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

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

• Adam Borgman, senior associate in the labor and employment group at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease. 

• Julie Brown, director of practice technology at Vorys. 

• Joshua Schnoll, Everlaw's chief marketing officer.

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

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

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

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

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

• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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

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

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

• AI adoption and its relationship to law firm growth. 

• Clients' expectations around lawyers' use of AI. 

• How potential clients find lawyers. 

• The correlation between technology adoption and long-term success. 

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

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

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

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

• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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

The e-discovery company Reveal Data recently announced that it will launch its new generative AI-powered document review platform, called "aji," in late September. Notably, the company said it is offering full access to the platform at no cost through Dec. 31, in order to enable "the entire legal community to explore and master the next era in GenAI review innovation."

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

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

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

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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today? 

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to extract, query, and transfer practice management.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today? 

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

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

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

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

• Lluis Faus, cofounder and CEO of vLex and now global CEO of the combined entity, known as the vLex Group. 

• Angel Faus, cofounder and chief technology officer of vLex.

• Ed Walters, cofounder and former CEO of Fastcase and now chief strategy officer of vLex.

• Phil Rosenthal, cofounder and former president of Fastcase and now chief growth officer of vLex.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world's first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's just-released latest version of its GPT model. 

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

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

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

• Jake Heller, CEO.

• Laura Safdie, COO & general counsel. 

• Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer. 

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

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

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

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. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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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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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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today? 

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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.

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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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. 

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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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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Over seven years as a litigator of complex commercial and antitrust cases, Dan Hauck had become frustrated over how difficult it was for legal teams to collaborate around matters. In 2014, he left his law firm, Bryan Cave, to start ThreadKM, a matter-centric legal collaboration platform. As the product evolved, it developed integrations with the document management platform NetDocuments, and in 2017, NetDocuments acquired ThreadKM, resulting in the NetDocuments product ndThread. 

Now, Hauck is chief product officer at NetDocuments, where he is responsible for the company's strategic vision, partnerships, products, user interface and roadmap. Over the past year, he was instrumental in the company's launch of PatternBuilder, a product for building applications and automating legal documents, and its acquisition of Worldox. 

Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Hauck for a live conversation about the company's product strategy and roadmap. Spoiler alert: His vision for the platform spans automating and linking every stage of the legal document workflow. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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Last week, the cloud-based content management company NetDocuments was in Denver for its annual three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was there also, where he sat down for an exclusive live interview with the company's two top executives, Josh Baxter, who has been CEO since 2018, and Alvin Tedjamulia, one of the company's original three founders and its CTO since 1999.

Just before Bob flipped-on the record button, Josh and Alvin revealed that, the next morning, Alvin would be announcing his retirement – a major announcement not just for the company, but for the legal tech industry more broadly, as Alvin is a veteran of 40 years in the industry and has been a visionary leader in bringing legal to the cloud. 

Josh, Alvin and Bob talk about that news, and also about the company's history, where it is today, and where it is heading over the next 5-10 years. Also, Josh and Alvin reveal who will succeed Alvin as the company's next CTO. 

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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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Ronnie Gurion, chief operating officer 

With 20 years of experience leading marketplace, e-commerce, and SaaS businesses to achieve rapid global expansion and growth, Gurion plays a pivotal role in shaping Clio's next chapter. As the previous GM and global head of Uber for Business (U4B), Gurion brings a wealth of global market activation experience, having grown the business rapidly during his tenure. When he's not developing high-performing, collaborative global teams, Gurion can be found skiing with his wife and two kids.

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

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

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

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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?, 

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Service of process and other documents is an essential function of law practice – one most lawyers deal with on a regular basis. But for Colorado lawyer Eric Voogt, he saw service of process as a broken system, one in which it could be difficult for an attorney to line up a process server or know the status of the service, and one that he believed was long overdue for a technological upgrade.

So Voogt decided to do something about it. In 2016, he founded Proof, an on-demand process serving platform that provides legal professionals with instant access to experienced process servers and real-time tracking from a phone or laptop. Earlier this year, Proof raised $7 million in a Series A funding round, and it says its platform is now used by more than 3,500 law firms and government agencies.

In early October, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Voogt live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, where it had just been announced that Proof would be one of three third-party products to be the first to be fully embedded within the Clio law practice management platform. They discuss why Voogt founded the company and how it is disrupting service of process. 

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Jonathan Watson, Clio's chief technology officer. 

With over 20 years of leadership experience in large-scale SaaS and live gaming solutions, Watson's unique approach and passion for intertwining product development, design, user experience, and engineering have accelerated Clio's product growth while earning Clio best-in-class NPS and customer retention rates. 

Outside of the office, he's an endless tinkerer who is always exploring creative pursuits including 3D printing, cooking, and making his daughter laugh.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Reagan Attle, chief marketing officer at Clio. 

Known for building and leading high-performing and award-winning teams, Attle has 20 years of experience and has played a major role in Clio's growth to date, having led the announcements of and go-to-market strategies for Clio's Series D and E funding rounds, acquisitions of Lexicata, CalendarRules, and Lawyaw, and the launch of Clio Payments and Clio's new mission and brand. 

When she's not transforming the legal experience for all, building competitive moats through authentic brand trust, and evolving the company's thought leadership, she can be found playing classic Nintendo games with her son.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Shubham Datta, vice president of corporate development at Clio.

Datta oversees the development and execution of Clio's strategic growth strategy through acquisitions and investments. He brings to Clio years of M&A experience on both sides of the table as a strategic acquirer and sell-side advisor, with experiences in sourcing, deal execution and integration. Prior to Clio, Shubham was a corporate development lead at Shopify working on acquisitions and investments.

In his spare time, he's usually hosting or editing The Backbone podcast, cheering on the Raptors or thinking about what to eat next.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, about the recently released 2022 Legal Trends Report.

An attorney admitted to the New York Bar, Lenon brings legal scholarship to the conversations happening both within Clio and with its customers. Lenon has worked extensively to educate lawyers on technology's capability to enhance their practice, while also teaching tech companies about the unique needs of the legal system.

Among the most divisive issues facing the legal profession today is that of revising the rules that regulate law practice – and more specifically the questions of whether to liberalize the rules to allow those who are not licensed lawyers to own law practices or to engage in the practice of law. Two states, Arizona and Utah, have implemented regulatory schemes loosening restrictions on law practice, and other states are considering similar revisions to their rules. 

Now, Stanford Law School's Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession has published a comprehensive study of the data coming out of Arizona and Utah, giving us what may be the first real evidence-based look at this issue. It finds that the reforms in those states are spurring substantial innovation, that they are critical to serving lower-income populations, and that they do not pose any substantial risk of consumer harm. 

On today's LawNext, we are joined by the two principal authors of that study: David Freeman Engstrom, co-director of the Rhode Center, and Lucy Ricca, director, policy and programs, at the Rhode Center, and formerly executive director of the Utah Office of Legal Services Innovation — the office that oversees the so-called regulatory sandbox in that state. They walk us through how they conducted the study, what they found, and what they would like to see come of the findings. 

Read the report: Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change.

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

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

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At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Curt Sigfstead, chief financial officer. He is responsible for managing Clio's financial affairs, including finance, accounting, capital, treasury, taxation, and corporate development. With over two decades of technology finance experience, Sigfstead has held numerous senior finance leadership roles at companies including Clearco and J.P. Morgan. He sits on multiple nonprofit boards including C100, which supports Canadian technology entrepreneurs through investment and mentorship. When he's not disrupting the status quo through mission-driven work he can be found running the trails of Northern California, mapping out a route for his first Clio virtual 10km.

In an episode of LawNext recorded in person at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton discusses the "antifragile" law firm, a concept he introduced in his conference keynote — derived from the book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — that certain firms thrive in the face of stressors and adversity, as we saw so clearly during the pandemic. 

So what is an antifragile law firm and how does a firm become antifragile? Newton and host Bob Ambrogi discuss the concept in greater detail. They also talk about the tenth anniversary of ClioCon, Clio's seventh-annual Legal Trends Report, the competitive landscape for law practice management technology, and the future course of Clio, including whether an IPO is on the horizon. 

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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An increasing number of startups are defining themselves not as legal tech, but as justice tech. So what, exactly, is justice tech, who are some of the companies that represent it, and what is the business opportunity they present for potential investors? Our guest this week is Maya Markovich, executive director of the Justice Technology Association, an organization formed earlier this year to support companies in the justice tech sector. 

She is also executive in residence for justice tech at Village Capital, the largest organization in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage startups, where she recently co-authored the report, Supporting Tech for Justice-Impacted Communities: Strategies to Supercharge Justice Tech Investing, a framework to help investors maximize the probably that a justice tech investment will have a positive impact on individuals involved with the justice system. 

Until last year, Markovich was chief growth officer at Nextlaw Labs, the legal tech incubator created by Dentons, one of the world's largest law firms.

We discuss the justice tech landscape, the opportunities for investors in justice tech, and how the sector is likely to develop over the coming years. 

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

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

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At a time when law firms are struggling to retain talent and wrestling to balance hybrid workplaces, the Texas-based corporate law firm Vela Wood did something unique: It sent its employees and their families to Portugal for a month. Why did it do it? How did it do it? What did clients think? And are there lessons for other firms?

For the answers to those questions and more, our guests this week are the two name partners of the firm: Kevin Vela, who is the firm's managing partner, and Radney Wood. As you will hear, theirs is not a traditional corporate firm in many respects, as they are selective in the clients they take on and committed to work-life balance among their employees. 

Travel was already integral to the firm's culture, in the belief that it helps develop more motivated and well-rounded employees. Partner Wood has traveled extensively throughout the world and founded a company to facilitate remote work for professionals. Several years ago, the firm adopted its Desk Independence program to encourage individual employees to work from other countries. 

But the Portugal trip — which the firm dubbed VW Abroad — took that to a new level, offering its entire staff the opportunity to work from Portugal for a month and bring their families. It offered a $3,000 stipend for travel, arranged a co-working space, and helped with travel and other activities. About half the staff took them up on the offer. 

Both Vela and Wood say the trip yielded benefits they had not even anticipated. And they are already planning next year's trip. 

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

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

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

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

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).

• SpeakWrite: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice

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For those who have to go to court without a lawyer, navigating the justice system can be daunting. Courtroom5 is a unique justice tech company that addresses that problem by providing pro se litigants with the training, tools, documents and support they need to represent themselves. For litigants who need extra help, it also offers access to à la carte lawyer services.

Our guest this week, Courtroom5's cofounder and CEO Sonja Ebron, was motivated by her own experiences as a pro se litigant to develop a way to help others who find themselves in the same situation. With a doctorate in electrical engineering and experience as an entrepreneur, she and cofounder Debra Slone, a PhD librarian and former library school professor, launched Courtroom5 in 2017. 

Courtroom5 is also a founding member of the Justice Technology Association, formed earlier this year to support technology companies that help people navigate legal matters. Ebron and Slone were both named to the 2022 Fastcase 50, which honors law's "smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders." 

Listen to learn why Ebron founded Courtroom5, how it helps those who cannot afford a lawyer, and what she sees as the future for her company and the broader landscape of justice tech. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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Devshi Mehrotra was a computer science undergraduate at the University of Chicago when she and classmate Leslie Jones-Dove developed JusticeText, an platform that makes it easier for public defenders to review and analyze the massive quantities of police body cam and other video footage that is becoming increasingly common in criminal cases. 

At the time, Mehrotra never envisioned it as a company or a career. But a year after graduating, as video of police misconduct brought the country to a national reckoning around racial justice and criminal justice reform, she realized that it was exactly what she was meant to do. For someone with no background in law or entrepreneurship, it was, she says, a terrifying leap of faith.

Since then, JusticeText has built a solid base of public defender offices as customers and it recently raised a seed financing round of $2.2 million. Meanwhile, Mehrotra and Jones-Dove have gained  recognition and accolades  for their innovative product and their social-justice mission, including having both been named to the Fastcase 50 for 2022, having been named by Smithsonian Magazine as among Sixteen Innovators to Watch in 2022, and having been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021.

In this episode of LawNext, Mehrotra joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how and why she built JusticeText and of what the future holds for the still-nascent company. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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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