LawNext

NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter believes the document management system is becoming something else entirely: a law firm's organizational intelligence layer. As lawyers increasingly do their work inside AI tools such as Claude, Harvey, Legora and ChatGPT, Baxter says NetDocuments' job is to build and preserve the firm's context, then make it accessible through whatever interface the user chooses. He even acknowledges that the DMS may eventually become "headless."

Recorded live at NetDocuments' Inspire conference in Orlando, this episode finds host Bob Ambrogi and Baxter, who joined the company as president in 2017 and became CEO the following year, discussing how generative AI is reshaping both the company and the legal market. Baxter lays out his three-layer view of legal AI: the models, which NetDocuments does not build; the "harness," which users will swap at will; and the organizational data and context, which he argues is the layer that will endure. He describes how NetDocuments' document intelligence pipeline, semantic embeddings, and context graph aim to capture not just what is in a firm's documents, but how its lawyers negotiated and reached outcomes, even after the partner who handled a matter has retired.

Baxter also shares the results of NetDocuments' internal benchmarking, which found that running AI work against its context graph cuts token costs by roughly half, with savings reaching about 70% on the most expensive models. He discusses where AI pricing is headed (a predictable base plus consumption), why the company still invested two years in a new user interface, and what distinguishes successful AI deployments from those that stall.

Along the way, Baxter makes NetDocuments' case against competitors, describes recent wins among Fortune 100 companies and AmLaw 200 firms, and reports month-over-month AI usage growth of 40% to 50% on the platform. He also explains how Claude Code transformed his engineering team, which built a tabular review feature in three months with one team instead of the 12 months and multiple teams originally scoped, and why that has made him more excited than worried about the so-called "SaaSpocalypse."

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).

Ajax, the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use.

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Five years ago, Noah Waisberg sold Kira Systems, the pioneering AI contract-analysis company he co-founded, to Litera. Even though the deal itself went well, the experience of going through the sale was hard, Waisberg now says. But that experience provided the fuel that turned into his next business. As part of the sale, he kept a copy of the underlying Kira technology and about 30 of the company's roughly 180 employees, and used them to launch Zuva.

Zuva started as an API-only company, but it has since turned its focus to the sell side of M&A. After interviewing some 200 dealmakers about the most painful parts of selling a business, Zuva built software to help sellers manage the flood of bidder questions. It also launched a tech-enabled diligence service that pairs Kira's AI with experienced former Big Law associates. Zuva says the service delivers work product comparable to Big Law at a fraction of the cost.

Waisberg was last on LawNext in 2021, marking the 10th anniversary of Kira and the release of his book, AI for Lawyers. In today's episode, he and host Bob Ambrogi discuss Zuva's new direction and what the recent expiration of his post-sale restrictions means for the company. They recorded this conversation on the day Harvey announced its latest mega-funding round, so they also talk about the prospects for Harvey and Legora against the frontier labs, and why Waisberg recently remarked that we've hit "peak legal tech." He also covers the limitations of today's AI that he thinks the market underestimates, and why the billable hour remains the biggest obstacle to efficiency 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, 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.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:16) From Kira to Zuva

(09:49) Why Selling a Business Is Hard

(17:00) Zuva's Sell-Side Strategy

(35:27) The Legal AI Market

(51:52) AI's Limits and the Billable Hour

(58:25) The Case for Selling Your Business

Legal tech company Clio has long said that its mission is to transform the legal experience for all. Until now, that "all" has largely focused on law firms and their clients, but recently Clio announced a major initiative to develop technology for the judiciary.

As part of that initiative, it hired Pablo Arredondo, the former cofounder of Casetext and developer of CoCounsel, one of the first AI legal assistants, to lead product development. Arredondo was on this show on Sept. 1 to discuss his new role.

Now, Clio has made another major hire to help lead this project: Bridget Mary McCormack, the innovative former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and current president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association, who will join Clio in October as general manager, judiciary, to lead the market and commercial strategy for the judiciary business.

On the day her hiring was announced, McCormack sat down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why she considered this an offer she could not turn down and how she believes she, Arredondo, and Clio can transform the legal experience for the judiciary.

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.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introductions (02:49) Bridget McCormick's New Role at Clio (08:44) Co-Designing Technology with Judges (11:11) Building Tech for the Judiciary vs. Law Firms (15:35) Addressing Court Challenges with Technology (20:28) Bottlenecks in the Court System (23:30) Improving Existing Court Technologies (25:20) Integrating Technology in Courts (28:00) The Role of AI in Judicial Processes (32:02) Addressing Self-Represented Litigants (35:50) Balancing Tradition and Innovation in Courts (40:20) Setting Goals for the Future of Court Technology

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

Call it Alex Su, redux. We do not usually have the same guest on LawNext twice in the same year, but there is good reason to have Alex back, as he has just been named president of Latitude Legal, the flexible legal staffing company.

Last February, Alex and host Bob Ambrogi recorded a live episode of this podcast over lunch in a Cambodian restaurant in Alex's hometown of Alameda, Calif., as part of our LawNext on Location series. They talked about his winding career, from Sullivan & Cromwell associate to federal clerkship to legal tech startups and finally to chief revenue officer at Latitude.

In that interview, Bob asked Alex what was coming next. His answer was that as AI got better, the demand for lawyers with real judgment — to direct it, check it, and own the work — would only grow. Seven months later, that prediction is proving prescient. In just the first half of this year, Latitude says it has seen a 52 percent jump in new law firm and corporate clients.

So with Latitude's promotion of Su to president, he returns to LawNext to discuss why he thinks AI is driving more demand for experienced lawyers, not less. He also talks about how Latitude's client-service model relies on former law firm partners and senior in-house counsel, why he pushes back on labeling flex talent as "contract attorneys" or calling Latitude an ALSP, and why he expects the market for flexible legal talent to keep expanding as law firms and legal departments sort out what AI can and cannot handle.

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.

Chronologies have become one of legal tech's hottest categories, with a wave of AI startups promising to turn a messy evidentiary record into a structured timeline in minutes. Jeff Kerr and his company Casefleet were more than a decade ahead of the pack.

Kerr finished law school in 2010 and made what he calls the crazy decision to start a law firm as his first job after graduating. Running an employment practice, he found that winning cases came down to knowing the chronology cold. But the only tools for building one were a Word document and a lot of patience. So he taught himself to code, left practice in 2015, and founded Casefleet.

On this episode of LawNext, Kerr joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss what a decade of building fact-management software looks like now that AI has arrived. Last month, Casefleet launched Casey, a conversational AI agent that proposes facts, links them to legal issues, and drafts documents — with a citation engine that rejects any citation not matching the exact text of the underlying document.

Kerr deliberately draws a hard line on what he will let his AI do. Casefleet's agent is fully agentic in the sense of researching and iterating on its own, he says, but it stays read-only – it will not send emails, make calls, or file anything.

Among the other topics they cover:

Why Casefleet's pre-AI data model turned out to be the right foundation for AI, and why classic Casefleet still runs alongside Casey.

The company's move back toward e-discovery, including newly added document production, and why Kerr isn't chasing terabyte-scale cases.

What happens to specialized litigation tools if the frontier AI labs push further into legal.

Why Casefleet, profitable since 2018 and largely bootstrapped, may raise outside capital in the coming year.

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.

Pablo Arredondo, the Casetext cofounder who helped build some of the earliest and most influential applications of AI in legal practice, is joining Clio as senior vice president, judiciary, where he will lead the company's strategy for extending its technology into the courts. In this episode, recorded just ahead of the announcement, Arredondo tells host Bob Ambrogi why he is turning his attention to the judiciary — and why he believes the challenge starts with the sheer torrent of material flooding into the courts. "On Monday, somewhere on the order of three billion tokens are going to hit court dockets," he says.

Arredondo cofounded Casetext in 2013 and helped develop CARA, the first brief analyzer, and CoCounsel, the product that brought generative AI into everyday legal workflows. After Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in 2023, he joined that company, leaving at the end of last year. In this conversation, he traces how his interest shifted toward the courts — from watching judges organically adopt Casetext's Parallel Search to a recent project at Cornell's Legal Information Institute using LLMs to annotate the U.S. Code of Conduct for Judges with centuries of judicial ethics thinking from rabbinic, Islamic and Roman Catholic traditions.

Arredondo also explains why courts need "judiciary grade" technology rather than tools built for lawyers, how AI is driving a surge in pro se filings, whether AI could ever replace judges (his short answer: "absolutely not"), and where he plans to start when he officially begins the role Aug. 31. This is Arredondo's second appearance on LawNext this year, following a February conversation at his home in Tiburon, Calif., about his career and what would come next. Now we know.

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.

This week, LexisNexis announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City — a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Amazon Web Services sit in the same room and build legal AI together, in real time.

The company is calling it a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped: Instead of developing products internally and asking customers to validate them afterward, customers bring their pain points into the lab, engineers code against them on the spot, and prototypes that pass muster can move into Lexis+ with Protégé in a matter of weeks.

Our guest today is the person leading that effort: Greg Dickason, chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Dickason joined LexisNexis in 2019 and previously ran the company's Asia-Pacific business, where he launched Lexis+ AI in that region. Before LexisNexis, he was chief technology officer at CoreLogic.

In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi recorded just ahead of the launch, Dickason explains what actually happens inside the lab as engineers code live alongside customers, and how this differs from the customer input LexisNexis has always said drives its product development. They also discuss what has already come out of the lab, including a multimedia Protégé Vault that lets a lawyer query a video deposition; why legal drafting is the lab's first priority; and how Dickason sees agents reshaping legal work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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).

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?

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.

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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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 Gaurav 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.

Gaurav 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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

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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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:

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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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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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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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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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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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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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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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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:

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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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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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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.