LawNext (Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi)

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

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

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

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

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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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Nicola Shaver, managing director, innovation and knowledge, at the law firm Paul Hastings, was recently named 2020 Innovative Leader of the Year in the International Legal Technology Association’s Distinguished Peer Awards. Not only that, but the law firm where she oversees innovation initiatives was named Innovator of the Year. 

While a major honor for anyone in the field of law firm innovation, it is even more remarkable given that until just seven years ago, Shaver was a lawyer practicing media law in Australia with no connection to the field of law firm innovation. When she moved to Toronto for family reasons in 2014, she could find no work in her legal speciality, so took a job at Cassels Brock & Blackwell leading the firm’s innovation initiatives. She was immediately hooked.  

After a stint at another Toronto firm, Stikeman Elliott, as director of knowledge management, she moved to Paul Hastings in New York in 2018, where she describes herself as “Dedicated to future-proofing law firms and accelerating the pace of positive change in the legal industry.” She is also founder of Legal Innovation and Design, a global membership group for anyone driving innovation initiatives in the commercial legal space, and publisher of the blog Tower of Babel. 

In a year that has presented so many challenges for law firms, Shaver joins LawNext to discuss the innovation initiatives that helped her and her firm earn these awards. She also shares her career journey, her thoughts on innovation, and her perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on the legal profession. 

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Dan Broderick believes businesses waste billions in repetitive work reviewing and negotiating semantically similar contracts. As a former lawyer, he saw the problem first-hand. It led him to found BlackBoiler, whose AI-based technology automates the review and mark-up of inbound contracts right in Word’s Track Changes. 

This week, BlackBoiler announced two new U.S. patents for its contract review software, bringing its total to seven. This comes less than two weeks after the company secured $3.2 million in funding from a group of strategic investors that included agreement cloud company DocuSign. 

In this episode of LawNext, Broderick joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how BlackBoiler came to be and the problem it addresses. He also describes how BlackBoiler works to automatically mark-up contracts, and discusses his plans for the future development of the technology and the company. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• ASG LegalTech is the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

• Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence. 
• TrustBooks is trust accounting made easy. The only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms, it helps them easily manage client accounts and stay compliant with their state bar requirements.  

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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). 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting.

This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings’ legal innovation hub, LexLab. The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some of the factors and considerations driving change in the law firm model.

Panelists speaking in this week’s episode are: Augie Rakow of Atrium LLP; Sameena Kluck, previously of Thomson Reuters; Nick Long, Director of Gravity Stack at Reed Smith LLP; and Patrick Palace, of Palace Law. The discussion is moderated by Alice Armitage, professor and Director of Applied Innovation at UC Hastings, and CEP of LexLab.

The panel was recorded as part of the LexLab Lunch-and-Learn speaker series. LexLab is an innovation hub within UC Hastings, which is building a concentration in law and technology for students, and an accelerator for legal tech startups.

It was big news earlier this month when practice management company Clio announced that it had acquired Lexicata, the first cloud-based CRM and client-intake platform for lawyers. It was the first acquisition by 10-year-old Clio, which says it will continue to operate Lexicata but will also develop its technology into a new, more advanced client-engagement platform, Clio Grow.

Lexicata CEO Michael Chasin and law school classmate Aaron George founded the company in 2014, after previously founding LawKick, a marketplace for connecting clients with lawyers. A 2013 graduate of Loyola Law School, Chasin also received a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Chasin at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, shortly after the acquisition was announced. They discuss the history of Lexicata, the reasons for the acquisition, the future of the product, and what it all means for the legal industry at large.

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Judy Perry Martinez is a lawyer who has made public service a part of her career from the start. She continues that legacy in August as she assumes the presidency of the 400,000-member American Bar Association during its annual meeting in San Francisco. On this episode of LawNext, Martinez joins host Bob Ambrogi for a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the ABA and the profession at large. 

Over more than 30 years, Martinez has held various leadership positions at the ABA, including as chair of the ABA Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which three years ago released it seminal study on access to legal services, Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States. Martinez also chaired the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which evaluates all prospective nominees to the federal bench. 

Other roles in which she has served include as the ABA’s lead representative to the United Nations, a member of the ABA Task Force on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, a member of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, a member of the Council of the ABA Center on Diversity, and a member of the ABA Commission on Domestic Violence.

She spent much of her career at the law firm Simon, Peragine, Smith & Redfearn in New Orleans, where she is of counsel. In 2003, she joined Northrop Grumman Corporation as assistant general counsel-litigation, eventually rising to become vice president and chief compliance officer before leaving in 2015 to spend a year at the Advanced Leadership Institute at Harvard University.

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In 2015, the husband-and-wife team of James Jones Jr. and Kristina Jones founded Court Buddy, a service that matches consumers with vetted lawyers at affordable prices. Last November, the couple stepped aside from the business to pursue other interests. In their time running the company, they had raised $7.1 million and won numerous awards and honors. 

Achieving success as a legal tech startup is notable in itself, but James and Kristina Jones also were among the few Black founders in an industry with a striking diversity problem. One survey of the legal tech industry found that only 2.3% of founders were Black and 3.1% were Latinx. 

Among the milestones they achieved, Court Buddy was named the winner of the American Bar Association’s Brown Select Award for Legal Access in 2017, a winner of the inaugural American Entrepreneurship Award in 2016, and a winner of a Webby Award in 2018. When they raised their first financing round in 2017, Kristina was recognized as only the 14th African-American woman ever to raise $1 million or more. Last year, Black Enterprise named the couple as its Techpreneurs of the Year. 

In this episode of LawNext, James Jones, a former practicing lawyer, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share their story of starting, building and ultimately stepping away from Court Buddy, and of how being a Black entrepreneur in legal tech presented certain obstacles he otherwise would not have encountered. 

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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This year marks the 10th anniversary of Kira Systems, the first company to develop AI-powered contract analysis, technology that is now becoming commonplace in the legal profession. To mark the anniversary, Kira’s cofounders are releasing a book, AI For Lawyers: How Artificial Intelligence is Adding Value, Amplifying Expertise, and Transforming Careers.

When CEO Noah Waisberg, a former lawyer, and CTO Dr. Alexander Hudek, a computer scientist, launched Kira in 2011, they thought it would be easy to develop machine-learning software to review contracts. They quickly found out otherwise. It was two years before they had a product to sell and nearly three before they earned a penny of revenue. 

This week on LawNext, Waisberg and Hudek join host Bob Ambrogi to share their story of founding and building Kira Systems into one of the world’s leading legal technology companies, used by law firms throughout the world. 

They also discuss their new book, the topics it covers, and the “friends” from the legal tech industry who helped them write it. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies. 
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

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

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

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With his contract-management company having just raised $40 million in Series B funding, Linksquares cofounder and CEO Vishal Sunak is aiming for some big goals, including “to build legal tech solutions that simply weren’t possible before.”

In announcing the raise, which brings the company’s total funding to $61.4 million, Sunak vowed that the company will develop its AI technology to “offer functionality no one has seen before,” and that it will soon introduce “a first-of-its-kind product that will change the way businesses complete the contracting process.”

Sunak returns to LawNext to discuss this latest funding round and his vision for the future of legal contracting. He was previously a guest on the show in the episode posted on June 2, 2020. That episode goes into more detail about the history of the company and its development. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking” 

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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.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

• On LawNext Podcast: LexFusion’s Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty on the 2022 Legal Market in Review.

• On LawNext: Joe Borstein and Basha Rubin on the Launch of LexFusion.

• LawNext Episode 38: EY’s Purchase of Pangea3, with Pangea3’s Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms. 

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

• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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David Lat defied the popular conception of who should be hit with a serious case of COVID-19. Just 44 years old, a two-time marathoner, with a young family and a successful career as a legal recruiter and journalist, and best known as the founder of the blog Above the Law, he did not fit the mold of a person at high risk. 

But what started early in March as fever and chills eventually led to 17 days in a New York City hospital, six of them spent intubated and on a respirator in ICU. As two major news organizations began preparing his obituary, his family, friends and thousands of social media followers prayed for his recovery. 

Over half of COVID-19 patients who go on a respirator do not survive. Lat was one of the fortunate ones. After six days, he recovered enough to be extubated and moved out of ICU. Then, on April 1, he sent out a Tweet announcing that he was about to be discharged. 

Now recovering with his husband and son at his parents’ home in New Jersey, Lat -- still hoarse from the intubation -- joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his ordeal and share his thoughts on what he learned going through it. 

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Here’s one that gets a bit meta. Back in November 2017, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi spoke at BYU Law School about a lawyer’s ethical duty to be technologically competent. The talk prompted the school to explore ways it could help students improve their technological abilities. What resulted was the school’s Legal Technology Initiative, a multi-pronged program to provide law students with technology training and assessment. 

Initially overseen by Shawn Nevers, deputy director of the law library, BYU this year brought on Tina Wilder, a former practicing lawyer, as an assistant law librarian to assist Nevers and take the lead in running tech training. On March 12, 2020, Ambrogi was at BYU and sat down with Nevers and Wilder to discuss the initiative and learn more about how the school teaches technology. 

But what no one anticipated when the interview was scheduled was that March 12 would be the very day that the coronavirus crisis would force the school to shut down its physical classrooms and put its lessons online. So Ambrogi recently connected with Nevers and Wilder for a follow-up on how going virtual has impacted the initiative.

This episode of LawNext begins with the original interview with Nevers and Wilder recorded March 12. Then, in a postscript recorded in July, Ambrogi catches up with the two guests for an update. 

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On Feb. 27, 2019, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite.

In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording of the live event. Listen as the 15 startups present their pitches, and then hear the final results and the announcement of the winner.

The 15 startups that participated were:

1. Lawble.
2. dealWIP.
3. DocStyle LLC.
4. Connective Counsel.
5. WarRoom.
6. JurisBytes.
7. OurChildInfo.com.
8. TrialLine.
9. Kinnami Software Corporation.
10. Fixi Subscription Plans.
11. Documate.
12. dtour.life.
13. EffortlessLegal.
14. Your Firm App.
15. Contract.one.

A huge thanks to the Legal Talk Network and Executive Producer Laurence Colletti for recording the competition and sharing the recording with us.

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Touting it as the next phase in its global expansion to transform the business of law, Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has launched its Legal Business Services practice in the United States, which it describes as “a comprehensive suite of legal management consulting and technologically-enabled legal managed services for corporate legal departments designed to accelerate the transformation of the business of law.”

A 2017 Harvard study of the Big Four in law found that their legal service lines have grown significantly in recent years in size, scope and importance, and their growth is not confined to tax or tax-related services, but spans a variety of practice areas. Yet in the U.S., the Big Four have been throttled in their ability to provide legal services by legal and financial regulatory constraints. At the same time, recent years have seen a surge in the use of managed services firms and other forms of alternative legal services providers. 

All of which leads to the question of what Deloitte’s new practice means, not just for corporate legal departments, but for the U.S. and global legal industry. To learn more, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with a principal of the new practice, Mark Ross, who joined Deloitte in January after serving as executive vice president and global head of contracts, compliance and commercial services at the global ALSP Integreon.

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Kimberly Y. Bennett describes herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, legal industry disruptor, and business coach who happens to be a lawyer. Nowhere are all those facets more evident than in the way she has structured her law practice, K Bennett Law, where she focuses on brand protection and growth strategy.

Soon after starting her own practice, which is entirely virtual, she decided there had to be a better way to charge legal fees, one that would provide predictable pricing for her business clients and predictable income for her. The model she developed is to provide her services via a monthly, flat-fee subscription. 

Another way she has distinguished her practice is through the relationships she has with her clients. She sees herself as not only a legal advisor to her clients, but also as a business coach and strategy consultant. She functions much like an outside general counsel, working with businesses until they scale to the point of hiring their own in-house attorney. 

Today, Bennett is also a coach and consultant to other lawyers looking to establish their own subscription-based practices, and she is a frequent speaker on innovation and entrepreneurship in law and business. 

On this episode of LawNext, Bennett joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her journey, discuss her practice model, and provide her insights on innovation, race, gender and more in the legal industry.  

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It was an epiphany, of sorts, for Greg Garman. In 2015, after 18 years at the same firm, including several as managing partner, he came to believe that most firms operated under a broken business model. Within weeks, he and several colleagues left the firm to start a smaller, more innovative practice, and he began to develop the concept for LawClerk, a marketplace where solos and small firms can hire freelance lawyers to assist them with specific projects. 

Now CEO of LawClerk, Garman -- who started the company together with his law partners Talitha Gray Kozlowski and Kristin Tyler -- has a vision for someday building it into the largest backbone provider of legal services in the United States. More importantly, he believes LawClerk will disrupt how small firms hire and how freelance lawyers get work -- providing both firms and freelancers greater profitability and flexibility. 

In this episode of LawNext, Garman joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he believes LawClerk provides small firms with a better option for staffing their firms, one that he says will enable them to be more profitable while charging their clients less. He also shares his thoughts about the business of law more broadly and how he sees the industry evolving.

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Which firms are best prepared to keep pace with changes in the legal market? That was the question explored in a recent survey of U.S. and European law firms, the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, conducted by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory. Among the findings: The firms that are best prepared for the future are those that already leverage technology. 

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the survey with Dean Sonderegger, who was recently named to lead Wolters Kluwer Legal and Regulatory U.S., the division of the global publishing giant that serves legal, corporate and compliance professionals in the United States. In a conversation recorded live at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, they also discuss innovation in the legal industry and the future of Wolters Kluwer. 

At Wolters Kluwer, Sonderegger -- whose formal title is senior vice president and general manager -- is responsible for accelerating the vision and strategy for the business. He has a particular focus on rapid development of advanced digital products and services to enhance customers’ efficiencies and workflows.

Sonderegger is also a well-known speaker and thought leader on topics including artificial intelligence, blockchain, the evolution of the legal profession, and business transformation. He writes a regular column for Above the Law on the intersection of technology and the practice of law, and his commentary has appeared in several publications including Forbes, CFO Magazine and the ABA Journal.

A veteran of the information and software industries, Sonderegger joined Wolters Kluwer in 2015 as the head of legal markets and innovation. In that role, he is credited with spearheading customer-focused innovation. Earlier in his career, he was executive director of product management and marketing at Bloomberg BNA. 

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After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building, sold last year to OpenText for $75 million, John Tredennick was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings — Merlin Digital Magic, a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the use of open source software to improve access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient. 

Now, Tredennick’s new company is about to release a product called Sherlock that he believes will revolutionize enterprise search. Tredennick calls it “the first AI-powered digital document bloodhound.” Start with a simple search query, then refine the results with increasing precision by telling Sherlock which results do or do not match the results you seek. 

A litigator before founding Catalyst in 2000, Tredennick is a true pioneer in legal technology who continues to blaze new trails. His legal and technology acumen have earned him numerous awards, including having been named by The American Lawyer as one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” named to the FastCase 50 as a legal visionary and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine.

In this episode, Tredennick joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his current projects as well as his former company, his interest in open source technology, his thoughts on the current state of legal technology, and his advice for legal technology entrepreneurs who are just starting out. 

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode. 

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With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Everlaw, a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence. 

Thanks also to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. We appreciate their support. 

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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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“Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone,” says Andy Wilson, cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull. “We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth.”

Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-processing company they had run since 2004. As the software took off, they gave up data processing to devote themselves full time to building and expanding Logikcull. In 2016, they brought in $10 million in a Series A financing, and then in 2018 they raised another $25 million.   

Today, coming off what Wilson says was the company’s biggest growth year ever, Logikcull has customers all over the world, ranging in size from solo practitioners to major law firms, from Fortune 500 corporations such as Walmart to city and state governments, and it is even used by some journalists.

On this episode of LawNext, recorded live in Logikcull’s San Francisco office, Wilson sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company’s founding, growth and future direction, including some of the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them. He also talks more generally about the state of the e-discovery industry.

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Jeffrey Marple, who has gained a national reputation for law department innovation in his role as director of innovation for corporate legal at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, has moved to Keesal Propulsion Labs, a company that assists Fortune 500 law departments in automating their business and legal processes, where has taken the position of director of digital transformation strategy.

In an exclusive LawNext interview, Marple and Rudy DeFelice, cofounder and CEO of KP Labs, join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss Marple’s move to the company, which spun off in 2018 from the California law firm Keesal, Young & Logan. They also share their insights on the state of law department innovation, the challenges law departments face in innovating, and where the industry is heading.

For Marple, his move to KP Labs comes after 21 years at Liberty Mutual, where, in his most recent role, he led the investigation, testing, and implementation of new technology, processes, and business models to improve how legal professionals work. In 2019, the Association of Corporate Counsel named Marple's department the "Legal Operations Team of the Year."

DeFelice, the company's cofounder and CEO, is a lawyer and technology entrepreneur. After practicing law early in his career with the firms McDermott, Will & Emery and Kelley Drye & Warren, he went on to found three technology companies, including one venture-backed legal technology company, Realpractice, which was acquired in 2012.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies. 

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

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Last week, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, said that it had acquired majority ownership of vLex, the international legal research platform that lays claim to having the largest collection of legal information on a single service. 

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined from London by Masoud Gerami, managing director, vLex Global Markets, who oversees vLex in the UK, Ireland, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. They talk about this latest news and what it means for vLex, and also talk more generally about the company and its research platform. 

Gerami joined vLex in 2019, when it acquired Justis Publishing Ltd., a 33-year-old UK-based online legal publisher. He had been managing director at Justis since 1986. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Swansea University. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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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.

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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Today on LawNext: A coronavirus success story – how a state bar, anticipating a tidal wave of unemployment claims, partnered with two legaltech companies to launch a pro bono portal in barely more than a week. 

On April 27, 2020, the New York State Bar Association launched a website devoted to helping those who need unemployment assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The site provides assistance with filing an unemployment claim and access to pro bono attorneys for those whose claims are denied. 

The launch came less than two weeks after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached out to the bar, asking for its help in preparing for the anticipated onslaught of claims. The bar, realizing it would need help from a technology developer, reached out to practice management company Clio, which in turn reached out to the pro bono portal company Paladin. 

In barely a week, the three teams got the site up and running. On this episode, we hear the story of how they did that from three who were directly involved:

• Henry M. (Hank) Greenberg, president of the NYSBA and shareholder in the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
• Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio.
• Kristen Sonday, cofounder of Paladin. 

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This week on LawNext: A look at the innovative Tech Edge J.D. program at Santa Clara University School of Law. As law schools come under fire for failing to teach the practical skills students need to succeed in the real world, this program does the opposite. It aims to change the return on investment in legal education by providing law students with the essential legal, technology and business skills that will prepare them to hit the ground running as tech lawyers in Silicon Valley. 

To discuss the program, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the program’s founding director, Laura Norris, who also created and directs the school’s Entrepreneurs’ Law Clinic, and who also teaches courses for engineering students on IP and startup law. In June, the Silicon Valley Business Journal named Norris to its list of 100 Women of Influence, an annual list of women leaders who are “doing extraordinary things in an extraordinary time.” 

Prior to joining the Santa Clara Law faculty, Norris was in private practice representing technology startups and entrepreneurs. She was also the first vice president of legal affairs at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. In 2014, she was one of only two academics named by The Recorder as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Tech Law. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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Throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, Holger Zscheyge is widely regarded as a leading authority on legal technology and innovation. President of the European Legal Technology Association, he is also founder and managing director of Infotropic Media, a Moscow-based legal publisher and producer of legal technology conferences, and a cofounder of Moscow Legal Hackers. 

Zscheyge was a guest on LawNext in 2018, when host Bob Ambrogi interviewed him live in Moscow at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference about the state of legal tech adoption in Russia. A lot has changed since then, so Zscheyge, who took office as ELTA president last November, returns to LawNext to share his perspectives on legal tech and innovation in Europe and Eastern Europe as they stand today. 

In a wide-ranging conversation, Zscheyge and Ambrogi discuss legal tech use by law departments and law firms, the pandemic’s impact on legal tech adoption, regulatory-reform initiatives that parallel those in the U.S., and the need for law schools to better teach legal tech and innovation. 

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies. 

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

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At its recent customer conference in Salt Lake City, called LEX Summit, the case management company Filevine unveiled a number of product releases and updates. Among them were several products for litigators driven by generative AI, including a first-of-its-kind tool, Depo CoPilot, that helps guide a lawyer during a deposition, and another, DemandsAI, that generates settlement demand letters in the lawyer’s own voice and style. 

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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It has been a year of notable developments for the practice management company MyCase. After starting the year with the arrival of a new CEO, Jim McGinnis, the company went on to make two significant acquisitions — of case management platform CASEpeer and document automation software Woodpecker — and this week is holding its first-ever customer conference, where McGinnis announced a third acquisition — of cloud-based legal accounting platform Soluno — and a roadmap of new features that includes native accounting. 

On this episode of LawNext, McGinnis joins host Bob Ambrogi to bring us up to date on everything happening at MyCase, discuss the company’s recent acquisitions and what they mean for customers, and share details on the company’s product roadmap and longer-term vision. 

Before joining MyCase in January 2021, McGinnis was EVP/GM of Wolters Kluwer’s Tax and Accounting North America Professional Segment, where he helped build CCH Axcess as a leading SaaS solution in the accounting profession. Earlier, he was vice president at Intuit, where he led marketing and product management for the professional division and led the accountant segment as part of Intuit’s QuickBooks business. He has also held senior leadership positions at Activision, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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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. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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Andrew Perlman is one of the nation’s leading forces helping to establish the future of legal education and legal practice. 

As a professor and now dean at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, he has helped drive the creation and development of programs for teaching about legal innovation and technology. He was founding director of Suffolk’s Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology and its related legal technology and innovation concentration for law students. He also helped establish Suffolk’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, or LIT Lab, where law students are able to work directly on legal tech and data science projects. 

Perlman has also been a leading force in national initiatives to shape the future of law practice and access to justice. He was chief reporter for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Ethics 20/20, which was responsible for updating the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to reflect changes in technology and increased globalization. He also served as the vice chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which produced projects and recommendations designed to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed, and he was the inaugural chair of the governing council of the ABA’s Center for Innovation.

Perlman joins host Bob Ambrogi to share thoughts on the present and future of legal education, legal practice, and legal regulatory reform. 

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

• ASG LegalTech is the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.
• XIRA.com is where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys in one place. For attorneys, XIRA is abolishing the subscription model for tech tools, providing free, fully integrated practice management software, e-billing, online scheduling, document management and video conferencing.

Bobby Balachandran, founder and CEO of governance, risk and compliance company Exterro, has just been named LegalTech CEO of the Year in the Legaltech Breakthrough Awards. In a year in which so many legal tech companies have seen significant growth, it is a notable honor. But Balachandran is hardly resting on his laurels. He is already eyeing an IPO in the year ahead. 

A computer scientist by training, Balachandran founded Exterro in 2008, quickly convincing a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company to sign on as his first customer. In 2018, Exterro received a reported $100 million investment – at that point one of the largest investments ever in a legal tech company – and went on to make two major acquisitions – of data privacy company Jordan Lawrence and digital forensics company AccessData. 

Balachandran joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his leadership philosophy as a legal tech CEO, his company’s formation and growth, his views on the legal tech market, and his plans for his company in the years ahead. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.
• Legalweek New York, back in person for 2022.

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You would be hard-pressed to find two people in legal technology more experienced in user interface and user experience design than Nicole Bradick and Andy Wishart. Bradick is founder and CEO of the legal tech design and development firm Theory and Principle. Wishart is chief product officer at contract lifecycle management company Agiloft and formerly was co-founder and chief technology officer of Contract Express, the contract automation software that Thomson Reuters acquired in 2015. 

While both individually have years of experience designing legal tech products, Bradick and Wishart also recently worked together on a project to redesign Agiloft’s UI and UX. That collaboration offers a case study in product design and of why good design matters in a legal technology product. 

In today’s episode, they share the story of why Agiloft initiated the redesign, the process by which Bradick and her team went about making recommendations, and how Agiloft is incorporating those recommendations into its product roadmap. 

This is a return appearance on LawNext for Bradick, who was the guest for our very first episode. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms. 

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

• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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It was 20 years ago that two Covington & Burling associates, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, made the audacious move of quitting their jobs and launching the legal research company Fastcase. Their goal was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology. Two decades later, that once-scrappy company is now a major player in the legal research market. 

At the recent annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, Walters and Rosenthal — now CEO and president respectively — sat down for a live interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. They recount the beginnings of their company, its growth over the intervening 20 years, and their successes and mistakes over the years. They also offer predictions for where Fastcase and legal research will be in another 20 years. 

This episode of LawNext was produced and recorded in collaboration with the Legal Talk Network. A big thanks to them for partnering with us on this podcast. 

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I am very pleased and honored to kick off my first episode with guest Nicole Bradick. A veteran legal technology innovator and entrepreneur, Nicole is CEO of Theory and Principle, the technology design and development company she founded last January. Formerly partner and chief strategy officer with legal-technology development firm CuroLegal, Bradick is a 2014 Fastcase 50 honoree, recognizing “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders,” and was profiled by the ABA Journal as a Legal Rebel in 2012. In this inaugural episode of LawNext, I talk with Nicole about technology development and design, what makes legal technology “bad” or “good,” the process of developing technology from problem to prototype, and why Nicole believes technology is not the answer to all of our problems. Click the player above to listen to the show. And if you like the show, leave a kind word on iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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• 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.

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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

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

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

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

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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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The $500 million secondary investment announced recently by online legal services company LegalZoom is the largest investment ever in a legal technology company. It comes as the company continues to expand both its services and its geographic reach. With a valuation of $2 billion and a customer base of 4 million, what will this investment mean for LegalZoom now and into the future?

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Chas Rampenthal, general counsel and corporate secretary of LegalZoom. In a wide-ranging conversation, they talk about the investment, LegalZoom’s mission, it battles with state bars, its expansion overseas, its growing network of outside attorneys, and the need for disruption in legal services delivery.

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

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

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

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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.

• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.

• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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As a litigator in Los Angeles, Nicole Clark saw that state court data could be a secret weapon for winning, but she also saw how difficult it was for her and other lawyers to access that data. That inspired Clark to found Trellis in 2018, to collect and provide access to that data so that other litigators would not have to operate blind. 

Recently, Trellis raised $14.1 million in a Series A funding round that Clark plans to use to expand the company’s coverage into additional states and its customer base into additional industries. Eventually, Clark hopes to see the use of court analytics become the industry standard, commonplace among litigators and expected by clients. 

On this episode of LawNext, Clark joins host Bob Ambrogi to explain why she started Trellis and how she sees its court and judge analytics as critical tools for today’s litigators. She also recounts how the company has expanded its coverage so far and describes her plans to eventually cover the courts in every U.S. state. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035. 

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

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

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

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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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Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium’s lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even including marketing, and develops and operates software to streamline the firm’s workflows.

Atrium was launched in 2017 by Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who sold the Twitch video platform he created to Amazon for $970 million, and Augie Rakow, a former partner representing startups at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to address Kan’s own frustrations as a client with how legal services are delivered. Atrium raised an initial $10.5 million in funding in 2017 and then another $65 million last September in round led by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

On this episode of LawNext, cofounder Rakow, now chair of Atrium, joins host Bob Ambrogi for a frank and informative discussion. Rakow discusses the origins and structure of Atrium, the firm’s progress so far in achieving its goals, Atrium’s blueprint for future development, and the obstacles and challenges it has faced. They also discuss how Atrium differs from Clearspire, an earlier attempt at a dual-entity model.  

Rakow attended Harvard Divinity School before discovering an interest in law and attending UC Hastings College of the Law. He joined Orrick as a corporate associate, later becoming partner. He specialized in representing startups in the Bay Area, where his clients included the driverless car industry’s first “unicorn” startup, the world’s then fastest-growing SaaS company, the first venture-backed consumer drone company, the leading Sand Hill-backed consumer packaged goods company, and several of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture funds.

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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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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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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.

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. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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What if a lawyer could know how a judge is likely to rule in a case or how heavy is a judge’s workload? Rick Merrill was a litigator at a large law firm who became frustrated over his inability to get meaningful information about the judges before whom he appeared. So last year, he launched Gavelytics, a California company that uses analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze docket data and provide lawyers with a range of insights about judges’ propensities, workloads and leanings.

In this episode of LawNext, host Robert Ambrogi visits Gavelytics’ office in Santa Monica, where he sits down with Merrill, now the company’s CEO, and Justin Brownstone, VP of sales and litigation counsel, to talk about the product one year after its launch, how lawyers use analytics for strategic and competitive purposes, and how analytics and AI are being used more broadly in law.

Before founding Gavelytics, Merrill was a litigator with the law firm Greenberg Traurig in Los Angeles, involved primarily in real estate and other commercial disputes. He received his law degree from UCLA School of Law, completed the executive program at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California.

Brownstone is also a former litigator with several Los Angeles firms. He is also a graduate of UCLA School of Law, where he was a managing editor of the law review. He earned his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College.

This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams, author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting.  

On this episode of LawNext, Adams and Chas Rampenthal, LegalZoom’s general counsel, join host Bob Ambrogi to provide details on Adams’ new role as head of contracts and the system they are building to give small businesses a better contracting experience -- one that is driven more by expertise than by technology alone.

This episode gets kind of meta for us here at LawNext. Rampenthal was our guest for a show last August. After hearing the episode, Adams reached out to Ambrogi to ask if he would make an introduction to Rampenthal. Ambrogi did, and that led eventually to Adams’ hiring and the launch of this new project.

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As the legal profession continues to transform and evolve, how can a law firm or legal department be “future ready”? What are the characteristics that define future-ready organizations and foretell their continued success? 

Just out from Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is its 2021 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report, documenting the top trends affecting legal professionals and looking at how well prepared law firms and legal departments are to address them. And given that this year’s report comes in the wake of the global pandemic, it considers the events of 2020 and their impact on the profession now and into the future. 

To discuss the report and share their insights on it, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two top executives from Wolters Kluwer:

• Martin O’Malley, executive vice president and managing director of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory worldwide. 
• Dean Sonderegger, senior vice president and general manager of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

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George Psiharis was employee number six at Clio, which he joined shortly after the practice management company was founded in 2008. Now, he is COO of an enterprise with more than 400 employees and growing, responsible for customer success, business development and data operations. 

Psiharis also oversees Clio’s annual Legal Trends Report, the fourth of which was released at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego. This year’s report included a unique feature, a study that Clio said was the largest nationwide assessment of client services among law firms. 

Psiharis joined host Bob Ambrogi for a special edition recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, where he discussed some of the surprising and notable findings of the Legal Trends Report. He also discusses the growth he has overseen during a decade at Clio and how his role has evolved.

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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.

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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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. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

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When COVID-19 first swept across the United States in March 2020, it forced courts across the country to shut down, bringing trials and other legal proceedings to a screeching halt. A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts examined how courts responded in the aftermath of that shutdown, and it concluded that they did pretty well overall, rapidly embracing technology and revolutionizing their operations.

But the study, How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations, also found that courts’ accelerated adoption of technology disproportionately benefited those with legal representation, while posing disadvantages for those without legal representation, particularly those whose access was limited by lack of technology, physical disabilities or limited English proficiency.

We take a deep dive into the report with Qudsiya Naqui, a lawyer and officer on the Civil Legal System Modernization team at Pew that conducted this research and produced the report. Naqui is a podcaster herself, host of Down to the Struts, a podcast about disability and design that focuses on building more inclusive systems and structures that acknowledge the breadth of human diversity. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin, helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice.

Paladin has attracted some notable investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and host of the show Shark Tank,and also notable development partnerships, including with the law firms Dentons and Wilson Sonsini and the Chicago Bar Foundation.  

On this episode of LawNext, Conrad joins host Bob Ambrogi for an in-depth discussion of the company she and cofounder Kristen Sonday launched in 2015. She explains how the platform works, describes Paladin’s partnerships with legal departments, law firms and associations to expand it capabilities, and discusses her views on how technology can play a role in expanding access to justice.

Before founding Paladin, Conrad was a litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. An alumnus of NYU Law, McGill University and Sciences Po Paris, she previously worked at the United Nations on International Criminal Court issues, and has worked in international law around the world. In 2017, she was named both an ABA Journal Legal Rebel and a Fastcase 50 legal innovation honoree. In 2019, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center named her to its roster of Women of Legal Tech.

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

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

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

• Dave Lewis, chief scientific officer, who has over three decades of experience in AI and statistics.

• Lenora Gray, data scientist, who has worked for more than 15 years in law firm project management and matter support roles.

• Jeremy Pickens, head of applied science, a pioneer in the fields of collaborative exploratory search and technology assisted review. 

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

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

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

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

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.

• LEX Reception, Never miss a call, with expert answering service for Lawyers.

• Legalweek, March 24-27, New York Hilton Midtown. Register today at legalweekshow.com.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LexLab, the legal innovation hub at UC Hastings Law School, recently wrapped up the fourth cohort of its legal tech accelerator program with a demo day at which the seven startup participants got to pitch their products to potential investors. 

But this demo day, in fact this entire cohort, was noticeably different than prior ones, in that it was the first to take place 100% virtually, without the benefit of having the startups come and work on site in LexLab’s offices on the Hastings campus in San Francisco.  

In this episode of LawNext, we speak with LexLab’s director, Drew Amerson, and Tiyani Majoko, cofounder of Anü, one of the startups that participated in the program, about the accelerator program and about the good and bad of the experience of conducting it virtually. 

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• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

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On this episode of LawNext: A conversation about Thomson Reuters’ strategy around generative artificial intelligence with two of the executives most directly responsible for its development and implementation. 

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

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

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

• Mike Dahn, senior vice president and head of Westlaw product management. 

• Joel Hron, head of artificial intelligence and TR Labs.

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

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“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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On Thursday, March 12, facing the escalating threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Brigham Young University Law School made the decision to close down live classes, send students home, and teach the remainder of the semester online. 

As it happened, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the law school that day, where he was scheduled to interview the school’s head of infrastructure and technology, David Armond, about its law and corpus linguistics initiative. 

But as they sat down to record, Armond had just come from a meeting with the school’s deans and others in which the school had finalized the decision to close down for the remainder of the semester and put its classes online, so he graciously agreed to discuss how the school reached that decision and how it would be implemented. 

In this brief episode, Armond discussed how a law school prepares to shut down and then executes on that decision. We’ll post the remainder of the interview – the part about law and corpus linguistics – later as a separate episode. 

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

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

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

• In April 2019, where he discussed the company’s founding and early development.

• In November 2021, just after Everlaw became one of the first legal tech companies to achieve unicorn status, or a valuation of over $1 billion. 

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

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

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

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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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As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself. 

Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduling sessions via Calendly, and communicating with staff and counsel via Slack. 

But when courthouses in Jefferson Parish closed last month, it presented an even-greater challenge for the programs Judge Schlegel oversees, which focus on treatment and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol offenders. 

With help from legal technology companies, he rallied to further innovate, working with LawDroid to create a text-based chatbot to check in on probationers and with Documate to develop an online system for defendants to enter guilty pleas from prison. 

In this episode of LawNext, Judge Schlegel joins host Bob Ambrogi to describe the systems he has built and how they are being used to keep the wheels of justice turning even with courthouses shut down.   

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The past year has seen the launch of several legal technology marketplaces, but Theorem LTS aims to be something more — an integrated legal technology ecosystem to power workflow-driven tech adoption by law firms and legal departments, as well as a marketplace for vendors to sell their products and connect with customers. 

Founder Joshua Maley is a former lawyer and venture investor who started the company because he perceived that legal professionals had no viable way to understand all the products and services available to them on the market, and specifically at the point of pain within their workflows. “The Holy Grail of enterprise adoption and engagement is to deliver these solutions within the workflow, and that’s where our focus is,” Maley says. 

After nearly two years of developing and testing the platform, Maley is now formally launching it. He joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he started Theorem and how he believes it will help drive broader technology adoption by law firms and legal departments.  

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

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

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

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

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A recent report from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation’s legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a 2018 paper published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review that documented these legal deserts and rural America’s increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis. 

Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper, Lauren Sudeall, associate professor of law and founding faculty director of the Center for Access to Justice at Georgia State University College of Law. We talk about legal deserts and about Sudeall’s other research, in which she focuses on access to the courts, in both the civil and criminal contexts, and on how lower-income individuals navigate the legal system, either with or without the help of a lawyer.

A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Sudeall clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. She then worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first as a Soros Justice Fellow and later as a staff attorney.

At the Southern Center, she represented indigent capital clients in Georgia and Alabama and litigated civil claims regarding constitutional violations within the criminal justice system, based primarily on the right to counsel. She serves on the Southern Center’s board of directors, the Indigent Defense Committee of the State Bar of Georgia, and the board of advisors for the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School. 

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Sixteen months after UpCounsel announced it would shut down, it is not only alive and well, but showing double-digit revenue growth, consistent profitability, and accelerating demand for legal services through its lawyer marketplace. Now it is launching a crowdfunding campaign with the mission of bringing legal to the people. 

[The crowdfunding campaign opens to the public July 28, but listeners of this podcast can access the private friends and family campaign, with early investor benefits including a lower valuation cap.]

On this episode of LawNext, we look at the Phoenix-like story of how UpCounsel came back from near death, saved at the eleventh hour by new owners and a new management team that reinvented its business model, and why the company is now turning to crowdfunding to raise capital to fuel its growth and development. 

To tell this story, we are joined by two of the company’s top executives: 

• Chief Executive Officer KJ Erickson, a serial entrepreneur who Rolling Stone named in 2017 as one of 25 people shaping the future.
• Chief Revenue Officer Paul Drobot, a sales veteran who previously led sales at legal tech companies Atrium and Logikcull. 

This episode is part of a two-part series on UpCounsel that also includes the LawSites blog post: Exclusive: As UpCounsel Launches Crowdfunding Campaign, the Phoenix-like Story Of Its Rise from Near Shutdown.

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

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

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

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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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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.

In August, a Utah task force on access to justice issued a report that called for “profoundly reimagining the way legal services are regulated in order to harness the power of entrepreneurship, capital, and machine learning in the legal arena.” 

Two days later, the Utah Supreme Court voted unanimously to approve the report’s recommendations, including substantially loosening regulatory restrictions on lawyers and creating a “regulatory sandbox” to allow a market of non-traditional legal entities to provide legal services in the state. 

In this episode of LawNext, we take an in-depth look at this unprecedented experiment in enhancing access to justice through regulatory reform. Joining host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the report, Narrowing the Access-to-Justice Gap by Reimagining Regulation, and its implementation are the cochairs of the Task Force, who will now continue as cochairs to oversee the implementation of the recommendations: 

Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court in February 2015 by Gov. Gary Herbert. Prior to his appointment, he served as a trial court judge for over 10 years. A 1989 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began his legal career as a litigator with the law firm of Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, where he focused on complex civil litigation.

John R. Lund is past-president of the Utah State Bar and partner with Parsons Behle & Latimer in Salt Lake City, where he focuses his practice on litigation and trial work. A 1984 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, he is also chair of the Utah Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence. 

Further reading:

• Utah Supreme Court Votes to Approve Pilot Allowing Non-Traditional Legal Services.
• Utah Task Force Calls for ‘Profoundly Reimagining the Way Legal Services Are Regulated’.

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In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the Oct. 1, 2020, launch of LexFusion, we get a first look at the new company from guests Joe Borstein, a legal industry veteran and one of LexFusion’s two cofounders, and Basha Rubin, the cofounder and CEO of Priori Legal, the legal talent company that is one of the initial participants in the LexFusion collaborative. 

LexFusion’s mission is to turbocharge the adoption and use of technology within corporate legal departments and large law firms by changing the paradigm for how technology is purchased. The company will serve as the go-to-market representative of a collaborative, hand-picked group of best-in-breed legal technology companies, each providing a distinct category of technology. 

The overarching goal is to rescue general counsel and firm partners from the endless and overwhelming stream of cold calls they receive and offer an alternative based on trusted relationships and trusted products. 

In this episode of LawNext, Borstein describes the purpose and vision of LexFusion, and Rubin explains why her company chose to participate. 

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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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• 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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In this episode of LawNext, we take you live to Russia, where we interview two of the leading experts on Russian legal technology to get their insights and perspectives on the state of innovation and development there. What they say may surprise you.

Host Bob Ambrogi recently visited Moscow as the keynote speaker at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference. While there, he recorded these two interviews on the state of the legal tech industry in Russia:

• Holger Zscheyge, managing director of the publishing company Infotropic Media and organizer of his own legal tech conference, Moscow Legal Tech. Zscheyge is widely regarded as the leading authority on legal technology in Russia.
• Anton Pronin, organizer of the Skolkovo LegalTech conference and legaltech director of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, where he helps incubate and advise legal technology startups.

Zscheyge and Pronin describe an industry undergoing significant change. In Russia, the legal tech startup scene has quickly become more robust over the last two years. But law firms and courts have been slow to adopt new technologies. Both guests suggest that may now be starting to change.

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.

• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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

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

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

• Alexander Horwitz, chief operating officer at Legal Services NYC. 

• Kate Boyd, chief operating officer at Sente Advisors. 

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• Littler, local everywhere. 

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On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission is to lead the school’s next chapter of innovation. 

But she also arrives as a profound moment of social change in our society and in the legal profession, a moment that has raised new questions about the nature of legal education and the role of law schools in helping to shape the profession. As she steps into this role, where does she start and what challenges does she face? 

On this episode of LawNext, Osofsky joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her new role and to share her thoughts on legal education, bar admission, legal innovation, and legal regulatory reform. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

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

The four panelists were:

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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In January 2020, Axiom Managed Services, one of two companies spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, rebranded as Factor, a move the company characterized as a relaunch, and named a new CEO, Varun Mehta, a veteran of the legal tech industry who had previously helped found the e-discovery managed services firm The Clutch Group.

It has been a year of challenges and opportunities for Factor, an ALSP that describes itself as delivering complex legal work at scale. While Mehta could never have anticipated that he was taking the helm in a year that would be defined by a global pandemic, it was also a year in which the company received an investment it characterized as one of the largest in the global legal solutions market, built out a powerhouse management team, and partnered with major law firm Allen & Overy to provide LIBOR remediation.

This week on LawNext, Mehta joins host Bob Ambrogi to reflect on his first year as CEO and the company's progress so far, as well as to share his vision for what lies ahead for Factor and for the managed services industry more broadly.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software.

• Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.

• TrustBooks, the only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms.

• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.

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In multiple ways, Stacy Butler is immersed in seeking to innovate the justice system and the delivery of legal services. 

As director of the Innovation for Justice program at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, she leads students in thinking critically about the power of technology and innovation to close the justice gap. As president of the board of Step Up To Justice, she is helping to rethink the provision of free legal services. As a member of the Arizona Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, she is helping to reshape the regulatory rules that inhibit innovation.

Among the projects she has helped spearhead are a new tier of civil legal professional in Arizona, a free tool for helping tenants and landlords communicate, a toolkit for advocates of human trafficking survivors, and an ambitious tenant-education program to reduce evictions. She has 20 years of experience in community advocacy work related to pro bono legal services, and was named three times as one of the Top 50 Pro Bono Attorneys in Arizona.

At the recent Innovations in Technology Conference presented by the Legal Services Corporation, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Butler for a face-to-face conversation about her work and her broader thoughts regarding innovation in legal services. 

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There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services. 

So critical is the issue that GPSolo, the magazine of the American Bar Association’s Solo, Small Firm and General Practice Division, has devoted its most recent issue to the topic, assembling a roster of contributors who are among the nation’s leading experts on regulatory reform. 

In this special LawNext episode in conjunction with GPSolo, five of those contributors come together to share and discuss their views on reregulation:

• Zachariah DeMeola, director of legal education and the legal profession at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.
• Joseph Gartner, director and counsel, ABA Center for Innovation.
• Judy Perry Martinez, past president of the ABA and former chair of the ABA’s Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, whose 2016 Report on the Future of Legal Services influenced many of the reform initiatives now underway. 
• Patrick Palace, the past president of the Washington State Bar Association and current member of the executive council of the National Conference of Bar Presidents and the board of the ABA Center for Innovation, who served as editor of the GPSolo issue. 
• Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer of the Arizona Supreme Court, who chaired the Arizona Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, which recommended rules ultimately adopted by the court that created a new tier of legal services provider and eliminated the ban on non-lawyer ownership.

Note: For previous LawNext episodes featuring some of these panelists, see:

• Supreme Court Justice Ann Timmer on Arizona’s Sweeping Regulatory Reforms (2021).
• Incoming ABA President Judy Perry Martinez (July 29, 2019). 
• LawNext Episode 34: Alternative Legal Models – A Panel Discussion (with Patrick Palace and others)(April 9, 2019).

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

What does it mean to practice data-driven law? On this episode, Bob speaks with Jeff Pfeifer, the LexisNexis vice president charged with driving overall product strategy for LexisNexis Legal and Professional, North America. Over the past several years, Pfeifer has spearheaded a series of acquisitions and product developments, all with the goal of establishing LexisNexis as the leader in legal analytics and enabling what he calls data-driven law.

Pfeifer oversaw the company’s 2016 acquisitions of legal analytics companies Lex Machina and Intelligize and the 2017 acquisition of Ravel Law. Most recently, Pfeifer led the roll-out of Lexis Analytics, a suite of tools that organizes all of LexisNexis’s major analytics acquisitions and products (as well as a couple new products) into three categories of analytics – litigation, regulatory and transactional. Bob talks with Jeff about these acquisitions, the launch of Lexis Analytics, and his vision of the data-driven lawyer.

Pfeifer is a 29-year veteran of LexisNexis. Before taking on his current role in 2015 as vice president of product management, he was vice president, primary law and Shepard’s, and president and CEO of LexisNexis Puerto Rico. Earlier, he was vice president of marketing. He was recognized this year as among the Fastcase 50, honoring the “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

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To say that Stevie Ghiassi is a busy man is an understatement. In addition to founding Legaler, a secure video meeting platform for lawyers, the Australia-born entrepreneur is the founder of the recently launched Legaler Aid, a charity to support social justice legal cases worldwide, and founder of the Global Legal Tech Report, which will release its final report in December after nearly a year of surveying legal tech around the world. 

As if those projects were not enough to occupy his time, Ghiassi is the founding president of the Australian Legal Technology Association and founder of the organization Blockchain for Law. 

In this episode of LawNext, Ghiassi — who is now based in Los Angeles — joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his story of how he became involved in legal technology, describe how he developed and built Legaler into a platform used by lawyers worldwide, discuss his vision for how Legaler Aid will use blockchain and crowdfunding to address access to justice, and offer findings from the Global Legal Tech Report. 

If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Xira, a site that helps consumers by making legal advice more accessible and affordable and that helps lawyers by providing a one-stop platform for getting, booking and managing clients. 

Thanks also to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support. 

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Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman, CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements.

Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the launch of the Agreements Network, which he describes as the “legal layer for a networked world.” The Agreements Network provides a base blockchain layer and other tools to serve as an ecosystem to create, distribute, and operate legal agreements.

Kuhlman envisions that lawyers will be able to generate new revenue by converting agreements they’ve created into products that can be sold through these networks. These “archetypes,” as Kuhlman calls them, would combine legal text with smart-contract workflows to allow commercial clients to create their own active agreements.

Now based in Scotland, Kuhlman is a U.S.-trained lawyer who went to work in Somaliland in eastern Africa and started a law firm there. His work representing companies in transactional matters helped convince him that there had to be a better way to manage agreements. That led him to launch Monax and the Agreements Network.

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“We are not your grandfather’s law librarian.” As president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Femi Cadmus makes that point emphatically. Her organization recently completed it first-ever AALL State of the Profession report, an in-depth look at what information professionals do and how they do it. The report’s bottom line is that technology is making the role of the law librarian more diverse and more essential than ever before.

As the AALL prepares to convene in Washington, D.C., in July for its annual meeting, Cadmus shows LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the state of the law librarian profession and the evolving role of information professionals in law firms, corporations, law schools and government.

Born in New York and raised in Nigeria, Cadmus is currently at Duke University School of Law, where she is the Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty research professor of law, associate dean of information services and technology, and director of the Michael J. Goodson Library. With almost three decades in law libraries, she was formerly at Cornell University, where she was Edward Cornell law librarian, associate dean for library services and professor of the practice. Her earlier experience includes positions at the law schools at Yale, George Mason University and the University of Oklahoma.

Cadmus’ educational background includes an LL.B. from the University of Jos, Nigeria, B.L Nigerian Law School; an LL.M. (Law in Development) from the University of Warwick, England; and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Oklahoma. She is admitted to practice in New York.

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Ralph Baxter spent nearly a quarter century as chairman and CEO of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, leading its growth from a regional San Francisco law firm specializing in municipal finance to one of the world’s largest firms with offices worldwide and a diverse array of practices. Along the way, both Baxter and Orrick earned kudos for their many innovations in the delivery and pricing of legal services and the staffing and structure of the firm. 

Now retired from Orrick, Baxter serves as an advisor and consultant devoted to inspiring positive transformation in the ways legal services are delivered globally. In particular, he believes that technology and process design enable legal services to be delivered better, faster and cheaper, and to be available at reasonable cost to all who need them, and his goal is to help make this happen. 

Baxter is also an advisor to a number of legal organizations. He was chairman of the advisory board of the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, is on the board of directors of Intapp, and is on the legal advisory board of LegalZoom. He was previously on the boards of directors of both Lex Machina and Ravel Law prior to their acquisitions by LexisNexis. 

He is a fellow and senior advisor to CodeX, the Stanford University Center for Law and Informatics, and is a member of the advisory boards of the Stanford Law School Center on the Legal Profession, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, and the Georgetown Law School Center for the Study of the Legal Profession.  

Included in 2009 in the ABA Journal’s inaugural class of Legal Rebels, Baxter was an elementary school teacher before attending law school. Last year, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from West Virginia, losing in the primary. 

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E-discovery company Casepoint is unusual among legal technology companies in that it has achieved significant growth in recent years, without taking on outside funding. Since 2015, the company has grown from 45 employees to 370, and in just the last year has seen its install base grow by more than 70 percent. 

In this episode of LawNext, Haresh Bhungalia, the chief executive officer of Casepoint, joins host Bob Ambrogi, to discuss the company’s history, growth and current position in the market. They also discuss Bhungalia’s thoughts about whether and when to take outside funding, the benefits of avoiding outside funding, and scaling a company based on organic growth. 

Bhungalia was just 25 when he launched his first company, 2020 Company LLC, a government services business that provided technology systems integration, development and support to federal government entities including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After growing that company to 650 employees, he and cofounder Paresh Ghelani sold it in 2012. 

While still at 2020, Bhungalia had been an angel investor in and advisor to a new startup, then called Legal Discovery, that had developed one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. After selling 2020, he joined Casepoint as CEO, where he has been instrumental in its growth. 

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.

• Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms. 

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

• Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.

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