stories of the year. On Jan. 5, two leading legal research companies, Casemaker and Fastcase – two companies that have been rivals for as long as they’ve been in business – announced their merger.

The combined company, which will operate under the Fastcase name, has a subscriber base estimated to be more than a million lawyers, or more than three quarters of the 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. What does this mean for the companies, their customers, and the legal research landscape more broadly?

To discuss the merger and its implications, host Bob Ambrogi welcomes the three top executives of the two companies:

• Dr. Satish Sheth, president and CEO of Casemaker, and also a full-time emergency pediatrician for Kaiser Permenante in California.
• Ed Walters, cofounder and CEO of Fastcase.
• Phil Rosenthal, cofounder and president of Fastcase.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

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ASG LegalTech, a portfolio company composed of four leading legal practice products — PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and Headnote — has introduced a new brand for itself, Paradigm, to better represent how the company views itself, its customers and its plans for moving forward.

In this special episode of LawNext recorded in advance of the announcement, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the rebrand and the reasons for it with Soumya Nettimi, CEO of Paradigm, and Colin Li, chief growth officer of Paradigm.

“When people hear the word ‘paradigm,’ they typically think of ‘paradigm shift,’” Nettimi says on the podcast, “and with that, what we want to communicate with our rebrand is that our mission is to fundamentally shift the standard for legal technology.”

Listen as Nettimi and Li describe the process they went through to bring about the rebranding, what they hope to convey and achieve with it, and their plans for the future of the company and its four distinct products.

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Twenty-five years ago, in the still-fledgling days of the web, the husband-and-wife team of Tim Stanley and Stacy Stern founded FindLaw and quickly developed it into the most highly trafficked legal site on the internet. In 2001, they sold FindLaw to the West Group, and two years later, they founded Justia, repeating their earlier success and then some with what is now one of the most popular legal sites in the world.

Throughout, their mission has remained the same: to make law and legal resources free for all. Whereas FindLaw started as a modest collection of links to legal resources, Justia is now one of the largest databases of cases, codes, and other legal resources, all available for free to the site’s visitors. It also supports various public interest and pro bono projects, including the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center, the LGBTQ Legal Resource Center, and the Supreme Court Center.

Justia supports all this by selling law firm marketing services, including a lawyer directory, SEO, websites and blogs.

In this episode of LawNext, Stanley, CEO, and Stern, president, both lawyers by education, discuss how they came to start FindLaw, the sale to West, starting again with Justia, their future plans, and their thoughts, after 25 years, on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go towards providing free access to law.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• XIRA.com, where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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Jules Miller knows what it is to be a legal tech entrepreneur. She is a three-time founder, twice of legal tech companies: Hire an Esquire in 2012 and Evolve Law in 2015. Now a partner in venture capital firm Mindset Ventures, she is leading her firm’s expansion into legal tech investing, most recently with the Series A financing of legal marketplace Priori Legal.

On this episode of LawNext, Miller joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about venture investing – in technology generally and in legal technology specifically. She discusses what she looks for in a founder, the types of companies and technologies that excite her, and how a founder can get her ear. She also talks about what VCs can do to increase diversity among founders.

Prior to joining Mindset in June, Miller was an executive at IBM, where she co-founded IBM Blockchain Ventures, launched and ran the IBM Blockchain Accelerator, and led the IBM Blockchain Garage for North America. Earlier, she was a partner at LunaCap Ventures, a venture debt fund investing in diverse founders, and was COO of gender lens investing pioneer BRAVA Investments. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, Designing the Successful Corporate Accelerator.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out: ASG LegalTech, XIRA.com, Everlaw, and Law Insider

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Dan Broderick believes businesses waste billions in repetitive work reviewing and negotiating semantically similar contracts. As a former lawyer, he saw the problem first-hand. It led him to found BlackBoiler, whose AI-based technology automates the review and mark-up of inbound contracts right in Word’s Track Changes.

This week, BlackBoiler announced two new U.S. patents for its contract review software, bringing its total to seven. This comes less than two weeks after the company secured $3.2 million in funding from a group of strategic investors that included agreement cloud company DocuSign.

In this episode of LawNext, Broderick joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how BlackBoiler came to be and the problem it addresses. He also describes how BlackBoiler works to automatically mark-up contracts, and discusses his plans for the future development of the technology and the company.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech is the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.

• TrustBooks is trust accounting made easy. The only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms, it helps them easily manage client accounts and stay compliant with their state bar requirements.

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Andrew Perlman is one of the nation’s leading forces helping to establish the future of legal education and legal practice.

As a professor and now dean at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, he has helped drive the creation and development of programs for teaching about legal innovation and technology. He was founding director of Suffolk’s Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology and its related legal technology and innovation concentration for law students. He also helped establish Suffolk’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, or LIT Lab, where law students are able to work directly on legal tech and data science projects.

Perlman has also been a leading force in national initiatives to shape the future of law practice and access to justice. He was chief reporter for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Ethics 20/20, which was responsible for updating the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to reflect changes in technology and increased globalization. He also served as the vice chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which produced projects and recommendations designed to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed, and he was the inaugural chair of the governing council of the ABA’s Center for Innovation.

Perlman joins host Bob Ambrogi to share thoughts on the present and future of legal education, legal practice, and legal regulatory reform.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• ASG LegalTech is the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.
• XIRA.com is where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys in one place. For attorneys, XIRA is abolishing the subscription model for tech tools, providing free, fully integrated practice management software, e-billing, online scheduling, document management and video conferencing.

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After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building, sold last year to OpenText for $75 million, John Tredennick was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings — Merlin Digital Magic, a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the use of open source software to improve access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient.

Now, Tredennick’s new company is about to release a product called Sherlock that he believes will revolutionize enterprise search. Tredennick calls it “the first AI-powered digital document bloodhound.” Start with a simple search query, then refine the results with increasing precision by telling Sherlock which results do or do not match the results you seek.

A litigator before founding Catalyst in 2000, Tredennick is a true pioneer in legal technology who continues to blaze new trails. His legal and technology acumen have earned him numerous awards, including having been named by The American Lawyer as one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” named to the FastCase 50 as a legal visionary and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine.

In this episode, Tredennick joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his current projects as well as his former company, his interest in open source technology, his thoughts on the current state of legal technology, and his advice for legal technology entrepreneurs who are just starting out.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Everlaw, a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.

Thanks also to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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To say that Stevie Ghiassi is a busy man is an understatement. In addition to founding Legaler, a secure video meeting platform for lawyers, the Australia-born entrepreneur is the founder of the recently launched Legaler Aid, a charity to support social justice legal cases worldwide, and founder of the Global Legal Tech Report, which will release its final report in December after nearly a year of surveying legal tech around the world.

As if those projects were not enough to occupy his time, Ghiassi is the founding president of the Australian Legal Technology Association and founder of the organization Blockchain for Law.

In this episode of LawNext, Ghiassi — who is now based in Los Angeles — joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his story of how he became involved in legal technology, describe how he developed and built Legaler into a platform used by lawyers worldwide, discuss his vision for how Legaler Aid will use blockchain and crowdfunding to address access to justice, and offer findings from the Global Legal Tech Report.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Xira, a site that helps consumers by making legal advice more accessible and affordable and that helps lawyers by providing a one-stop platform for getting, booking and managing clients.

Thanks also to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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A recent report from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation’s legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a 2018 paper published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review that documented these legal deserts and rural America’s increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis.

Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper, Lauren Sudeall, associate professor of law and founding faculty director of the Center for Access to Justice at Georgia State University College of Law. We talk about legal deserts and about Sudeall’s other research, in which she focuses on access to the courts, in both the civil and criminal contexts, and on how lower-income individuals navigate the legal system, either with or without the help of a lawyer.

A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Sudeall clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. She then worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first as a Soros Justice Fellow and later as a staff attorney.

At the Southern Center, she represented indigent capital clients in Georgia and Alabama and litigated civil claims regarding constitutional violations within the criminal justice system, based primarily on the right to counsel. She serves on the Southern Center’s board of directors, the Indigent Defense Committee of the State Bar of Georgia, and the board of advisors for the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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The practice management company Clio recently released its annual Legal Trends Report, based on analysis of data from tens of thousands of legal professionals and surveys of legal professionals and legal consumers, and it showed that the coronavirus crisis has resulted in a decided shift in legal practice, away from bricks-and-mortar offices and towards cloud-based technologies and virtual delivery of legal services.

So what will law practices look like going forward? And how will law practice technology adapt and evolve to meet the shifting needs of legal professionals? For their perspectives on these questions, we are joined this week by Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio, and Mik Lernout, Clio’s vice president of product.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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The legal marketplace Priori Legal today announced a $6.3 million Series A financing, with existing investors joined by several legal industry heavyweights. In this special edition of LawNext, the company’s founders Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the implications of this news for their company and for the legal services market.

Rubin, Priori’s CEO, and Levitt, its chief product officer, met as classmates at Yale Law School. They shared a vision for how a legal marketplace could disrupt the BigLaw model for Fortune 500 companies by using data and technology to unbundle legal services. Today, their clients include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading technology companies.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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Nicole N. Morris is a professor in practice at Emory University School of Law and director of the TI:GER program (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), an innovative partnership between Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology that brings together graduate students in law, business, science and engineering to work on ways to take innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace.

There is perhaps no one better suited to lead this multidisciplinary program than Morris. A chemical engineer for six years with 3M and Eli Lilly before attending law school, she later served as managing patent counsel at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, where she was responsible for the development and implementation of the company’s global patent strategy and for providing day-to-day advice and counseling to business stakeholders.

In this episode of LawNext, Morris joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the goals of the TI:GER program, the skills students learn from participating in the program, and how it benefits students’ careers in the legal profession.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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A solo serving the Hispanic community in St. Paul, Minn., Inti Martinez-Alemán knew from the day he opened his Ceiba Forte Law Firm that he wanted to take a creative approach to client service.

It starts from the moment clients first arrive for a consultation, when he offers a drink menu and then asks them to pick a story card that best depicts how they are feeling. It continues through his use of visuals to explain the legal process, his use of virtual reality to familiarize clients with the courtroom, and his flexible approach to setting fees.

These and other innovations earned Martinez-Alemán and his firm the 2020 Reisman Award for Excellence in Client Service, presented during the recent Clio Cloud Conference.

In this episode of LawNext, Martinez-Alemán shares his approach to customer service as well as his journey from an abogado in Honduras to solo in St. Paul.

Support for this show:

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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In September, Rocket Lawyer became the first national company approved to participate in Utah’s regulatory sandbox, a pilot program for licensing new and alternative forms of legal providers and services. For Charley Moore, who founded Rocket Lawyer in 2008, it was yet another step in his quest to deliver high-value legal services at an affordable price.

A former U.S. Naval officer who served in the Gulf War before becoming a lawyer, Moore started his legal career as an internet and business lawyer with Venture Law Group in Menlo Park, Calif., where his clients included the-then fledgling startup Yahoo! He went on to start and sell another company before founding Rocket Lawyer, with the goal of providing small businesses and individuals with an alternative to the high cost of obtaining legal help.

In this episode of LawNext, Moore recounts the founding and development of Rocket Lawyer and its expansion into Europe starting in 2012. He also explains why he wanted the company to participate in the Utah sandbox and what he expects to happen there. Finally, as one of the few Black CEOs in legal tech, Moore discusses his thoughts on expanding diversity in the industry.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Support for This Show Comes From:

A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.

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After much speculation about the future of Legalweek – one of the world’s largest and most-anticipated legal technology and legal business conferences – the conference’s organizers announced on Oct. 1 that it will be virtual in 2021.

ALM Media, which produces Legalweek, said the conference will be rebranded as Legalweek(year) and will be extended into a full year of events, leading up to a resumption of the in-person event in February 2022.

On this special edition of LawNext, Mark Fried, CFO and president of events at ALM Media and the man in charge of legalweek, joins host Bob Ambrogi to provide more details about the conference and discuss what it means for attendees and exhibitors.

Support for this episode comes from:

A huge thank you to our new partner ASG Legaltech for sponsoring today's episode!

Thank you, as well, to our listeners for supporting LawNext on Patreon. An extra special thank you to our leading Patreon member, Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

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Sept. 30, 2020, was Josh Becker’s last day in legal tech, at least for the time being, as he pursues his campaign for election to the California state Senate in the district that encompasses Silicon Valley cities such as Palo Alto, Mountain View and Menlo Park.

Most recently, Becker was chairman of the trailblazing legal analytics company Lex Machina and head of legal analytics at LexisNexis, which acquired Lex Machina in 2015. Previously, he was Lex Machina’s CEO, a role he stepped into shortly after Stanford Law School spun it off into a private company.

Becker also heads the LexisNexis Legal Tech Accelerator program, which recently announced its fifth cohort of startup participants, and which he will continue to stay involved with on a reduced basis.

On Becker’s last day in legal tech, he sat down for an interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, to recount his career, share his observations about the industry, and offer advice for startups in the field.

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.

Announcement

Starting with this episode, we are honored to announce that we are welcoming a new sponsor to LawNext. It is ASG LegalTech, the company that is home to four leading products in law practice management, the practice-management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and the e-payments platform Headnote. We are thankful to them for supporting us in continuing to bring great content to our listeners, and we hope you will check out their full portfolio of products.

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In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the Oct. 1, 2020, launch of LexFusion, we get a first look at the new company from guests Joe Borstein, a legal industry veteran and one of LexFusion’s two cofounders, and Basha Rubin, the cofounder and CEO of Priori Legal, the legal talent company that is one of the initial participants in the LexFusion collaborative.

LexFusion’s mission is to turbocharge the adoption and use of technology within corporate legal departments and large law firms by changing the paradigm for how technology is purchased. The company will serve as the go-to-market representative of a collaborative, hand-picked group of best-in-breed legal technology companies, each providing a distinct category of technology.

The overarching goal is to rescue general counsel and firm partners from the endless and overwhelming stream of cold calls they receive and offer an alternative based on trusted relationships and trusted products.

In this episode of LawNext, Borstein describes the purpose and vision of LexFusion, and Rubin explains why her company chose to participate.

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In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the announcement of ASG LegalTech’s acquisition of electronic payments company Headnote, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with the two companies’ CEOs: Soumya Nettimi of ASG LegalTech and Sarah Schaaf of Headnote, on the reasons for the deal and the significance for customers.

On Sept. 22, 2020, ASG LegalTech, the company that owns cloud practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time and MerusCase, announced that it had acquired Headnote, the online payments platform that provides e-payments and accounts-receivable management for law firms.

The acquisition is the fourth in three years for ASG LegalTech and the 27th for its parent company Alpine SG (ASG), a portfolio company of the San Francisco private equity firm Alpine Investors.

No sooner did ASG announce the acquisition than it revealed the first product to result from it — PantherPayments, an all-in-one payment system that is fully integrated within the PracticePanther platform.

In this interview, Nettimi and Schaaf go into depth on the reasons for the acquisition, their plans for future development, and what this means for both companies’ customers.

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Nicola Shaver, managing director, innovation and knowledge, at the law firm Paul Hastings, was recently named 2020 Innovative Leader of the Year in the International Legal Technology Association’s Distinguished Peer Awards. Not only that, but the law firm where she oversees innovation initiatives was named Innovator of the Year.

While a major honor for anyone in the field of law firm innovation, it is even more remarkable given that until just seven years ago, Shaver was a lawyer practicing media law in Australia with no connection to the field of law firm innovation. When she moved to Toronto for family reasons in 2014, she could find no work in her legal speciality, so took a job at Cassels Brock & Blackwell leading the firm’s innovation initiatives. She was immediately hooked.

After a stint at another Toronto firm, Stikeman Elliott, as director of knowledge management, she moved to Paul Hastings in New York in 2018, where she describes herself as “Dedicated to future-proofing law firms and accelerating the pace of positive change in the legal industry.” She is also founder of Legal Innovation and Design, a global membership group for anyone driving innovation initiatives in the commercial legal space, and publisher of the blog Tower of Babel.

In a year that has presented so many challenges for law firms, Shaver joins LawNext to discuss the innovation initiatives that helped her and her firm earn these awards. She also shares her career journey, her thoughts on innovation, and her perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on the legal profession.

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In 2006, inspired by the success of business process outsourcing company Office Tiger, which RR Donnelley acquired that year for $250 million, Ajay Agrawal and Daniel Reed founded UnitedLex, one of the earliest legal process outsourcing companies. Within months, it was providing legal services to clients such as HP, IBM and Microsoft. Within four years, the company had achieved a valuation of $100 million.

But Agrawal was becoming increasingly intrigued by a problem a client had described to him as one of “contract education” — the gap between the promises made in an organization’s contracts and the promises ultimately delivered. It is a problem, he estimates, into losses for businesses of $2-3 trillion a year. So in 2011, he sold his stake in UnitedLex to begin working on a solution.

That led him to found SirionLabs in 2012, where he is using artificial intelligence technology to disrupt the field of enterprise contract lifecycle management. In May, the company raised $44 million in a Series C round, bringing its total raise to $66 million. Just this month, it announced several patent-pending upgrades to its AI technology.

Based in New York City, Agrawal recently joined me from New Delhi, India, where he is awaiting travel restrictions to lift so he can return home.

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Kimberly Y. Bennett describes herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, legal industry disruptor, and business coach who happens to be a lawyer. Nowhere are all those facets more evident than in the way she has structured her law practice, K Bennett Law, where she focuses on brand protection and growth strategy.

Soon after starting her own practice, which is entirely virtual, she decided there had to be a better way to charge legal fees, one that would provide predictable pricing for her business clients and predictable income for her. The model she developed is to provide her services via a monthly, flat-fee subscription.

Another way she has distinguished her practice is through the relationships she has with her clients. She sees herself as not only a legal advisor to her clients, but also as a business coach and strategy consultant. She functions much like an outside general counsel, working with businesses until they scale to the point of hiring their own in-house attorney.

Today, Bennett is also a coach and consultant to other lawyers looking to establish their own subscription-based practices, and she is a frequent speaker on innovation and entrepreneurship in law and business.

On this episode of LawNext, Bennett joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her journey, discuss her practice model, and provide her insights on innovation, race, gender and more in the legal industry.

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It should have come as no surprise when California attorney Erin Levine recently announced her plan to go nationwide with her do-it-yourself divorce platform Hello Divorce. After all, the site has been seeing rapid growth and has earned Levine broad accolades, including the 2020 James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering from the American Bar Association and the 2019 Reisman Award for legal innovation from practice management company Clio.

But why did Levine, who has a successful family law practice in Oakland, Calif., first decide to create Hello Divorce three years ago and then spin it off as a standalone company last year? And what does she now see as the opportunities and challenges in bringing it to all 50 states?

On this episode of LawNext, Levine joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her story as well as that of Hello Divorce, starting from why she went to law school, how she came to establish her own practice, her reasons for launching Hello Divorce, and the site’s growth and future.

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Touting it as the next phase in its global expansion to transform the business of law, Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has launched its Legal Business Services practice in the United States, which it describes as “a comprehensive suite of legal management consulting and technologically-enabled legal managed services for corporate legal departments designed to accelerate the transformation of the business of law.”

A 2017 Harvard study of the Big Four in law found that their legal service lines have grown significantly in recent years in size, scope and importance, and their growth is not confined to tax or tax-related services, but spans a variety of practice areas. Yet in the U.S., the Big Four have been throttled in their ability to provide legal services by legal and financial regulatory constraints. At the same time, recent years have seen a surge in the use of managed services firms and other forms of alternative legal services providers.

All of which leads to the question of what Deloitte’s new practice means, not just for corporate legal departments, but for the U.S. and global legal industry. To learn more, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with a principal of the new practice, Mark Ross, who joined Deloitte in January after serving as executive vice president and global head of contracts, compliance and commercial services at the global ALSP Integreon.

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Here’s one that gets a bit meta. Back in November 2017, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi spoke at BYU Law School about a lawyer’s ethical duty to be technologically competent. The talk prompted the school to explore ways it could help students improve their technological abilities. What resulted was the school’s Legal Technology Initiative, a multi-pronged program to provide law students with technology training and assessment.

Initially overseen by Shawn Nevers, deputy director of the law library, BYU this year brought on Tina Wilder, a former practicing lawyer, as an assistant law librarian to assist Nevers and take the lead in running tech training. On March 12, 2020, Ambrogi was at BYU and sat down with Nevers and Wilder to discuss the initiative and learn more about how the school teaches technology.

But what no one anticipated when the interview was scheduled was that March 12 would be the very day that the coronavirus crisis would force the school to shut down its physical classrooms and put its lessons online. So Ambrogi recently connected with Nevers and Wilder for a follow-up on how going virtual has impacted the initiative.

This episode of LawNext begins with the original interview with Nevers and Wilder recorded March 12. Then, in a postscript recorded in July, Ambrogi catches up with the two guests for an update.

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In 2015, the husband-and-wife team of James Jones Jr. and Kristina Jones founded Court Buddy, a service that matches consumers with vetted lawyers at affordable prices. Last November, the couple stepped aside from the business to pursue other interests. In their time running the company, they had raised $7.1 million and won numerous awards and honors.

Achieving success as a legal tech startup is notable in itself, but James and Kristina Jones also were among the few Black founders in an industry with a striking diversity problem. One survey of the legal tech industry found that only 2.3% of founders were Black and 3.1% were Latinx.

Among the milestones they achieved, Court Buddy was named the winner of the American Bar Association’s Brown Select Award for Legal Access in 2017, a winner of the inaugural American Entrepreneurship Award in 2016, and a winner of a Webby Award in 2018. When they raised their first financing round in 2017, Kristina was recognized as only the 14th African-American woman ever to raise $1 million or more. Last year, Black Enterprise named the couple as its Techpreneurs of the Year.

In this episode of LawNext, James Jones, a former practicing lawyer, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share their story of starting, building and ultimately stepping away from Court Buddy, and of how being a Black entrepreneur in legal tech presented certain obstacles he otherwise would not have encountered.

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Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur is one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice. Professor at the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, she is also a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative. In 2018, she was named a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work promoting an evidence-based approach to increasing access to justice for low-income communities.

In the wake of Washington state’s decision to sunset its pioneering Limited License Legal Technicians program, host Bob Ambrogi asks Sandefur about that program, which she evaluated in a 2017 report, and about other programs in which those other than lawyers provide legal assistance.

They also discuss access to justice more broadly, including the scope and causes of the justice gap, the obstacles to bridging it, the impact of race and class on access to justice, what works and what does not to close the gap, and why regulatory reform and technology are essential to enhancing access to justice.

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At BYU Law in Provo, Utah, a first-of-its-kind technology platform is enabling legal researchers to explore the meanings of legal words and phrases by examining the contexts in which they historically were used. The Law and Corpus Linguistics platform enables users to examine large collections of historical texts to help determine, for example, what early drafters meant by a phrase such as “bear arms.”

In this episode of LawNext, my guest is David Armond, head of infrastructure and technology and senior law librarian at BYU Law, who was instrumental in helping create and launch the platform. We discuss this emerging field of corpus linguistics and how it is being used by lawyers, judges and legal scholars.

The BYU Law collection is now home to seven collections of historical text, or corpora, including founding-era American English (1760-1799), early modern English (1475-1800), Supreme Court opinions, U.S. caselaw, records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and more.

As it happened, host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Armond live at BYU Law on the very day that the school decided to close down due to the coronavirus crisis. Before discussing their scheduled topic of corpus linguistics, Armond and Ambrogi had a conversation about how a law school prepares to shut down and go online. That conversation was posted as LawNext Episode 66: How One Law School Prepared for Coronavirus Shutdown.

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LinkSquares, the Boston-based provider of AI-powered contract management and analysis technology for corporate legal departments, announced a major new product this week. Called LinkSquares Finalize, it extends the company’s technology into the pre-signature stage, helping its customers create and approve contracts more quickly and efficiently.

This news comes just three months after LinkSquares raised $14.5 million in a Series A financing round, bringing its total financing to $21 million. And it comes after a year in which the company saw 300% year-over-year growth.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Vishal Sunak, who cofounded LinkSquares in 2015 and has been its CEO ever since. He and cofounder Chris Combs started the company after participating in the acquisition of the company where they formerly worked, Backupify, and witnessing the need for a better way to manage enterprise contracts.

Hear how they bootstrapped and built the company from scratch, why Sunak sees contract management as so vital to corporations, and where he sees the industry heading.

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Today on LawNext: A coronavirus success story – how a state bar, anticipating a tidal wave of unemployment claims, partnered with two legaltech companies to launch a pro bono portal in barely more than a week.

On April 27, 2020, the New York State Bar Association launched a website devoted to helping those who need unemployment assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The site provides assistance with filing an unemployment claim and access to pro bono attorneys for those whose claims are denied.

The launch came less than two weeks after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached out to the bar, asking for its help in preparing for the anticipated onslaught of claims. The bar, realizing it would need help from a technology developer, reached out to practice management company Clio, which in turn reached out to the pro bono portal company Paladin.

In barely a week, the three teams got the site up and running. On this episode, we hear the story of how they did that from three who were directly involved:

• Henry M. (Hank) Greenberg, president of the NYSBA and shareholder in the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
• Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio.
• Kristen Sonday, cofounder of Paladin.

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Mark Harris is sounding an alarm – or, as he puts it, staging an intervention – for corporate counsel.

Harris and Alec Guettel, the original founders 20 years ago of alternative legal services provider Axiom and, since last year, the CEO and CFO of contract management company Knowable, have taken the unusual step of posting an open letter that they describe as an unsolicited intervention for general counsel.

Businesses are about to confront a tidal wave of urgent questions from suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and others, they warn, the answers to which are buried in thousands or hundreds of thousands of commercial contracts. Unfortunately, they say, most companies don’t know what’s in their contracts or even, in many cases, where those contracts are.

“We woke up a couple weeks ago and realized, there is no time,” Harris and Guettel wrote. “Our clients, you, are drifting through these pandemic rapids, focused on more important issues like the immediate safety and sanity of your employees, heading right for a cliff.”

What has led to this situation and what can corporate counsel do about it? In this episode of LawNext, Harris, who we previously interviewed in Episode 56, returns to LawNext to share his analysis and advice.

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Virtually overnight, COVID-19 changed the landscape for law firms and how they serve clients. While some firms were caught unprepared – struggling to adapt to a remote work environment and lacking the technologies and procedures to ensure seamless client service and team performance – other firms made the pivot quickly. What gave these successful firms the edge?

In this episode, which was recorded as a live video webinar on May 7, 2020, we speak with the heads of innovation at four major U.S. law firms about how they responded to the pandemic and its impact on their firms. The panelists are:

• David Cambria, Chief Services Officer, Baker McKenzie.
• Linda Novosel, Chief Innovation and Value Officer, Blank Rome, LLP.
• Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer, Shearman & Sterling, LLP.
• Adam Ruttenberg, Senior Partner and Chairman of the Technology Committee, Cooley, LLP.

Joining as co-moderator for the discussion was Josh Becker, head of Legal Analytics at LexisNexis.

Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder and principal of Plat4orm PR, for helping to organize the panel.

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The coronavirus crisis has created turmoil for legal education and bar admissions, as law schools have shut down their campuses and states have put off bar exams. One proposal, advocated by Jennifer L. Mnookin, dean of UCLA Law School, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law School, in The National Law Journal, is for states to provisionally license law school graduates for two years, without a bar exam.

Of course, bar admission is only one of the many difficult challenges facing law school deans as they wrestle with online courses, uncertainty about student internships and placements, disrupted admissions, and enormous questions about planning for the coming academic year and beyond.

On this episode of LawNext, Dean Mnookin joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her thoughts and experiences on legal education in a lockdown and beyond.

Dean of UCLA Law since 2015, Mnookin is also the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro professor of law and faculty co-director of PULSE @ UCLA Law (Program on Understanding Law, Science & Evidence).

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As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself.

Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduling sessions via Calendly, and communicating with staff and counsel via Slack.

But when courthouses in Jefferson Parish closed last month, it presented an even-greater challenge for the programs Judge Schlegel oversees, which focus on treatment and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol offenders.

With help from legal technology companies, he rallied to further innovate, working with LawDroid to create a text-based chatbot to check in on probationers and with Documate to develop an online system for defendants to enter guilty pleas from prison.

In this episode of LawNext, Judge Schlegel joins host Bob Ambrogi to describe the systems he has built and how they are being used to keep the wheels of justice turning even with courthouses shut down.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced legal professionals to work remotely, many are scrambling to find the best tools and technology to help them manage their legal matters and continue to closely collaborate with their colleagues. While many law firms already use Microsoft Office 365, fewer are as familiar with its core collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams.

Our guests for this episode of LawNext believe that Teams is a powerful tool for lawyers working from home and one that can effectively serve as a full matter-management platform for law firms and legal departments, entirely within Office 365. They are:

• Mike Ammerlaan, director, M365 Ecosystem Marketing.
• Carol Lynn Grow, vice president of marketing and sales, LawToolBox.

Ammerlaan and Grow will explain why they see Teams as a powerful tool and discuss how lawyers can use Teams for collaboration, conferencing and case management.

As a supplement to this episode, Ammerlaan and Grow recorded a video demonstrating the features and capabilities of Teams for legal professionals.

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Ever since the publication of his seminal 1996 book, The Future of Law, Richard Susskind has remained the world’s most-recognized and most-respected speaker and author on the future of legal services. But even he could not have foreseen the sudden relevance of his latest book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice.

On this episode of LawNext, Susskind joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about the legal profession and the judicial system in a time of global pandemic. Will the pandemic fast-forward law’s leap into the future? Will there be fundamental change in legal services delivery? Will courts move online more quickly than even he had thought? Susskind shares his thoughts on these questions and more.

Susskind is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to major professional firms and national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of professional service and, in particular, the ways in which technology and the Internet are changing the work of lawyers. He has worked on legal technology for over 30 years.

Susskind has, since 1998, been IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is president of the Society for Computers and Law, chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council, and chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, where he is also a visiting professor. He also holds professorships at UCL, Gresham College, London, and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

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David Lat defied the popular conception of who should be hit with a serious case of COVID-19. Just 44 years old, a two-time marathoner, with a young family and a successful career as a legal recruiter and journalist, and best known as the founder of the blog Above the Law, he did not fit the mold of a person at high risk.

But what started early in March as fever and chills eventually led to 17 days in a New York City hospital, six of them spent intubated and on a respirator in ICU. As two major news organizations began preparing his obituary, his family, friends and thousands of social media followers prayed for his recovery.

Over half of COVID-19 patients who go on a respirator do not survive. Lat was one of the fortunate ones. After six days, he recovered enough to be extubated and moved out of ICU. Then, on April 1, he sent out a Tweet announcing that he was about to be discharged.

Now recovering with his husband and son at his parents’ home in New Jersey, Lat -- still hoarse from the intubation -- joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his ordeal and share his thoughts on what he learned going through it.

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In Australia, as elsewhere, COVID-19 is creating a surge in the demand for legal help, especially among low-income individuals, as people face job losses, evictions, bankruptcy, domestic violence, and end-of-life issues. Further complicating the situation there is that parts of the country are still recovering from the bush fires that only recently were extinguished.

With face-to-face legal help not possible, technology is a critical tool and effective tool in meeting the demand for help, as Justice Connect, an Australian legal services charitable organization, is demonstrating. In recent years, it has developed a number of innovative tools to help people get legal help and understand their legal rights.

Our guest this week is Kate Fazio, head of innovation and engagement at Justice Connect. A former corporate lawyer, she leads the organization’s development of online and technology tools to increase access to justice and legal empowerment.

In addition to its COVID-19 resource center, Justice Connect’s technology includes an online intake and referral tool, a cloud-based case management system, a Pro Bono Portal matter distribution system that they are working to expand globally, and the newly launched Justice Connect Answers, which allows people to ask discrete legal questions and receive quick, confidential answers from attorneys.

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Even as the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled any sense of business as usual last week, the document-automation company Litera seemed to stay a step ahead, becoming one of the first major legal technology companies to take steps to continue operations, quickly pivoting to develop a lite version of its deal-management platform to offer for free, and completing the notable acquisition of Best Authority.

Litera has been a company on the move since 2016, when a $100 million investment from K1 Investment Management led to the combination of four document-technology companies – Litera, Microsystems, XRef and The Sackett Group – into a single business. After K1 sold the company to Hg Capital Trust last year, two more major acquisitions followed, of U.K. company Workshare in July 2019 and deal-management platform Doxly in August 2019.

Leading the company through these changes since 2016 has been CEO Avaneesh Marwaha, a former intellectual property lawyer who transitioned his career into a series of business-executive roles, including as chief operating officer of Keno Kozie Associates, a major provider of outsourced IT for global law firms.

In this episode of LawNext, Marwaha joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the recent news involving his company, how his company is continuing to serve customers in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of Litera into the company it is today, and the company’s future plans.

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On Monday, March 23, the practice management company Clio announced that it was committing $1 million to a disaster relief fund to help the legal community successfully navigate the challenges and hurdles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We want to ensure lawyers are set up to succeed as well as ensuring their their clients can continue to get the legal help they need,” Jack Newton, the company’s cofounder and CEO, explained.

In this episode of LawNext, Newton joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why his company created the fund and how it will be deployed. He also shares his thoughts on how the coronavirus crisis will reshape the legal profession and the practice of law, both over the short term and well into the future.

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On Thursday, March 12, facing the escalating threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Brigham Young University Law School made the decision to close down live classes, send students home, and teach the remainder of the semester online.

As it happened, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the law school that day, where he was scheduled to interview the school’s head of infrastructure and technology, David Armond, about its law and corpus linguistics initiative.

But as they sat down to record, Armond had just come from a meeting with the school’s deans and others in which the school had finalized the decision to close down for the remainder of the semester and put its classes online, so he graciously agreed to discuss how the school reached that decision and how it would be implemented.

In this brief episode, Armond discussed how a law school prepares to shut down and then executes on that decision. We’ll post the remainder of the interview – the part about law and corpus linguistics – later as a separate episode.

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At ABA TECHSHOW 2020, Vicki Huff Eckert, U.S. and global new ventures and innovation leader at PwC, was the featured speaker at the Rebels Riot Luncheon, an event honoring the Legal Technology Resource Center’s 2020 Women of Legal Tech and the ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels.

Shortly after the luncheon, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Eckert for a live conversation to discuss innovation in professional services, the parallels between the accounting profession and the legal profession, and PwC’s recent launch of PwC InsightsOfficer, an automated bookkeeping product designed for small and medium law firms.

As PwC’s new ventures and innovation leader since 20176 Eckert is responsible for streamlining the firm’s approach to the marketplace by elevating its strengths in new and creative ways to unlock business value. Previously, she served in a range of roles for PwC, having led its global technology industry and co-founding its Silicon Valley Advisory practice.

In 2016, Eckert was named one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. In 2008, she was recognized by Consulting magazine as a leader in client service within the consulting industry. In 2007, she was recognized by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a member of the 40-under-40 emerging leaders within Silicon Valley.

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When Jerry Levine became general counsel of IPsoft in December 2015, the artificial intelligence company had been in business since 1998, but it had never had an inhouse lawyer. That meant Levine had the daunting task of creating a legal department from scratch, within an established company that had customers worldwide.

More than four years later, Levine has built an international team of inhouse legal professionals, implemented governance standards, put in place compliance policies, set up processes for contract management and legal operations, and much more.

He is also a tech- and business-savvy lawyer who has relied heavily on technology to help build the department and accomplish its goals.

In a special episode of LawNext recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City, host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Levine to talk about the challenges of building a legal department and the role technology played -- and continues to play -- in helping him meet those challenges.

Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder of Plat4orm PR, for her assiduous assistance in organizing this panel.

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The growing use of legal analytics is rapidly transforming the practice of law. Within law firms, analytics drive litigation strategy, business development efforts, and hiring decisions. Within corporate legal departments, analytics drive outside counsel hiring and internal business operations.

In a special episode of LawNext recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City, we bring together a super session of leading experts to discuss this new world of data-driven law.

Joining host Bob Ambrogi for this special episode are:

• Eric M. Falkenberry, litigation partner at DLA Piper, where he specializes in the assessment, quantification and transfer of litigation risk through data mining, litigation analytics, and predictive modeling.
• Peter A. Geovanes, head of data strategy, AI and analytics at the law firm Winston & Strawn, where he is responsible for achieving innovation in the areas of enterprise-wide data, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
• Karl Harris, CEO at legal analytics company Lex Machina, where he leads strategy and operations and, prior to the company’s acquisition by LexisNexis, he led all product development.
• Mark A. Smolik, chief legal and compliance officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, where he serves as global chair of the organization's supply chain legal practice group.

Listen to this episode to learn how data analytics are enabling lawyers to make more informed and strategic decisions about all facets of their practices, and hear the panelists’ predictions for how this field will evolve in coming years.

Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder of Plat4orm PR, for her assiduous assistance in organizing this panel.

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As corporate legal departments seek to control costs and drive innovation, how can better use of data, metrics and analytics help? How are corporate counsel using analytics to measure and improve performance internally and among outside counsel?

These questions were the topic of a special episode of LawNext, recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City with a panel of four corporate counsel and executives who are leaders in law department innovation.

My guests for this special episode were:

• Jason Barnwell, assistant general counsel-modern legal at Microsoft, where he leads a team tasked with driving legal department innovation.
• Laurie Ehrlich, associate general counsel and head of legal operations at Cognizant, where she manages the finances, technology and knowledge management for its 200-plus person legal department.
• Jeff Reihl, executive vice president and chief technology officer at LexisNexis, where he is responsible for driving technology transformation, with a focus on data analytics and artificial intelligence.
• Mark A. Smolik, chief legal and compliance officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas, where he serves as global chair of the organization's supply chain legal practice group.

Listen to hear their insights and experiences using data analytics to improve legal department operations and drive efficiencies both internally and externally.

Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder of Plat4orm PR, for her assiduous assistance in organizing this panel.

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In the legal industry, the concept of design thinking has become synonymous with the name Margaret Hagan. Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, she is also a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, a ubiquitous speaker at legal conferences worldwide, and a leading advocate for making the law more accessible.

After graduating from Stanford Law in 2013, she became a fellow at the d.school, where she launched the Program for Legal Tech & Design, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful and engaging. She also started the blog Open Law Lab to document legal innovation and design work.

Now, she teaches a series of project-based classes, with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services. She also leads workshops to train legal professionals in the design process, to produce client-focused innovation. During the past year, Hagan has played a leading role in helping Utah launch an ambitious experiment in legal regulatory reform.

At the recent Innovations in Technology Conference presented by the Legal Services Corporation, Hagan sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record a live conversation about design thinking in law and how it can enhance access to justice.

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In multiple ways, Stacy Butler is immersed in seeking to innovate the justice system and the delivery of legal services.

As director of the Innovation for Justice program at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, she leads students in thinking critically about the power of technology and innovation to close the justice gap. As president of the board of Step Up To Justice, she is helping to rethink the provision of free legal services. As a member of the Arizona Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, she is helping to reshape the regulatory rules that inhibit innovation.

Among the projects she has helped spearhead are a new tier of civil legal professional in Arizona, a free tool for helping tenants and landlords communicate, a toolkit for advocates of human trafficking survivors, and an ambitious tenant-education program to reduce evictions. She has 20 years of experience in community advocacy work related to pro bono legal services, and was named three times as one of the Top 50 Pro Bono Attorneys in Arizona.

At the recent Innovations in Technology Conference presented by the Legal Services Corporation, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Butler for a face-to-face conversation about her work and her broader thoughts regarding innovation in legal services.

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It was an epiphany, of sorts, for Greg Garman. In 2015, after 18 years at the same firm, including several as managing partner, he came to believe that most firms operated under a broken business model. Within weeks, he and several colleagues left the firm to start a smaller, more innovative practice, and he began to develop the concept for LawClerk, a marketplace where solos and small firms can hire freelance lawyers to assist them with specific projects.

Now CEO of LawClerk, Garman -- who started the company together with his law partners Talitha Gray Kozlowski and Kristin Tyler -- has a vision for someday building it into the largest backbone provider of legal services in the United States. More importantly, he believes LawClerk will disrupt how small firms hire and how freelance lawyers get work -- providing both firms and freelancers greater profitability and flexibility.

In this episode of LawNext, Garman joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he believes LawClerk provides small firms with a better option for staffing their firms, one that he says will enable them to be more profitable while charging their clients less. He also shares his thoughts about the business of law more broadly and how he sees the industry evolving.

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Jim Sandman may be one of the most impassioned advocates in the United States for ensuring access to justice for all. As president of the Legal Services Corporation since 2011, he oversees an organization that funds free civil legal services to more than 130 legal aid programs throughout the country. As a frequent speaker and advocate, he forcefully makes the case for equal access to justice.

In this episode of LawNext, Sandman joins host Bob Ambrogi for a frank and thoughtful discussion about the justice gap in the U.S. and his ideas for how to bridge it, from increasing funding for legal aid to loosening restrictions on legal practice. They also discuss the role of technology and the 2013 report that Sandman spearheaded, Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice.

Before joining the LSC, Sandman spent 30 years as a lawyer with the firm Arnold & Porter, including 10 years as the firm’s managing partner. Wanting to spend more time in public service, he became general counsel for the District of Columbia Public Schools, where he stayed until the opportunity arose to join the LSC. He is a past president of the 100,000-member District of Columbia Bar.

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Jeroen Plink was named in 2018 as CEO of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions, a subsidiary of the international law firm Clifford Chance that designs and develops software to address clients’ business challenges. He is responsible for product development and go-to-market strategy for all its products, including CC Dr@ft, a legal document automation platform.

Plink is a legal technology veteran who, in 2007, moved to the United States to set up Practical Law Company US. Within five years, he successfully grew the business from two employees to 250, and had 80% of the AmLaw 200 and thousands of in-house departments as customers. In 2013, Practical Law Company was acquired by Thomson Reuters.

After leaving Practical Law, Plink focused on providing strategic guidance as a board member and senior advisor to legal tech startups. He is currently on the board of the legal research startup Casetext and he has also served on the boards of Compliance.ai, a regulatory data and predictive analytics company, and Kira Inc., which uses AI to analyze and review complex documents.

Plink started his career at Clifford Chance's Amsterdam office in 1996 as a private equity associate. He left the firm in 2000 to cofound a company that developed software for due diligence in the M&A transactions. In 2002, he sold that company to Practical Law Company, where he led application development in London before launching its U.S. operation.

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As executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, Jayne Reardon oversees programs and initiatives to increase the civility and professionalism of attorneys and judges, create inclusiveness in the profession, and promote increased service to the public.

In this special edition of LawNext recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, Reardon joined host Bob Ambrogi. They discussed Reardon’s thoughts on recent initiatives in several states to loosen professional-conduct rules. They also talk about Reardon’s work to promote civility and what it means for legal professionals.

A frequent writer and speaker on topics involving the changing practice of law, Reardon believes that embracing inclusiveness and innovation will ensure that the profession remains relevant and impactful in the future.

Her prior experience includes many years of practice as a trial lawyer, committee work on diversity and recruiting issues, and handling attorney discipline cases as counsel to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission Review Board.

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In one of a series of special reports recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nehal Madhani, an attorney and the founder and CEO of the cloud-based IP filing software Alt Legal.

Before starting Alt Legal, Madhani practiced as an attorney at Kirkland & Ellis. He is a Python/Django developer and serves on the board of Django-NYC, a nonprofit organization with nearly 2,500 software developers as members. He is also a CodeX fellow at Stanford Law School.

Madhani speaks and writes regularly about the intersection of legal practice and technology. He has also co-authored several publications about the challenges of applying antitrust law to online business models, which have appeared in the Huffington Post and in the Journal of Management and Information Systems. He was selected for the 2016 Fastcase 50 – an award that “recognizes 50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

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In another of a series of special reports recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviews Ed Walters, CEO and cofounder of the online legal research company Fastcase.

Under Ed’s leadership, Fastcase has grown to become one of the world’s largest legal publishers, currently serving more than 800,000 subscribers from around the world. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and at Cornell Tech, where he teaches The Law of Robots, a class about the frontiers of law and technology.

Before founding Fastcase, Ed worked at Covington & Burling, in Washington D.C. and Brussels, where he advised Microsoft, Merck, SmithKline, the Business Software Alliance, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. His practice focused on corporate advisory work for software companies and sports leagues, and intellectual property litigation.

See also: LawNext Episode 45: As Fastcase Turns 20, Founders Recount Its History and Predict Its Future.

Bonus Content Alert for our Patreon Supporters: Listen to Bob and Ed's conversation about skipping class in law school during our sound check on our Patreon page or using the custom RSS feed we provided!

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After 10 years as a lawyer at two leading transactional law firms, Haley Altman decided there should be a better way to structure the workflow around the many deals in which she was involved. So in 2016, she left law practice to found Doxly, a technology platform designed to transform the archaic and chaotic process of managing transactions into one that is streamlined and efficient.

Last August, Altman sold Doxly to the document technology company Litera Microsystems. That acquisition came just a month after Litera acquired U.K. company Workshare, which had its own transaction platform, Workshare Transact. Within a month, that meant, Litera went from having no transaction-management technology to owning two of the leading platforms -- platforms that spanned both the U.S. and European markets.

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, Altman, who is now general manager of transaction management at Litera, sat down with LawNext for a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi. In their conversation, she provides updates on the acquisition and shares her thoughts on the state of legal technology more broadly.

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In 2018, Mark Britton left Avvo, the often-controversial company he founded in 2006 and led as CEO until he sold it early last year to web behemoth Internet Brands. Soon after, he joined us here on LawNext in Episode 11 for an insightful conversation about why he started the company, why he sold it, and why he left.

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down again with Britton to record a live special edition of LawNext. Britton was attending the conference following Clio's announcement in September that he had joined its board of directors and become an investor.

In this interview, Britton explains why he decided to become involved with Clio, how he sees its mission as similar to Avvo’s, and what he believes its future will hold.

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George Psiharis was employee number six at Clio, which he joined shortly after the practice management company was founded in 2008. Now, he is COO of an enterprise with more than 400 employees and growing, responsible for customer success, business development and data operations. 

Psiharis also oversees Clio’s annual Legal Trends Report, the fourth of which was released at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego. This year’s report included a unique feature, a study that Clio said was the largest nationwide assessment of client services among law firms. 

Psiharis joined host Bob Ambrogi for a special edition recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, where he discussed some of the surprising and notable findings of the Legal Trends Report. He also discusses the growth he has overseen during a decade at Clio and how his role has evolved.

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Nineteen years ago, Mark Harris and Alec Guettel founded Axiom, a pioneering service to provide on-demand legal talent to corporate legal departments, growing it into a company with a roster of more than 2,000 lawyers that works with over half of the Fortune 100, while also developing technology and managed services arms.

Last February, gearing up for a possible IPO, Axiom spun off its technology and managed services entities into two new companies: Knowable, which uses machine-learning technology to help companies better understand their contracts, and Axiom Managed Services (AMS), which offers people, processes and technology to provide outsourced legal help to companies.

With the spin-off, Harris and Guettel moved to Knowable, with Harris as CEO and Guettel as CTO. In July, Knowable announced that it had entered into a joint venture agreement with LexisNexis Legal & Professional, allowing Knowable to continue to operate independently, but with the benefit of LexisNexis’s resources and infrastructure.

On this episode of LawNext, Harris joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his new “contract intelligence” company, which aims to help companies get a global view of their risks, obligations and entitlements. He also recounts his 19 years starting and growing Axiom.

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The seventh-annual Clio Cloud Conference recently wrapped up in San Diego. In this special edition of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sat down at the conference for a conversation with Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio, to talk about the conference and the company.

With Clio having recently announced a $250 million funding round — one of the largest ever for a legal technology company — there was a lot to talk about. In addition, at the conference, Newton announced the forthcoming release of his book, The Client-Centered Law Firm: How to Succeed In An Experience-Driven World, in which he lays out his blueprint for law firm success.

Newton talks about his vision for Clio to become the “operating system of law” and to help lawyers close the gap in access to justice. He also lays out his ideas for how lawyers can achieve greater success by building a client-centered law firm.

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In August, a Utah task force on access to justice issued a report that called for “profoundly reimagining the way legal services are regulated in order to harness the power of entrepreneurship, capital, and machine learning in the legal arena.”

Two days later, the Utah Supreme Court voted unanimously to approve the report’s recommendations, including substantially loosening regulatory restrictions on lawyers and creating a “regulatory sandbox” to allow a market of non-traditional legal entities to provide legal services in the state.

In this episode of LawNext, we take an in-depth look at this unprecedented experiment in enhancing access to justice through regulatory reform. Joining host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the report, Narrowing the Access-to-Justice Gap by Reimagining Regulation, and its implementation are the cochairs of the Task Force, who will now continue as cochairs to oversee the implementation of the recommendations:

Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court in February 2015 by Gov. Gary Herbert. Prior to his appointment, he served as a trial court judge for over 10 years. A 1989 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began his legal career as a litigator with the law firm of Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, where he focused on complex civil litigation.

John R. Lund is past-president of the Utah State Bar and partner with Parsons Behle & Latimer in Salt Lake City, where he focuses his practice on litigation and trial work. A 1984 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, he is also chair of the Utah Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence.

Further reading:

• Utah Supreme Court Votes to Approve Pilot Allowing Non-Traditional Legal Services.
• Utah Task Force Calls for ‘Profoundly Reimagining the Way Legal Services Are Regulated’.

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In LawNext Episode 48, host Bob Ambrogi traveled to Toronto to record a live interview with the founders of the AI-driven legal research platform ROSS Intelligence, CEO Andrew Arruda and CTO Jimoh Ovbiagele, in which they discussed the company’s rise from startup in 2014 to a more mature and established company.

In this second interview recorded in Toronto, we take a deep dive into the artificial-intelligence technology that drives the ROSS legal research platform. For this interview, CTO Ovbiagele returns, joined this time by Stergios Anastasiadis, head of engineering at ROSS. They discuss why they believe ROSS’s AI technology is unique, how they see AI changing the legal industry, and what’s ahead for ROSS and AI in law.

Ovbiagele is a computer scientist who was one of the three original founders of ROSS in 2014, when it emerged out of a cognitive-computing competition at the University of Toronto. Anastasiadis is a computer scientist who joined the company earlier this year to lead the further refinement and development of the product. Formerly, he was the director of engineering at Shopify and engineering manager at Google.

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Ralph Baxter spent nearly a quarter century as chairman and CEO of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, leading its growth from a regional San Francisco law firm specializing in municipal finance to one of the world’s largest firms with offices worldwide and a diverse array of practices. Along the way, both Baxter and Orrick earned kudos for their many innovations in the delivery and pricing of legal services and the staffing and structure of the firm.

Now retired from Orrick, Baxter serves as an advisor and consultant devoted to inspiring positive transformation in the ways legal services are delivered globally. In particular, he believes that technology and process design enable legal services to be delivered better, faster and cheaper, and to be available at reasonable cost to all who need them, and his goal is to help make this happen.

Baxter is also an advisor to a number of legal organizations. He was chairman of the advisory board of the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, is on the board of directors of Intapp, and is on the legal advisory board of LegalZoom. He was previously on the boards of directors of both Lex Machina and Ravel Law prior to their acquisitions by LexisNexis.

He is a fellow and senior advisor to CodeX, the Stanford University Center for Law and Informatics, and is a member of the advisory boards of the Stanford Law School Center on the Legal Profession, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, and the Georgetown Law School Center for the Study of the Legal Profession.

Included in 2009 in the ABA Journal’s inaugural class of Legal Rebels, Baxter was an elementary school teacher before attending law school. Last year, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from West Virginia, losing in the primary.

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On Sept. 4, 2019, the cloud practice management company Clio announced $250 million funding round -- one of the largest ever for a legal technology company. Shortly after making the announcement during an event in Clio’s Burnaby, B.C., headquarters, cofounder and CEO Jack Newton sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for this live recording session to discuss the news.

In this special edition of LawNext, Newton provides additional background on the investments and the investors, what this means for his company, and how he believes this serves the greater purpose of making law better and closing the justice gap. He also provides a peek at the company’s roadmap over the coming months, and discusses the news that Mark Britton, founder of Avvo, has joined Clio’s board of directors.

Make sure to listen until the end for an exclusive LawNext promo code for the Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego this September.

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Often called the app store of law, Reynen Court has fast become one of the most talked-about companies in legal technology. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to the rapidly growing universe of vertically integrated SaaS providers.

In this episode of LawNext, recorded live at the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Andrew Klein, Reynen Court’s founder and CEO. Klein started the company in 2017 after he realized how little had changed in the basic technology infrastructure underpinning even the largest practices – and as a result, how difficult it was for firms to adopt modern technology or achieve genuine business transformation.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Klein was an associate at Cravath, Swaine and Moore when he left in 1992 to start a brewery. In 1995, to raise money for the brewery, Klein applied his experience as a securities lawyer to launch the first-ever initial public offering sold through the Internet.

The success and notoriety of that IPO led Klein to launch Wit Capital, an investment bank dedicated to helping other companies raise money online. The company flourished, recording more than $350 million in annual revenues, and itself went public in 1999. Ultimately, Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab.

After Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab, Klein moved to Amsterdam where, over the next 15 years, he co-founded two asset management firms, Skybridge Capital and Ultra Capital, and, in between those ventures, created and led Spotzer Media, a provider of digital advertising solutions to local businesses.

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For the 50th episode of LawNext, we could think of no more appropriate topic than the state of podcasting in the legal industry. And we could think of no one better suited to the topic than Adam Camras, CEO of the Legal Talk Network, and Laurence Colletti, its executive producer.

Camras is a longtime entrepreneur in the legal industry whose company Lawgical acquired the Legal Talk Network in 2013. Since then, he has launched an array of law-related podcasts and made the Legal Talk Network’s recording booth a ubiquitous presence at legal conferences throughout the United States.

Colletti, with both a law degree and a master’s in business administration, was a solo practitioner in Colorado before joining the Legal Talk Network in 2014. He had long had a passion for web-based media and a particular interest in podcasting and video, so moving to the Legal Talk Network was a natural fit. As executive producer, he helps plan existing shows and conceive new ones, and is a regular host of the network’s On the Road series.

In this episode, Camras and Colletti speak with host Bob Ambrogi about the state of podcasting in the legal industry, its rapidly growing popularity, and how it is likely to evolve into the future.

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Which firms are best prepared to keep pace with changes in the legal market? That was the question explored in a recent survey of U.S. and European law firms, the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, conducted by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory. Among the findings: The firms that are best prepared for the future are those that already leverage technology.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the survey with Dean Sonderegger, who was recently named to lead Wolters Kluwer Legal and Regulatory U.S., the division of the global publishing giant that serves legal, corporate and compliance professionals in the United States. In a conversation recorded live at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, they also discuss innovation in the legal industry and the future of Wolters Kluwer.

At Wolters Kluwer, Sonderegger -- whose formal title is senior vice president and general manager -- is responsible for accelerating the vision and strategy for the business. He has a particular focus on rapid development of advanced digital products and services to enhance customers’ efficiencies and workflows.

Sonderegger is also a well-known speaker and thought leader on topics including artificial intelligence, blockchain, the evolution of the legal profession, and business transformation. He writes a regular column for Above the Law on the intersection of technology and the practice of law, and his commentary has appeared in several publications including Forbes, CFO Magazine and the ABA Journal.

A veteran of the information and software industries, Sonderegger joined Wolters Kluwer in 2015 as the head of legal markets and innovation. In that role, he is credited with spearheading customer-focused innovation. Earlier in his career, he was executive director of product management and marketing at Bloomberg BNA.

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On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi travels to Toronto to sit down for a live recording with the founders of the AI-driven legal research platform ROSS Intelligence, CEO Andrew Arruda and CTO Jimoh Ovbiagele. Along with a third founder, Pargles Dall’Oglio, Arruda and Ovbiagele first developed ROSS at the University of Toronto in 2014, rapidly gaining international attention for what the news media dubbed the robot lawyer of the future.

In short order, the founders were invited to Silicon Valley to participate in the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator. Denton’s NextLaw Labs made ROSS one of its earliest investments. In 2015, they secured $4.3 million in seed funding and then, two years later, another $8.7 million in Series A funding. In 2017, Forbes named the three founders to its “30 Under 30.”

So where is ROSS today? On today’s episode, Arruda and Ovbiagele recount the founding of their company, its rapid rise, controversy over its marketing, major developments over the past year, and what lies ahead. They also share their thoughts about AI in legal more broadly and its potential impact on the practice of law.

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E-discovery company Casepoint is unusual among legal technology companies in that it has achieved significant growth in recent years, without taking on outside funding. Since 2015, the company has grown from 45 employees to 370, and in just the last year has seen its install base grow by more than 70 percent.

In this episode of LawNext, Haresh Bhungalia, the chief executive officer of Casepoint, joins host Bob Ambrogi, to discuss the company’s history, growth and current position in the market. They also discuss Bhungalia’s thoughts about whether and when to take outside funding, the benefits of avoiding outside funding, and scaling a company based on organic growth.

Bhungalia was just 25 when he launched his first company, 2020 Company LLC, a government services business that provided technology systems integration, development and support to federal government entities including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After growing that company to 650 employees, he and cofounder Paresh Ghelani sold it in 2012.

While still at 2020, Bhungalia had been an angel investor in and advisor to a new startup, then called Legal Discovery, that had developed one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. After selling 2020, he joined Casepoint as CEO, where he has been instrumental in its growth.

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Judy Perry Martinez is a lawyer who has made public service a part of her career from the start. She continues that legacy in August as she assumes the presidency of the 400,000-member American Bar Association during its annual meeting in San Francisco. On this episode of LawNext, Martinez joins host Bob Ambrogi for a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the ABA and the profession at large.

Over more than 30 years, Martinez has held various leadership positions at the ABA, including as chair of the ABA Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which three years ago released it seminal study on access to legal services, Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States. Martinez also chaired the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which evaluates all prospective nominees to the federal bench.

Other roles in which she has served include as the ABA’s lead representative to the United Nations, a member of the ABA Task Force on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, a member of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, a member of the Council of the ABA Center on Diversity, and a member of the ABA Commission on Domestic Violence.

She spent much of her career at the law firm Simon, Peragine, Smith & Redfearn in New Orleans, where she is of counsel. In 2003, she joined Northrop Grumman Corporation as assistant general counsel-litigation, eventually rising to become vice president and chief compliance officer before leaving in 2015 to spend a year at the Advanced Leadership Institute at Harvard University.

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It was 20 years ago that two Covington & Burling associates, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, made the audacious move of quitting their jobs and launching the legal research company Fastcase. Their goal was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology. Two decades later, that once-scrappy company is now a major player in the legal research market.

At the recent annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, Walters and Rosenthal — now CEO and president respectively — sat down for a live interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. They recount the beginnings of their company, its growth over the intervening 20 years, and their successes and mistakes over the years. They also offer predictions for where Fastcase and legal research will be in another 20 years.

This episode of LawNext was produced and recorded in collaboration with the Legal Talk Network. A big thanks to them for partnering with us on this podcast.

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By any measure, the London-based legal AI startup Luminance has had spectacular success. Not yet three years old, it has raised $23 million in funding, has achieved a valuation of $100 million, is used by more than 150 organizations on six continents, and has won numerous technology awards, including the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the innovation category.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi interviews Emily Foges, who joined Luminance as CEO in 2016 when the company was a small team of technologists and lawyers. She took the product to market and led the growth of the business, which doubled in size every quarter through 2017.

Foges, who had never before worked in the legal industry, discusses the company’s trajectory from its start at Cambridge University to where it is today and explains what she believes distinguishes it from other AI companies. She shares her insights on how AI is changing legal practice, explains why she believes AI has reached a tipping point in law, and offers her projections for how AI will shape the future of the legal industry.

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As director of applied innovation at UC Hastings College of the Law, Alice Armitage oversees two innovation-focused projects at the law school: LexLab, a multifaceted innovation program for students, startups and the broader legal tech community; and Startup Legal Garage, a program offering free legal assistance to early-stage technology and biotech companies.

LexLab has three areas of focus: building a concentration in law and technology for students; setting up an incubator for legal tech startups on campus, a space where students and alumni can interact with entrepreneurs; and hosting regular large and small-scale community events. The incubator recently graduated its first cohort of startups.

In this episode of LawNext, Armitage joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these programs and her thoughts more broadly about teaching innovation and mentoring startups. She also talks about the challenges startups face, the importance of promoting diversity among startup founders, and the role of technology in enhancing access to justice.

Armitage was the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal before becoming a tax attorney in Washington, D.C., first with Arnold & Porter and then as international chief counsel at the Internal Revenue Service, where she worked on developing tax policy for complex cross-border financial transactions. She left law for a period to start two companies of her own, before coming to Hastings, where she is also a professor of law.

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“We are not your grandfather’s law librarian.” As president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Femi Cadmus makes that point emphatically. Her organization recently completed it first-ever AALL State of the Profession report, an in-depth look at what information professionals do and how they do it. The report’s bottom line is that technology is making the role of the law librarian more diverse and more essential than ever before.

As the AALL prepares to convene in Washington, D.C., in July for its annual meeting, Cadmus shows LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the state of the law librarian profession and the evolving role of information professionals in law firms, corporations, law schools and government.

Born in New York and raised in Nigeria, Cadmus is currently at Duke University School of Law, where she is the Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty research professor of law, associate dean of information services and technology, and director of the Michael J. Goodson Library. With almost three decades in law libraries, she was formerly at Cornell University, where she was Edward Cornell law librarian, associate dean for library services and professor of the practice. Her earlier experience includes positions at the law schools at Yale, George Mason University and the University of Oklahoma.

Cadmus’ educational background includes an LL.B. from the University of Jos, Nigeria, B.L Nigerian Law School; an LL.M. (Law in Development) from the University of Warwick, England; and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Oklahoma. She is admitted to practice in New York.

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Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and territories.

On this episode of LawNext, we talk with Thomas R. Bruce, who is retiring June 30 after 27 years leading the LII. In 1992, Bruce and former Cornell Law Dean Peter W. Martin founded the LII. They codirected it until Martin retired in 2003, after which Bruce continued as sole director. The LII blazed the trail of publishing law online for free, inspiring the creation of some two dozen similar organizations throughout the world, and carrying the banner for the right of citizens to have access to the laws that govern them.

Bruce says he is most proud that he was able to break the monopoly on legal information held by commercial publishers. “The time was ripe for change, and we were the first to use the Web to try our hands at it.”

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Tom started his career as a stage and production manager before joining Cornell Law School as director of educational technologies. The first seeds of the LII were sowed, Bruce once wrote, with two gin-and-tonics, consumed by someone else. The rest, as they say, is history -- a history Bruce recounts in this episode.

Related links:

• End of an Era: Tom Bruce, Trailblazing Director of LII, to Retire after 27 Years.
• We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When.
• On Law Technology Now: A Conversation With Legal Information Institute Cofounder Tom Bruce On Its 25th Anniversary.

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A lawyer, economist and scholar, Gillian K. Hadfield has devoted much of her career to studying how legal systems can be improved to ensure they meet the needs of the people they are meant to serve. In her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, she argues that the complexity of today’s global, digital economy has pushed law to its limits, making it too expensive, too complicated, and too far out of touch with our needs.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Hadfield about her book and her proposals for reinventing the legal system. They also discuss her ideas for addressing the access-to-justice gap, her recent research on ensuring the safety of artificial intelligence, her belief that private investment is essential to sparking innovation in law, and her work with the Utah Supreme Court to launch a regulatory sandbox to test many of her theories.

With both a J.D. from Stanford Law School and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, Hadfield is currently based at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management, where she teaches courses in legal innovation and design, responsible development and governance of AI, the origins and evolution of the law, and contract law and strategy.

She is a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values and Policy and Global Agenda Council on Justice and co-curates the Forum’s Transformation Map for Justice and Legal Infrastructure.

She was appointed in 2017 to the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education and is a member of the World Justice Project’s Research Consortium. She serves as an advisor to The Hague Institute for the Innovation of Law, LegalZoom, and other legal tech startups.

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This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams, author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting.

On this episode of LawNext, Adams and Chas Rampenthal, LegalZoom’s general counsel, join host Bob Ambrogi to provide details on Adams’ new role as head of contracts and the system they are building to give small businesses a better contracting experience -- one that is driven more by expertise than by technology alone.

This episode gets kind of meta for us here at LawNext. Rampenthal was our guest for a show last August. After hearing the episode, Adams reached out to Ambrogi to ask if he would make an introduction to Rampenthal. Ambrogi did, and that led eventually to Adams’ hiring and the launch of this new project.

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A tremor rolled through the legal industry recently when Thomson Reuters announced that it had sold its managed services business, Pangea3, to global Big Four professional services firm Ernst & Young, a sign of Ernst & Young’s increasing expansion into legal services.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with two of the leaders of Pangea3, Joe Borstein, global director at Pangea3, and Ed Sohn, vice president of product and partner management there. They provide further details on the deal and discuss its broader implications for the legal industry.

Joe Borstein is a global director with Pangea3, helping to oversee over 1,000 full-time legal, compliance, and technology professionals in offices across the globe, and also director of innovation for Thomson Reuters’ corporate segment. Prior to joining Pangea3, Borstein practiced law at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, LLP, where he managed complex litigation in federal, state, and administrative courts. He is a 2005 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Ed Sohn is the vice president of product management and partnerships for Pangea3. He oversees an award-winning product portfolio that tech-enable managed services, products built in-house or from third-party partners. Sohn has served in a variety of leadership roles within Pangea3. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, he was a business litigation associate at King & Spalding in Atlanta, GA, where he is still based. Sohn has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Illinois.

Borstein and Sohn also co-author the alt.legal column on Above the Law, where they write about innovative technologies and businesses in the legal industry.

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“Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone,” says Andy Wilson, cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull. “We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth.”

Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-processing company they had run since 2004. As the software took off, they gave up data processing to devote themselves full time to building and expanding Logikcull. In 2016, they brought in $10 million in a Series A financing, and then in 2018 they raised another $25 million.

Today, coming off what Wilson says was the company’s biggest growth year ever, Logikcull has customers all over the world, ranging in size from solo practitioners to major law firms, from Fortune 500 corporations such as Walmart to city and state governments, and it is even used by some journalists.

On this episode of LawNext, recorded live in Logikcull’s San Francisco office, Wilson sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company’s founding, growth and future direction, including some of the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them. He also talks more generally about the state of the e-discovery industry.

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Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium’s lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even including marketing, and develops and operates software to streamline the firm’s workflows.

Atrium was launched in 2017 by Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who sold the Twitch video platform he created to Amazon for $970 million, and Augie Rakow, a former partner representing startups at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to address Kan’s own frustrations as a client with how legal services are delivered. Atrium raised an initial $10.5 million in funding in 2017 and then another $65 million last September in round led by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

On this episode of LawNext, cofounder Rakow, now chair of Atrium, joins host Bob Ambrogi for a frank and informative discussion. Rakow discusses the origins and structure of Atrium, the firm’s progress so far in achieving its goals, Atrium’s blueprint for future development, and the obstacles and challenges it has faced. They also discuss how Atrium differs from Clearspire, an earlier attempt at a dual-entity model.

Rakow attended Harvard Divinity School before discovering an interest in law and attending UC Hastings College of the Law. He joined Orrick as a corporate associate, later becoming partner. He specialized in representing startups in the Bay Area, where his clients included the driverless car industry’s first “unicorn” startup, the world’s then fastest-growing SaaS company, the first venture-backed consumer drone company, the leading Sand Hill-backed consumer packaged goods company, and several of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture funds.

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Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin, helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice.

Paladin has attracted some notable investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and host of the show Shark Tank,and also notable development partnerships, including with the law firms Dentons and Wilson Sonsini and the Chicago Bar Foundation.

On this episode of LawNext, Conrad joins host Bob Ambrogi for an in-depth discussion of the company she and cofounder Kristen Sonday launched in 2015. She explains how the platform works, describes Paladin’s partnerships with legal departments, law firms and associations to expand it capabilities, and discusses her views on how technology can play a role in expanding access to justice.

Before founding Paladin, Conrad was a litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. An alumnus of NYU Law, McGill University and Sciences Po Paris, she previously worked at the United Nations on International Criminal Court issues, and has worked in international law around the world. In 2017, she was named both an ABA Journal Legal Rebel and a Fastcase 50 legal innovation honoree. In 2019, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center named her to its roster of Women of Legal Tech.

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Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting.

This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings’ legal innovation hub, LexLab. The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some of the factors and considerations driving change in the law firm model.

Panelists speaking in this week’s episode are: Augie Rakow of Atrium LLP; Sameena Kluck, previously of Thomson Reuters; Nick Long, Director of Gravity Stack at Reed Smith LLP; and Patrick Palace, of Palace Law. The discussion is moderated by Alice Armitage, professor and Director of Applied Innovation at UC Hastings, and CEP of LexLab.

The panel was recorded as part of the LexLab Lunch-and-Learn speaker series. LexLab is an innovation hub within UC Hastings, which is building a concentration in law and technology for students, and an accelerator for legal tech startups.

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Everlaw is an e-discovery company that has attracted the interest of some big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms, raising nearly $35 million in the last three years. It was the first legal technology company to receive an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a firm known for backing a wide-ranging portfolio of successful companies such as Facebook Twitter, Airbnb, Box, Skype and Slack. Its $25 million Series B round last July was led by Menlo Ventures, one of the earliest Silicon Valley venture firms that also has a diverse portfolio that includes Uber, Roku, and Warby Parker.

Our guest this week, Everlaw’s CEO AJ Shankar, was a computer scientist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, when he founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. In a crowded e-discovery market, he believes that Everlaw stands out for its intuitive user interface, split-second speed, and range of features that span the e-discovery process from data uploads to trial preparation.

While working towards his doctorate, Shankar spent time as a technical expert at a national plaintiffs class-action law firm. Seeing the difficulties lawyers faced in sifting through massive quantities of data, he saw an opportunity to develop a better approach. That experience gave rise to Everlaw.

Shankar graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and computer science. He received his doctorate in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 2009. Prior to founding Everlaw, he cofounded Modista, a company that made shopping for apparel more intuitive.

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In February, Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini announced the launch of SixFifty, a software subsidiary that will develop automated tools designed to make legal processes more efficient and affordable for individuals, small businesses and emerging companies. Named president of SixFifty was Kimball Dean Parker, the lawyer who helped develop the innovative LawX design lab at BYU Law School.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi visits Parker in SixFifty’s Lehi, Utah, office, where they discuss Wilson Sonsini’s reasons for creating a software subsidiary and for locating it in Utah, the privacy tool SixFifty is developing for businesses to comply with California’s Consumer Privacy Act, and other products on SixFifty’s roadmap, including several to enhance access to justice.

Parker also talks about the LawX Lab and its work to develop SoloSuit, an online tool to help debtors respond to collection lawsuits; Parsons Behle Lab, the subsidiary he started for his former law firm, and its GDPR compliance tool; and his first start-up CO/COUNSEL, a legal education and crowdsourcing site.

A 2013 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Parker began his legal career as an associate with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco. He returned to his home state of Utah in 2016, where he was with the law firm Parsons Behle & Latimer until starting SixFifty this year.

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Gordon Smith, dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, once said: “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.”

Since becoming dean in 2016, Smith has worked tirelessly to make that happen, launching the nationally recognized LawX legal design lab, developing courses to teach non-traditional skills such as leadership, storytelling, and business ethics, launching clinical programs around unique skills such as entrepreneurship and conflict resolution; and spearheading development of the Law and Corpus Linguistics project.

On this episode of LawNext, Smith sits down in his Provo, Utah, office with host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about what it means for a law school to innovate and why it matters to the students, the school and the community at large. Smith also talks about BYU Law’s initiatives to expand its influence on a global sphere.

Smith has taught at six law schools in the U.S., as well as law programs in Australia, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, and Hong Kong. Earlier in his career, he was associate director of the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin, where he launched the annual Law & Entrepreneurship Retreat. More recently, he co-founded the Law & Entrepreneurship Association, a scholarly society that encourages the study of law and entrepreneurship. He is also one of the founding faculty members of the Crocker Innovation Fellowship at BYU.

In 2004, Smith co-founded (with Christine Hurt, also of BYU Law School) The Conglomerate Blog, a popular law professor blog focusing on business law.

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On Feb. 27, 2019, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite.

In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording of the live event. Listen as the 15 startups present their pitches, and then hear the final results and the announcement of the winner.

The 15 startups that participated were:

1. Lawble.
2. dealWIP.
3. DocStyle LLC.
4. Connective Counsel.
5. WarRoom.
6. JurisBytes.
7. OurChildInfo.com.
8. TrialLine.
9. Kinnami Software Corporation.
10. Fixi Subscription Plans.
11. Documate.
12. dtour.life.
13. EffortlessLegal.
14. Your Firm App.
15. Contract.one.

A huge thanks to the Legal Talk Network and Executive Producer Laurence Colletti for recording the competition and sharing the recording with us.

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In January, the world’s largest law firm, Baker McKenzie, announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty, to help the firm “enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients.” They join a team led by David Cambria, who last year left Fortune 50 company Archer Daniels Midland to become the firm’s global director of legal operations.

On this episode of LawNext, Um and Flaherty join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their new roles and share their thoughts on innovation at Baker McKenzie and in the delivery of legal services.

Um, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of pricing strategy, has more than 12 years of cross-functional experience in legal business. Most recently, she was founder and executive director of Six Parsecs, a company that applied research rigor, business analytics and storytelling to help legal businesses achieve success. Before that, she was at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, where she was director of strategic planning and analysis and, earlier, director of special projects. She is a regular contributor to the publication Legal Evolution.

Flaherty, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of legal project management, first rose to prominence while corporate counsel at Kia Motors for creating the Legal Tech Audit, a competency-based learning platform focused on the core technology tools of legal practice, and later the Service Delivery Review, using metrics and benchmarking to drive structured dialogue and continuous improvement between law departments and outside counsel. Based on these concepts, he founded Procertas, providing technology training and benchmarking to law firms, law schools, and other organizations.

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For some two decades, Mark Chandler has been a leading voice for innovation and technology in the operation of legal departments and the delivery of legal services. Executive vice president and chief legal officer at technology giant Cisco, he has been the company’s top lawyer since 2001 and a member of its legal department since 1996, when Cisco acquired Stratacom, where he had been general counsel.

In 2010, The National Law Journal named Chandler one of the 40 most influential lawyers of the decade, and in 2013, American Lawyer numbered him among the Top 50 Big Law Innovators of the Last 50 Years. In 2017, the Forum on Legal Evolution honored Chandler with its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, writing that he “has been at the forefront of legal department innovation and thought leadership, challenging the industry to consider new and better ways to serve internal and external clients.”

Chandler joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about innovation at Cisco, whose legal department is often cited as a model for others, as well as in legal departments generally and in the delivery of legal services. Other topics they discuss include privacy, the rise of legal operations, alternative legal services providers, and current technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.

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We thought 2018 was a banner year for investment in legal technology companies. But then, less than two weeks into 2019, the year got off to a roaring start with news of a $200 million strategic investment in Onit, a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process automation.

To discuss one of the largest investments ever in a legal technology company, cofounder and CEO Eric M. Elfman is our guest this week on LawNext. Elfman cofounded Onit nine years ago, together with Eric Smith, now Onit’s chief technology officer. The two had previously founded DataCert, a provider of matter management and legal and IP spend management for corporate legal departments that was eventually acquired by Wolters Kluwer.

A self-described serial entrepreneur, Elfman and host Bob Ambrogi discuss why he created the company and how its products, after some early pivots, matured to where they are today. He also discusses the investment by K1 Investment Management, a Los Angeles private equity firm that specializes in investments in high-growth enterprise software companies. In addition, Elfman talks about how the legal industry and legal technology have changed over the course of his career.

This episode was recorded live at the Legalweek conference in New York City on Jan. 30, 2019.

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Mark A. Cohen has long been ahead of the curve. After 25 years as an accomplished trial lawyer, he founded one of the first legal process outsourcing companies and then cofounded Clearspire, the groundbreaking two-company law firm and service provider that became the blueprint for a new generation of innovative legal services providers.

Now, Cohen puts his experience to work as a legal business consultant, providing services and training to law firms, legal departments and other organizations through his consulting firm LegalMosaic. He is also a widely read thought leader for his column at Forbes, where he writes about the business of law, now and into the future.

Cohen is also Distinguished Fellow at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and was recently appointed by the Singapore Academy of Law to serve as its inaugural LIFTED Catalyst-in-Residence.

On this episode of LawNext, Cohen joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about a range of topics. They discuss Clearspire and the lessons Cohen learned from that. They also talk about what Cohen sees as the “skills gap” in law and why it is that law schools and law firms are failing to address it. In the fact of a rapidly changing global legal economy, Cohen offers insights on how law firms should adapt.

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What do you get if you combine a virtual receptionist service with artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert: The answer is not robots answering the phone. Rather, the folks at Smith.ai say the combination results in a superior receptionist service for both live calls and website chat. By incorporating AI, they say, their service continually gets smarter as it comes to know your practice and your clients.

On this episode of LawNext, we speak with Smith.ai’s Justin Maxwell, cofounder and chief design officer, and Maddy Martin, head of growth and education. Among the topics discuss are the features that distinguish Smith.ai from its competitors, the types of law practices that are a good fit for a service such as this, and key questions a lawyer should ask when selecting a virtual receptionist service.

• Justin Maxwell, cofounder and chief design officer. Before founding Smith.ai, Maxwell was a design lead in Google’s Android group. He has designed products and led teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and a number of startups.
• Maddy Martin, head of growth and education. Martin has held roles in marketing, content management and audience development at a number of Silicon Valley technology companies. Most recently, she was general manager, content and community, and director of marketing at YourMechanic.com.

Special discount code: During the episode, Martin announced a special discount code that entitles you to $50 off your first month of live receptionist services (phone or web chat). The code is lawnext50.

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With Judicata, Itai Gurari believes he has built a better legal research platform. A lawyer and computer scientist, his approach to designing a legal research engine was to first “map the legal genome” -- that is, map the law with extreme accuracy and granularity. The result is a research engine that returns the best results the fastest, he says.

Gurari and his company also built Clerk, a tool that analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of legal briefs -- like moneyball for motions, he says. “Just as different batters have different on-base percentages, different motions have different probabilities of being granted or denied,” Gurari explains.

After a stint as an associate at Jones Day a decade ago, Gurari started his first legal research company, TraceLaw.com. When that closed in 2010, he joined Google as a software engineer working on Google Scholar. In 2011, he left Google to start Judicata. With $8 million in financing from some big-name investors, including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, Judicata was released to the public in May 2017.

In this episode of LawNext, Gurari speaks with host Bob Ambrogi about his thoughts on legal research, artificial intelligence, and what his tool Clerk has revealed about the quality of legal briefs.

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Our guest this week on LawNext is Daniel B. Rodriguez, who recently stepped down as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he gained wide recognition for his work to innovate legal education, and recently stepped up to become chair of the governing council of the ABA Center for Innovation, which focuses on improving the affordability, effectiveness, efficiency, and accessibility of legal services.

Rodriguez was dean at Northwestern Law from 2012-2018 and now serves on the school’s faculty as Harold Washington professor of law. Before joining Northwestern, Rodriguez was Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas-Austin; a research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy; dean and Warren Distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law; and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

Widely recognized as a thought leader on innovation in law and legal education, Rodriguez was the 2014 president of the Association of American Law Schools and was a member of the 2014-2016 ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and, in the spring semester of 2019, will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

In a wide-ranging interview, Rodriguez and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the meaning of innovation in law and at law schools and the obstacles to achieving innovation.

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In major legal industry news, global law company Elevate announced its acquisition of the legal AI technology and consulting firm LexPredict. The move combines the comprehensive legal services offering of Elevate with the data science team and AI engine of LexPredict. With Elevate’s alternative services model and LexPredict’s cutting-edge technology, does this acquisition foreshadow the future of legal practice?

In this episode of LawNext, we take a deep dive into the acquisition and what it means for the legal industry. Joining host Bob Ambrogi are two of the deal’s principles:

• Pratik Patel, vice president of innovation at Elevate. Patel oined Elevate as part of the acquisition of RFx LEGAL Analytics in 2012, prior to which he served as a founding member and partner at RFx LEGAL. Earlier, he was a senior managing consultant at Huron Legal, where he played a key role in the rapid growth of Huron’s Legal consulting practice.
• Daniel Martin Katz, cofounder and chief strategy officer of LexPredict, as well as professor of law at Chicago Kent College of Law and director of Chicago Kent’s Law Lab, a research center focused on legal innovation and technology. Katz has been named to the Fastcase 50, which "recognizes 50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law." He was also named to the ABA Journal's "Legal Rebels," a prestigious group of change leaders in the legal profession.

Patel and Katz describe what each of their companies brings to the table, how the two companies align, and why they believe the sum of the two makes both companies even greater.

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Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman, CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements.

Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the launch of the Agreements Network, which he describes as the “legal layer for a networked world.” The Agreements Network provides a base blockchain layer and other tools to serve as an ecosystem to create, distribute, and operate legal agreements.

Kuhlman envisions that lawyers will be able to generate new revenue by converting agreements they’ve created into products that can be sold through these networks. These “archetypes,” as Kuhlman calls them, would combine legal text with smart-contract workflows to allow commercial clients to create their own active agreements.

Now based in Scotland, Kuhlman is a U.S.-trained lawyer who went to work in Somaliland in eastern Africa and started a law firm there. His work representing companies in transactional matters helped convince him that there had to be a better way to manage agreements. That led him to launch Monax and the Agreements Network.

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In this special bonus episode of LawNext, we bring you a panel discussion on savvy podcasting for lawyers. Recently, at the 2018 Northeast Regional Conference of the Legal Marketing Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi joined a panel of legal marketing and media experts to discuss podcasting for lawyers and law firms. The panelists shared their tips and experiences on starting, producing and promoting legal podcasts.

The panel was moderated by Susan Peters, president of Greybridge PR in New York. In addition to Bob, the other panelists were Angela Robinson, marketing communications manager at the law firm Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner in Washington, D.C., and Michael Meyer, a New York photographer who specializes in corporate and legal marketing and who has his own podcast, the Legal Marketing Studio.

A special thanks to Michael Meyer for recording the panel and making it available to LawNext.

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In this episode of LawNext, we take you live to Russia, where we interview two of the leading experts on Russian legal technology to get their insights and perspectives on the state of innovation and development there. What they say may surprise you.

Host Bob Ambrogi recently visited Moscow as the keynote speaker at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference. While there, he recorded these two interviews on the state of the legal tech industry in Russia:

• Holger Zscheyge, managing director of the publishing company Infotropic Media and organizer of his own legal tech conference, Moscow Legal Tech. Zscheyge is widely regarded as the leading authority on legal technology in Russia.
• Anton Pronin, organizer of the Skolkovo LegalTech conference and legaltech director of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, where he helps incubate and advise legal technology startups.

Zscheyge and Pronin describe an industry undergoing significant change. In Russia, the legal tech startup scene has quickly become more robust over the last two years. But law firms and courts have been slow to adopt new technologies. Both guests suggest that may now be starting to change.

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When Alvin Tedjamulia cofounded NetDocuments in 1998 as the first cloud-based platform for document and email management, few lawyers had any concept of what it meant to work in the cloud. Today, NetDocuments has grown to become one of the leading DMS systems in legal, counting some of the world’s leading law firms and corporations as its customers.

Now chief technology officer at NetDocuments, Tedjamulia is in charge of strategic planning, cloud engineering, research and development, and SaaS software development, as well as for overseeing the company’s data centers in locations around the world.

During NetDocuments’ recent ndElevate customer and partner conference, Tedjamulia sat down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the development of NetDocuments over the years and how lawyers came to love the cloud.

Before cofounding NetDocuments, Tedjamulia was a cofounder in 1989 of SoftSolutions, an early DMS system popular with the legal profession. After WordPerfect acquired SoftSolutions, he became CTO at WordPerfect, and after Novell acquired WordPerfect, he became VP in charge of the Advanced Technology Group.

He was also the original chief designer for Comprehensive Law Office (CLO), an accounting and time & billing system for Law Firms which is now with Aderant.

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The recently launched Caselaw Access Project is the capstone to a massive undertaking executed over three years to digitize all U.S. case law, some 6.4 million cases dating back to 1658. Leading the project was Adam Ziegler, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, which partnered with Ravel Law to digitize the school’s entire library of U.S. cases.

In this episode of LawNext, Ziegler joins host Bob Ambrogi to describe the project and its significance for legal researchers. He also discusses other projects underway at the Library Innovation Lab and touches on some of the lessons he learned as cofounder of a legal tech startup.

In addition to directing the Library Innovation Lab, Ziegler is an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and an adjunct professor at Suffolk University Law School, where he co-teaches “Lawyering in the Age of Smart Machines.” Earlier, he founded Mootus, an online platform for collaborative legal argument, and practiced law for several years with firms in Boston and Washington, D.C.

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Sarah Schaaf wanted to revolutionize how lawyers get paid. After growing up with lawyer parents and then becoming a lawyer herself, including a stint in Google’s legal department, she saw the problems lawyers had in collecting from clients. She envisioned a platform as easy to use as PayPal or Venmo, but made specifically for the legal field and fully compliant with lawyers’ professional responsibilities.

Headnote, the company she co-founded and leads as CEO, is both a payment processing platform, allowing lawyers to accept echeck and credit card payments, and an accounts-receivable automation platform, to help ensure invoices get paid. Headnote takes a unique approach to the e-payments process, aiming to make it easier for both the lawyer and the client. It is also transparent about its pricing, with no monthly service fees and fixed transaction fees of 1.9% for echecks and 2.9% for credit cards.

In this episode of LawNext, Schaaf joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her company and her thoughts about payment processing in general. She describes how Headnote evolved out of her own experiences as a lawyer, how it differs from other payment processing platforms, and what lawyers should understand when selecting a payment processing company.

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They say you can’t go home again, but Matt Spiegel came back to legal technology after selling the first company he founded, MyCase, and then moving to other verticals. Earlier this year, Spiegel launched his second legal technology startup, Lawmatics, a cloud-based platform designed to automate legal marketing, CRM and client intake.

Spiegel had been a criminal defense lawyer when, in 2009, he founded MyCase, the legal practice management platform. In 2012, he sold MyCase to AppFolio, and then left in 2015 to start a software company that helped organizations manage trade shows and events. But he says he always knew he’d come back to legal technology.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a live conversation with Spiegel during the recent Law Firm 500 conference in Lake Las Vegas, Nev. Spiegel discusses the void he saw in legal-marketing software for smaller firms and how he believes Lawmatics can help lawyers boost their bottom lines.

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It was big news earlier this month when practice management company Clio announced that it had acquired Lexicata, the first cloud-based CRM and client-intake platform for lawyers. It was the first acquisition by 10-year-old Clio, which says it will continue to operate Lexicata but will also develop its technology into a new, more advanced client-engagement platform, Clio Grow.

Lexicata CEO Michael Chasin and law school classmate Aaron George founded the company in 2014, after previously founding LawKick, a marketplace for connecting clients with lawyers. A 2013 graduate of Loyola Law School, Chasin also received a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Chasin at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, shortly after the acquisition was announced. They discuss the history of Lexicata, the reasons for the acquisition, the future of the product, and what it all means for the legal industry at large.

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At just 17 years old, Joshua Browder made international news when he created DoNotPay, a chatbot that helped appeal parking tickets, reportedly saving motorists in the U.S. and UK millions of dollars. Now 21, he has just released a series of apps designed to help consumers solve common legal problems without the help of a lawyer -- including one to file small claims lawsuits in any U.S. jurisdiction.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi catches up with Browder during the recent Clio Cloud Conference, where they discuss the genesis of DoNotPay, the latest round of apps, and Browder’s dream of enabling robots and technology to help people with most of their common legal problems.

“If you’re a normal person who’s not accused of murder, who doesn’t need to be in the Supreme Court, I don’t want you to even have to interact with a lawyer,” Browder says. “ … There’s no reason why, if your landlord keeps your security deposit, it should be so complicated to get justice. So everything that a consumer would want from the legal system, I want to provide for free.”

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Kevin O’Keefe believes that lawyers get their best work from relationships and a strong word-of-mouth reputation, and that blogging is the perfect way to build relationships and reputation. In 2003, he founded LexBlog, a company devoted to helping lawyers and law firms launch their own blogs. Today, LexBlog has grown to a network of nearly 20,000 legal professionals worldwide blogging on the platform.

More recently, LexBlog launched a global legal news and commentary network based on legal blogs. The network is open to any legal blog, without cost and regardless of whether the blog is a LexBlog customer. And just last week, LexBlog announced a national campaign to help bridge the legal services gap by enabling lawyers to connect with consumers in real and authentic ways through blogs.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi -- who has worked with LexBlog since January 2018 as publisher and editor-in-chief -- talks with O’Keefe about LexBlog, blogging, and the important of building trust and relationships for lawyers to connect with clients.

Before founding LexBlog, O’Keefe was a trial lawyer in Wisconsin for 17 years. In 1998, he founded a virtual law community, PrairieLaw.com. After selling PrairieLaw to LexisNexis in 2001, he became vice president of business development for its Martindale-Hubbell division. He is a graduate of University of the Pacific -- McGeorge School of Law and the University of Notre Dame.

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What if a lawyer could know how a judge is likely to rule in a case or how heavy is a judge’s workload? Rick Merrill was a litigator at a large law firm who became frustrated over his inability to get meaningful information about the judges before whom he appeared. So last year, he launched Gavelytics, a California company that uses analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze docket data and provide lawyers with a range of insights about judges’ propensities, workloads and leanings.

In this episode of LawNext, host Robert Ambrogi visits Gavelytics’ office in Santa Monica, where he sits down with Merrill, now the company’s CEO, and Justin Brownstone, VP of sales and litigation counsel, to talk about the product one year after its launch, how lawyers use analytics for strategic and competitive purposes, and how analytics and AI are being used more broadly in law.

Before founding Gavelytics, Merrill was a litigator with the law firm Greenberg Traurig in Los Angeles, involved primarily in real estate and other commercial disputes. He received his law degree from UCLA School of Law, completed the executive program at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California.

Brownstone is also a former litigator with several Los Angeles firms. He is also a graduate of UCLA School of Law, where he was a managing editor of the law review. He earned his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College.

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Earlier this year, Mark Britton left Avvo, the often-controversial company he founded in 2006 and led as CEO, after selling it to web behemoth Internet Brands. Explaining his departure in a memo to his staff, he wrote, “It’s time for me to go.”

In this episode of LawNext, Britton reflects on his 12 years at Avvo. In a face-to-face interview with host Bob Ambrogi, he recounts why he started the company and explains why he left. He discusses what he believes his company achieved and what he achieved as CEO. He reveals his greatest disappointment and his frustration with Avvo’s ongoing battles with the organized bar. He also offers his advice to budding entrepreneurs.

Before founding Seattle-based Avvo, Britton was senior vice president, general counsel and secretary for Expedia after it spun off from Microsoft. Earlier, he was an attorney with Preston, Gates & Ellis in Seattle and senior counsel with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He is a 1992 graduate of The George Washington University Law School and a 1989 graduate of Gonzaga University.

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In July, Thomson Reuters unveiled Westlaw Edge, the next generation of its legal research platform that uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help legal professionals find answers and perform research more efficiently. The engineering of the AI that went into that was spearheaded by Dr. Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of research and development at Thomson Reuters and head of the company’s Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing in Toronto.

Al-Kofahi joins host Bob Ambrogi to debunk some of the myths around AI in law and to discuss why building AI is harder than many lawyers realize. He says that three keys to the quality of an AI product are quality of the editorial inputs used to train the system, quality of the data that underlies the system, and subject-matter expertise by the team building the system.

A 20-year veteran of Thomson Reuters, Al-Kofahi has led the development of many advanced technologies that power products across Thomson Reuters, including natural language processing applications to mine information from text, large-scale text classification, recommender systems, vertical search, named entity extraction and resolution, question answering, language generation and summarization.

Al-Kofahi has a doctorate in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology in Jordan.

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Should legal ethics rules be changed to allow non-lawyer ownership of legal services providers? So controversial is the question that it was major news in July when the State Bar of California voted to appoint a task force to study and make recommendations on the issue. What spurred the bar to take this action was the Legal Market Landscape Report it commissioned from William D. Henderson, professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who is Bob Ambrogi’s guest on today’s episode to discuss his findings and recommendations.

Henderson’s report makes the case that the legal profession is failing in its core mission of serving those who need legal services. The situation has brought the profession to an inflection point that requires action by regulators, Henderson says. The most effective regulatory action would be to ease rules on non-lawyer investment in order to allow lawyers to more closely collaborate with professionals from other disciplines, such as technology, process design, data analytics, accounting, marketing and finance.

“By modifying the ethics rules to facilitate this close collaboration,” Henderson writes in his report, “the legal profession will accelerate the development of one-to-many productized legal solutions that will drive down overall costs; improve access for the poor, working and middle class; improve the predictability and transparency of legal services; aid the growth of new businesses; and elevate the stature and reputation of the legal profession as one serving the broader needs of society.”

At Maurer, Henderson holds the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession. In 2017, he founded Legal Evolution, an online publication that chronicles successful innovation within the legal industry. A prolific author and speaker, he focuses primarily on the empirical analysis of the legal profession. Among his honors, he was named by the ABA Journal as a Legal Rebel, included on the National Law Journal’s list of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America, and in both 2015 and 2016 named the Most Influential Person in Legal Education by The National Jurist magazine.

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In September 2017, venerable Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy launched Fuse, setting aside a portion of its London office for a collaborative innovation space to develop and test new legal technologies, and it named lawyer Shruti Ajitsaria to head the project. On this episode of LawNext, Ajitsaria joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why Allen & Overy started Fuse, explain what it does, and describe its work to date.

Ajitsaria says Fuse is not an incubator, per se, but a collaborative technology innovation space that gives legal technology companies the opportunity to work directly with Allen & Overy’s lawyers and clients. It’s a win-win, she says. Companies get the chance to test and refine their products, while the firm’s lawyers get to better understand how technology can help them in their own practices.

Ajitsaria was a credit-derivatives lawyer dabbling in angel investing when a pitch from a legal technology startup sparked her interest in legal technology. While on maternity leave, she attended Google Campus’ Startup School, and when she returned to work, suggested and then spearheaded the development of Fuse.

Fuse differs from other incubators in that it accepts companies that are beyond early stage. Participants in the current cohort include AI platforms Kira Systems and Neota Logic. Another participant, Bloomsbury AI, was acquired in July by Facebook. Allen & Overy so much liked the first company it brought into Fuse, fintech company Nivaura, that it made an equity investment in it.

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What does it mean to practice data-driven law? On this episode, Bob speaks with Jeff Pfeifer, the LexisNexis vice president charged with driving overall product strategy for LexisNexis Legal and Professional, North America. Over the past several years, Pfeifer has spearheaded a series of acquisitions and product developments, all with the goal of establishing LexisNexis as the leader in legal analytics and enabling what he calls data-driven law.

Pfeifer oversaw the company’s 2016 acquisitions of legal analytics companies Lex Machina and Intelligize and the 2017 acquisition of Ravel Law. Most recently, Pfeifer led the roll-out of Lexis Analytics, a suite of tools that organizes all of LexisNexis’s major analytics acquisitions and products (as well as a couple new products) into three categories of analytics – litigation, regulatory and transactional. Bob talks with Jeff about these acquisitions, the launch of Lexis Analytics, and his vision of the data-driven lawyer.

Pfeifer is a 29-year veteran of LexisNexis. Before taking on his current role in 2015 as vice president of product management, he was vice president, primary law and Shepard’s, and president and CEO of LexisNexis Puerto Rico. Earlier, he was vice president of marketing. He was recognized this year as among the Fastcase 50, honoring the “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

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It was around the world in 40 days – the legal tech world that is. Earlier this year, Dera Nevin traveled to 19 destinations in 15 countries on six continents over 40 days, meeting with legal hackers and legal entrepreneurs all over the world. The trip, in conjunction with the Global Legal Hackathon, taught her lessons about legal technology and innovation on a global scale, and even taught her something about herself.

In this episode of LawNext, Nevin – who is now writing a book (maybe two) about her trip – describes how she came to embark on this trip, her objectives starting out, where she went, what she saw, and what she learned. Perhaps her biggest takeaway was that there are universal themes to the problems legal technologists are tackling and the obstacles they face.

Nevin was most recently e-discovery counsel and director of e-discovery services at Proskauer Rose in New York. Before that, she was managing counsel, e-discovery, at the TD Bank Group, and earlier was an e-discovery attorney at several law firms. Now, in addition to writing her book, she is teaching the course, Taxonomy of Innovation, in the Global Professional LLM program at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

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What does legal innovation look like? For all the talk about innovation in law, who are the real innovators and what are they doing? This week’s guest, Daniel W. Linna Jr., an attorney and law professor, helps us answer that question.

Linna is the creator of the Legal Services Innovation Index, where he is cataloging and indexing innovations at law firms and law schools. Through his work, he is helping us understand how law firms can better deliver legal services to their clients and how law schools can better prepare students to practice law in the 21st Century.

In addition to discussing the index, Linna, a visiting professor of law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, also discusses how he will teach his students about innovation and technology, and about the Innovation Lab he will help lead at Northwestern.

Before moving to Northwestern this year, Linna was director of LegalRnD, The Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University College of Law. He is an affiliated faculty member of CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and cofounder of the Chicago Legal Innovation & Technology Group. He is a 2015 Fastcase 50 honoree, recognizing the law’s “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, & leaders.”

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The $500 million secondary investment announced recently by online legal services company LegalZoom is the largest investment ever in a legal technology company. It comes as the company continues to expand both its services and its geographic reach. With a valuation of $2 billion and a customer base of 4 million, what will this investment mean for LegalZoom now and into the future?

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Chas Rampenthal, general counsel and corporate secretary of LegalZoom. In a wide-ranging conversation, they talk about the investment, LegalZoom’s mission, it battles with state bars, its expansion overseas, its growing network of outside attorneys, and the need for disruption in legal services delivery.

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Five years ago, legal research platform Casetext launched with a goal of making legal research more affordable and more intuitive. In the years since, the company has attracted $20 million in venture financing and won the 2017 award for new product of the year from the American Association of Law Libraries for its AI-driven research tool CARA.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sits downs with two of the company’s founders: Jake Heller, chief executive officer, and Pablo Arredondo, chief legal research officer. They talk about starting the company in 2013, the evolution of their platform, their thoughts about artificial intelligence for legal research, the state of their company today, and where they see themselves heading during their second five years.

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On July 12, Thomson Reuters formally launched Westlaw Edge, its next-generation legal research platform that uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help legal professionals find answers and perform research more efficiently. This was arguably the biggest news to come out of Thomson Reuters’ legal division since its launch eight years ago of Westlaw Next.

The day before the official announcement, I had the opportunity to speak with two of the executives who led the development of this new platform, Mike Dahn, senior vice president, Product Management, who led the project overall, and Jeff Arvidson, director of product management, who was responsible for bringing Litigation Analytics to Westlaw Edge. This episode features highlights from our conversation.

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I am very pleased and honored to kick off my first episode with guest Nicole Bradick. A veteran legal technology innovator and entrepreneur, Nicole is CEO of Theory and Principle, the technology design and development company she founded last January. Formerly partner and chief strategy officer with legal-technology development firm CuroLegal, Bradick is a 2014 Fastcase 50 honoree, recognizing “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders,” and was profiled by the ABA Journal as a Legal Rebel in 2012. In this inaugural episode of LawNext, I talk with Nicole about technology development and design, what makes legal technology “bad” or “good,” the process of developing technology from problem to prototype, and why Nicole believes technology is not the answer to all of our problems. Click the player above to listen to the show. And if you like the show, leave a kind word on iTunes.