Shows
LawNextFrom Client Experience to Client Intelligence: Case Status CEO Andy Seavers On Becoming A ‘Future Firm’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...
2025-10-0845 minLawNextAn AI Arbitrator? The Latest Innovations from the American Arbitration Association, with CEO Bridget McCormack and CTO Diana DidiaNearly 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...
2025-09-3055 minLawNextJustice Workers: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democracy Work, with Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew BurnettWith 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...
2025-09-2245 minLawNextLeading Product Transformation Amid Company Transformation: 8am’s New Chief Product Officer Leslie WittAs 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 ke...
2025-09-1635 minLawNextReveal’s CEO and CTO On Its Launch of Gen AI for E-Discovery ReviewThe 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...
2025-08-1943 minLawNextHarbor Global CEO Matt Sunderman On Driving Digital Transformation in LegalThis 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 ma...
2025-08-0638 minLawNextSpotDraft’s Shashank Bijapur: From Late-Night Due Diligence to Legal Tech InnovationWhat 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 ea...
2025-07-2940 minLawNextHow LexisNexis and Harvey Are Partnering to Reshape Legal AI, with LexisNexis CEO Sean FitzpatrickWhen 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 fundi...
2025-06-3043 minLawNextHow One Mass Tort Firm Uses Supio, the AI Platform for PI LawyersSupio, 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 TorHo...
2025-06-2549 minLawNextAALL President Cornell Winston on Why Law Librarians Should ‘Be Bold’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 fi...
2025-05-2844 minLawNextSerial Legal Entrepreneur Monica Zent on Building the Future of Legal ServicesMonica 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 s...
2025-05-2243 minLawNextEp 290: Turning Legal Spend Into Performance: PERSUIT Founder Jim Delkousis On His Acquisition of ApperioOn 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...
2025-05-1536 minLawNextNavigating 'Unruliness': Hence Cofounder Sean West on How Politics, AI and Law are Rewriting Business Rules"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...
2025-05-0648 minLawNextLawDroid Founder Tom Martin on Building, Teaching and Advising About AI for LegalLawDroid 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 m...
2025-05-0147 minLawNextFrom Ravel Cofounder to Knowable CEO, Nik Reed Has Learned that Building Quality AI for Legal Takes A Lot of Hard WorkIn 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 con...
2025-04-161h 01LawNextEp 285: Mark Cohen and Dierk Schindler On The Union Of the Digital Legal Exchange and the Liquid Legal InstituteAs 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 th...
2025-04-0147 minLawNextRelativity CEO Phil Saunders on the Future of Legal Data, Gen AI, and the Shifting Landscape of Law“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...
2025-03-2550 minLawNextSurePoint CEO Eric Thurston on Acquiring ZenCase and His Vision for Mid-Market Practice ManagementRecently, 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...
2025-03-1939 minLawNextEve CEO Jay Madheswaran on Building AI-Native Law Firms for the Plaintiffs’ BarAfter 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 technolog...
2025-03-0350 minLawNextEp 279: Upsolve’s Jonathan Petts and Ben Jackson on Building the TurboTax for Bankruptcy and Fighting UPL RestrictionsWhen 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...
2025-02-1846 minLawNextReflections On 25 Years Of Innovation In Legal Aid, With The LSC’s Longtime Program Counsel Glenn RawdonEarlier 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...
2025-01-2848 minLawNextCan AI Bridge the Justice Gap? Legal Aid Lawyer and Innovator Sateesh Nori Thinks SoFrom 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 pro...
2025-01-2146 minLawNextInsights on Leadership and Innovation in Legal Education, with Anastasia BoykoAnastasia 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.
2025-01-1353 minLawNextIn Which Gen AI Takes Over this Podcast to Discuss Law Practice Management TechnologyOn 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...
2024-12-1726 minLawNextNGAGE’s Paul Henry On How Law Firms Can Use Behavioral Analytics to Drive Tech AdoptionYou 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 not...
2024-12-1130 minLawNextHow One Legal Tech Company Is Donating Its Software To Pursue Justice In Atrocity CrimesEverlaw 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...
2024-12-0237 minLawNextAs She Retires From a Trailblazing Career in Legal KM and Innovation, Sally Gonzalez Shares Lessons LearnedIn 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 a...
2024-11-2533 minLawNextHow A Legal Services Agency Developed An Award-Winning KM Portal to Enhance Access to JusticeAt 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 S...
2024-11-1134 minLawNextLive from #ClioCon: Clio’s CTO Jonathan Watson on the Development of Clio Duo, Its Gen AI Legal AssistantRecently, 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 it...
2024-11-0723 minLawNextThe LegalTech Fund’s Zach Posner on Investing in Legal Tech (and His Upcoming Summit)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 A...
2024-11-0432 minLawNextLive from #ClioCon: A Deep Dive into the 2024 Clio Legal Trends Report, with Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in ResidenceAt 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...
2024-10-2832 minLawNextLive from #ClioCon: A Clio Power Trio: COO Ronnie Gurion, CFO Curt Sigfstead, and Board Member Mark BrittonThis 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 t...
2024-10-2233 minLawNextLive from #ClioCon: Clio CEO Jack Newton on Generative AI and the New Duo AI Legal AssistantWe’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. N...
2024-10-1538 minLawNextA Year Into His Tenure at UnitedLex, CEO James Schellhase on How the Company Is Embracing InnovationOne 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...
2024-09-3037 minLawNextA Deep Dive Into Filevine’s New Gen AI Tools for LitigatorsAt 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 p...
2024-09-2429 minLawNextLive from Filevine’s LEX Summit: Interviews with Three of Its LeadersIn 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...
2024-09-1735 minLawNextHow One Legal Tech Startup Is Simplifying Data Collection from Mobile DevicesMatt 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 Bo...
2024-09-1240 minLawNextThe State of Knowledge Management and Innovation in Legal, with Patrick DiDomenico and Joshua FiremanOn 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 sig...
2024-09-0351 minLawNextAll About Spellbook’s New AI Agent, Capable of Performing Complex Legal Tasks, with CEO Scott StevensonIn 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...
2024-08-2746 minLawNextIs Gen AI the New Paradigm for Technology Assisted Review in E-Discovery? Three Redgrave Scientists DiscussFor 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 d...
2024-08-0640 minLawNextEp 253: Exclusive: CEO Jack Newton on Clio’s Record-Setting $900M RaiseAs 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.
2024-07-2349 minLawNextCofounder Jason Tashea on the First Year and Uncertain Future of Georgetown’s First-of-Its-Kind Judicial Innovation FellowshipEighteen 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 fel...
2024-06-1950 minLawNextEpiq’s Global Legal Solutions Leader Roger Pilc on How AI Is Transforming Legal ServicesIn 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 So...
2024-05-1342 minLawNextHow Maptician Is Helping Law Firms Optimize Hybrid Office Space, with CEO Alaa PashaTiming 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 p...
2024-04-0821 minLawNextThe Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It HappenMarch 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...
2024-03-2550 minLawNextInfoTrack’s Mission to Revolutionize Litigation Services Such as E-filing and Process Serving, with CEO Ed WattsInfoTrack 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 c...
2024-03-1846 minLawNextEp 240: The New Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirement and How Legal Tech Can Help Companies ComplyThe 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 comp...
2024-03-1145 minLawNextOddr CEO Milan Bobde On How AI Can Help Law Firms Stem Revenue Leakage and Turn Invoices into CashCan 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...
2024-03-0521 minLawNextEp 237: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline JusticeIn 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 Fou...
2024-02-1346 minLawNextEp 236: How One Legal Aid Program Is Creating A Culture Of Innovation To Enhance Access to JusticeAt 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 t...
2024-02-0546 minLawNextEp 233: Zen and the Art of Law Practice Management, with ZenCase’s CEO TJ Fraser and COO Olivia MockelIn 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 l...
2024-01-1641 minLawNextAn Inside Look At Driving Innovation within A Major Law Firm and A Major Legal DepartmentWhat 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...
2024-01-1023 minLawNextThe Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of CentariToday 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. LawN...
2024-01-0334 minLawNextKM Keynotes: Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in LegalToday’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 t...
2023-12-1833 minLawNextAffiniPay CEO Dru Armstrong on the Intersection of Fintech, Legal Tech and AIDru 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 eve...
2023-12-1142 minLawNextErika Harold, Executive Director, Illinois Supreme Court Commission on ProfessionalismOn 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 a...
2023-11-2033 minLawNextUnpacking the 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report, with Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in ResidenceOn 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 per...
2023-10-3033 minLawNextEp 223: A Conversation About Wrongful Convictions, with Brian Banks and Michael SemanchikThis 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...
2023-10-2330 minLawNextClio CEO Jack Newton On Why It’s More Important Than Ever for Lawyers to Leverage TechIn 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 g...
2023-10-1652 minLawNextTraining Lawyers to Use Generative AI, with AltaClaro Founder Abdi ShayestehAs 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 abo...
2023-09-2642 minLawNextLitera CEO Sheryl Hoskins On Her First 17 Months and What’s Ahead For Her CompanyIt 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 r...
2023-09-1235 minLawNextThe Voices of ILTACON 2023, Part 2: Chats with 11 Legal Tech CompaniesRecently 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 produc...
2023-09-0532 minLawNextThe Voices of ILTACON 2023: Brief Chats with 12 Legal Tech StartupsLawNext 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 h...
2023-08-2934 minLawNextThe Story Behind Gunderson Dettmer’s Launch of ChatGD, Its ‘Homegrown’ Generative AI App, with Joe Green and John ScrudatoRecently, 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 als...
2023-08-1748 minLawNextDoNotPay, Legal Regulatory Reform, and the Op-Ed the ABA Wouldn’t Publish, with Maya Markovich and Tom GordonToday’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...
2023-08-0736 minLawNextEp 212: Three General Counsel Discuss Boston’s Unique Contributions to the Legal Tech LandscapeOn 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...
2023-07-271h 05LawNextThe Past, Present and Future of Trial Presentation Software, with Lit Software’s Tara Cheever and Derek MillerRecently, 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...
2023-07-1744 minLawNextThe Florida Bar’s Precedent-Setting Decision To Give Every Lawyer Access To Trust Accounting SoftwareIn 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 B...
2023-07-1033 minLawNextNovus Law Cofounder Ray Bayley On Using Process Management And Tech To Find The Story In Legal MattersEvery 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...
2023-06-2041 minLawNextLive from the CLOC Global Institute: Interviews with 22 Legal Tech ExhibitorsOn 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 abu...
2023-05-301h 10LawNextLogikcull Cofounder Andy Wilson on 10 Years of Disrupting and Democratizing E-DiscoveryThis 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 w...
2023-05-2246 minLawNextWolters Kluwer V.P. Abhishek Mittal on Data Management and Operational ExcellenceAs 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...
2023-05-1541 minLawNextThe Post-Pandemic State of Legal Practice, with Nicole Black of MyCaseOver 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...
2023-05-0944 minLawNextEp 201: Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi on His $20M Raise and Getting Deals Done Faster with AILexion 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...
2023-05-0148 minLawNextThe Four Founders of vLex and Fastcase on the Merger Of Their Two CompaniesIt 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 doe...
2023-04-2543 minLawNext15 Years, 15 Lessons: Clio Founder Jack Newton On What He’s Learned About Building a Successful CompanyIn 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 inves...
2023-04-031h 02LawNextCasetext’s Three Top Execs On CoCounsel, GPT-4 and ‘A New Age in the Practice of Law’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 f...
2023-03-2150 minLawNextAs He Steps Down As Dean, Gordon Smith Reflects On His Mission To Make BYU Law ‘One Of The Most Innovative Law Schools in the Country’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...
2023-03-1334 minLawNextA Closer Look At Smokeball, with Chief Revenue Officer Jane Oxley and President Ruchie ChadhaOn 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...
2023-03-0740 minLawNextParalegal Kathryn Tewson On Her Quest for Accountability from DoNotPayKathryn 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 pr...
2023-02-211h 02LawNextAs ALSP Axiom Opens A Law Firm in Arizona, Its Chief Strategy and Legal Officer Catherine Kemnitz Shares DetailsAxiom, 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 S...
2023-01-2437 minLawNextLexFusion’s Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty on the 2022 Legal Market in ReviewOver 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 recen...
2023-01-1750 minLawNextEp 188: Can GPT Pass the Bar Exam? We Find OutSince 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...
2023-01-0938 minLawNextA Special Fireside Chat with Four Legal Innovation Leaders on the State of the IndustryOn 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 an...
2023-01-0334 minLawNextTwo Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal SystemBrianna 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 t...
2022-12-2038 minLawNextFactor CEO Varun Mehta On ‘Integrated Law’ As A New Category of Legal Services ProviderFactor, 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...
2022-12-0532 minLawNextJeff Pfeifer of LexisNexis on Partnering with NetDocuments to Enrich Law Firm DataEarlier 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...
2022-11-2823 minLawNextDan Hauck, Chief Product Officer at NetDocuments, On the Company’s Product Strategy and RoadmapOver 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...
2022-11-2130 minLawNextNetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter and CTO Alvin TedjamuliaLast 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 le...
2022-11-1434 minLawNextLawNext #ClioCon Bonus Episode: Ronnie Gurion, Clio’s Chief Operating OfficerAt 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 devel...
2022-11-0122 minLawNextProof Founder Eric Voogt on Disrupting Service of ProcessService 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 ex...
2022-10-3132 minLawNextLawNext #ClioCon Bonus Episode: Jonathan Watson, Clio’s Chief Technology OfficerAt 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...
2022-10-2822 minLawNextLawNext #ClioCon Bonus Episode: Reagan Attle, Clio’s Chief Marketing OfficerAt 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 bra...
2022-10-2722 minLawNextLawNext #ClioCon Bonus Episode: Shubham Datta, Clio’s VP of Corporate DevelopmentAt 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...
2022-10-2626 minLawNextFrom Radical to Trailblazer: How Innovative GC Jeffrey Carr Disrupted the Legal Department, Part 2In 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 th...
2022-02-1544 minLawNextThe State of Legal Tech in Europe and Russia, with ELTA President Holger ZscheygeThroughout 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 l...
2021-04-1240 minLawNextHow One Law School Teaches Legal Tech, Pre- and Post-PandemicHere’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 tak...
2020-07-1350 minLawNextExploring the Meaning of Legal Terms through Corpus LinguisticsAt 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 discu...
2020-06-1630 min
LawNextAn Exclusive Look at LegalZoom’s New Project to Develop Better Contracts for Small BusinessesThis 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 busin...
2019-05-1350 min
LawNextJudging Judges – How Gavelytics’ Judicial Analytics are Reshaping LitigationWhat 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...
2018-10-0139 min