LawNext – Details, episodes & analysis

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. 

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.

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

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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

“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. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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.” 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

Filevine’s cofounder and CEO Ryan Anderson is this week’s guest on LawNext in an episode recorded the day the company announced this latest raise. Before starting Filevine, Anderson was a founding partner at a western-states law firm focused on personal injury, mass torts and employment class-actions. 

In his work as an attorney, Anderson says, he was constantly bombarded with urgent tasks and problems. Rather than continue being bombarded, he decided to turn his attention to building a system that would help solve the problems. He teamed up with a group of software engineers who shared his vision for cloud-based collaboration and clean, intuitive design, and in the basement of his law firm, Filevine was born.

Since then, the company has expanded to nearly 400 employees, made two major acquisitions — first of Lead Docket, a lead tracking and intake management product, and then of Outlaw, a contract and document editing platform — and, in just the last year, brought on more 700 new customers. 

Listen to our interview to learn more about Filevine’s story and what Anderson believes lies ahead for the company. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

In his day job, Jonathan Pyle is the contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where he is responsible for compliance, reporting, and implementing new uses of technology to analyze, streamline, and expand service delivery. But in the legal tech world, Pyle is better known as the developer of Docassemble, a free and open source document assembly application that has been widely adapted for a range of applications. 

Pyle developed Docassemble as a tool for automating the practice of law. It is used to create guided interviews that can be used for document assembly or for other uses, such as helping users find legal resources or obtain legal information. It has been used to power such products as Upsolve, a free service that assembles Chapter 7 bankruptcy forms, and the document-assembly platform Documate. 

Pyle joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he came to develop Docassemble and why he released it as open source software. He also shares examples of how it has been used in the legal market and describes his plans for further development. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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.

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

As head of managed services and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, Jeffrey Solomon oversees a database that tracks over $150 billion in legal spend data. Legal departments are able to use this data in multiple ways, including to benchmark outside firms’ billing rates and to evaluate staffing of legal matters. 

In this episode of LawNext, Solomon joins host Bob Ambrogi for a deep dive into how corporate legal departments are using data and analytics to drive more strategic decision-making around setting and managing legal budgets and legal spend. They also talk about how access to this data is shaping corporate clients’ conversations with their outside firms around efficiency and use of technology. 

Solomon oversees a team at Wolters Kluwer that leads innovation initiatives through ideation, market research, development, and go-to-market for a portfolio of AI-powered products and managed services. He has been with ELM Solutions since 2013. Before that, he was with TyMetrix, which Wolters Kluwer acquired in 2003. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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