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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certified as such by the organization Fairly Trained. 

To discuss how KL3M was developed and why this built-from-scratch, domain-specific LLM is significant for the legal industry, our guest for today's LawNext is Jillian Bommarito, chief risk officer at 273 Ventures, the company that developed CLEM. Not only was Bommarito involved in developing KL3M and the data set used to train it, but she also oversaw the process of earning KL3M its Fairly Trained certification. 

Regular listeners of LawNext may remember my interview last year with two of the other principals of 273 Ventures, CEO Michael Bommarito, who is Jillian's husband, and Chief Science Officer Daniel Katz, who were on this show just after they conducted the first experiment in having GPT take the bar exam. All three, along with Katz's wife Jessica Katz, had formerly founded the legal AI and consulting company LexPredict, which was acquired in 2018 by the global law company Elevate. 

In today's conversation, Bommarito talks about what went into developing the model and creating the dataset to train it, and discusses what it offers the legal market and why and how a law firm would use this model over others that are commercially available. 

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Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician, developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns. 

But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha, expanding its platform to help law firms manage the new normal of hybrid offices and return to work, and it has continued to evolve to become an all-in-one platform for managing in-office needs and helping firms better plan and use their office space.

Pasha, who is our guest on this episode, says that, in his view, the company's real focus is not space, but people, and helping law firms and businesses understand how to optimize their spaces for the people who work in them today, and how to plan their spaces for the years ahead. 

Side note: The recording of this conversation came about somewhat serendipitously, when host Bob Ambrogi was scheduled to meet with Pasha for a briefing during the Legalweek conference in January. When Ambrogi showed up at Maptician's booth, the company's publicist offered to record the conversation, and this is the result. Thanks to Maptician for allowing us to share it through this podcast. 

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

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

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

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

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

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March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project, it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law. 

The massive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases, some dating as far back as 1658. While Harvard's Library Innovation Lab did all the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017  — footed the bill. 

 Harvard completed that digitization in 2018, making those cases available for free to the general public, but until March 1, 2024, any commercial use of the cases was restricted by the agreement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the full release of the cases, free of any restrictions. 

On today's LawNext, we will get the inside story of the history of the Caselaw Access Project and talk about the significance of this final lifting of all restrictions on the data. How did the partnership ever come about in the first place? What was the scanning process like? What does this data mean for the future of access to law, particularly in the face of generative AI? 

To do all of that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:

• Daniel Lewis, the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, who is now CEO of the contract review company LegalOn. 

• Adam Ziegler, the former director of Harvard's Library Innovation Lab and the Caselaw Access Project (who recently wrote a first-person account of the project)..

• Jack Cushman, the current director of the Library Innovation Lab. 

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the show, but had to cancel as of the recording time. 

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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InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts. 

Our guest today, Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company is on a mission to innovate and even revolutionize litigation services and the litigation workflow. Already, its products are used every day by lawyers throughout the United States to file court cases, track court dockets, search court records, and arrange service of process, and it integrates with most major law practice management platforms.

InfoTrack in the U.S. actually grew out of a company founded in Australia in 2012, when it was spun out of the LEAP law practice management platform. InfoTrack expanded first to the U.K. and then in 2016 to the U.S. 

Since coming to this country, it has expanded both organically and through acquisitions, including in 2020, when it acquired two legal tech companies, LawToolBox, the court calendaring company, and One Legal, a California provider of litigation support services such as court filing, service of process, and document retrieval, and in 2021, when it acquired Lawgical, the parent company of ServeNow, Serve Manager, and the Legal Talk Network. 

Watts has been with the company since before it spun out from LEAP, and says he was employee number one when it expanded to the U.S. He and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the company's history, where it is today, and its plans for future growth. 

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

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

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The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.

With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them -- legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance. 

One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality. 

On today's episode, we'll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer:

• Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation.

• Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.

• Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America. 

One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules. 

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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Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry's first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product.

At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr's cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections.

Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.

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

• Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

• Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

• Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

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

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

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

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

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

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Last month, KKR, a major global investment firm, announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft, the contract lifecycle management company. As part of the deal, the growth equity firm FTV Capital, already an Agiloft investor, is making an additional investment, and another growth equity firm, JMI Equity, is joining as a new investor.

The deal was a feather in the cap for Eric Laughlin, who joined Agiloft as CEO in 2020 after leading the Pangea3 business at Thomson Reuters. When Laughlin stepped into that role, Agiloft had been in business for 30 years, and he succeeded a predecessor who had been CEO for nearly all that time. He came aboard just as the company had raised its first-ever outside funding round, tasked with the mission of taking the company to its next level of growth. 

During his tenure, the company has earned a reputation as a leading innovator in the CLM space, including in its development of features based on artificial intelligence, and it has significantly grown both its workforce and its global customer base. Laughlin has also strengthened his own reputation as a leader who believes that employee experience is as important as customer experience. 

In March 2021, not long after he joined Agiloft, Laughlin was our guest on this show to talk about his plans for the company. On today's episode, he returns to discuss how Agiloft has grown during his four-year tenure and to share his thoughts on the contract lifecycle management landscape, now and into the future. 

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

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At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap. 

Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC's first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab's advisory board. 

Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today's episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation's Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?

This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district from using third-party service providers such as PacerPro, RECAP or DocketBird. That order came on the heels of a memorandum from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that – while it didn't outright ban the use of such service providers – it did urge courts to warn filers to be cautious about using third-party services and software.

Were these actions justified? Is there reason to be concerned about third-party providers? And what exactly is the best way to protect sealed documents? 

To answer these questions, the legal tech company PacerPro brought together a panel of experts for a live program presented during the annual meeting of the National Docketing Association in Boston in October. On the panel were: 

• Josh Blandi, CEO and cofounder of UniCourt. 

• Sara Collins, vice president of product management, File & ServeXpress. 

• Gavin McGrane, cofounder of PacerPro. 

• Snorri Ogata, chief technology officer at Tech Unicorn and formerly chief information officer at the Los Angeles Superior court and, before that, at the Orange County Superior Court, two of the largest court systems in the United States.. 

I moderated the panel and recorded it for this podcast. Thanks to the panelists, the NDA, and PacerPro for allowing me to do that. 

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

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

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

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In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he and his team decided to build the solution they needed for themselves. 

By 2018, they had dubbed the software ZenCase, and in 2021, after continuing to develop and refine it, they migrated their first 50-plus user law firm onto the platform and officially launched it commercially to the legal market at large.

On today's LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Fraser, who is now the CEO of ZenCase, and Olivia Mockel, its president and COO. Mockel recently moved to ZenCase after several years in leadership roles at other practice management companies, including most recently as CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis.

So what makes ZenCase different from other practice management platforms and what types of law firms is it suited for? In today's episode, we'll hear from Fraser and Mockel about all that and more, including how they are incorporating generative AI and their plans for future development. 

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

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

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

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What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley, who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter, and Ilona Logvinova, managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.

Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference in New York City, sharing their views and insights on innovation from their unique perspectives. Shortly after they spoke, they sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record this conversation about innovation in legal. 

Note that since we recorded this conversation, Dooley has left Goodwin Procter.

This is the third LawNext episode featuring conversations recorded at the conference. To listen to the prior two, check out:

• Two KM Keynotes – Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in Legal, in which we spoke with the conference's two keynote speakers. 

• The Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of Centari, featuring interviews with two of the startups that attended the conference. 

The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. 

This 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.

• DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents

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

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Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City. 

First up is Nicole Clark, cofounder and CEO of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in January 2002.) Then, in the second part of the show, we speak with the cofounders of Centari, an AI-powered knowledge management and dealmaking platform, Kevin Walker, the company's CEO, and Bryan Gilbert Davis, its CTO. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and recorded both of these interviews live there, where both of these companies were sponsors and exhibitors. The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. 

For more from the conference, check out the last episode of LawNext, which featured interviews with the two keynote speakers from that conference: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada's largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dru Armstrong was named CEO of AffiniPay, the parent company of LawPay, in July 2021. Less than a year later, AffiniPay shook up the legal tech landscape by acquiring MyCase, one of the leading law practice management platforms, in a deal that also included four other practice management products: CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, Soluno for billing and accounting (which it recently sold), and Woodpecker for document automation. 

One reason that deal was so notable was that, until then, LawPay had been the legal tech equivalent of Switzerland – a neutral integration partner with virtually every practice management platform out there. But in acquiring one of the major players in the market, that legal tech Switzerland seemed to suddenly lose its neutrality. 

Now, two and a half years into the job as Affinipay CEO, Armstrong is our guest on this episode of LawNext to discuss that acquisition, where the company is today, and why the marriage of fintech and legal tech matters to legal practitioners. She also shares her plans for the company's future, including how it will incorporate generative AI across its various products. 

Armstrong and host Bob Ambrogi spoke live in Miami at the TLTF Summit, a conference produced by the Legal Tech Fund, a VC fund focused on legal tech, where she spoke on a panel on the intersection of fintech and legal tech. She was previously on this podcast in June 2022, at the time the MyCase acquisition was announced, and was also on our Legaltech Week podcast. 

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Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five "cluster projects" that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact. 

The students  – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today's LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work: 

• Whitney Triplet, who is in her final semester at Southern University Law Center. 

• Paul Campbell, a part-time student in his fourth year at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. 

Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.  

In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes:

• On LawNext Podcast: Two Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal System. 

• On LawNext Podcast: The Legal Fellows Tackling Systemic Racism in Law. 

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On this episode of LawNext: An interview recorded live with Erika Harold, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, an organization charged with working to enhance civility and professionalism and to eliminate bias within the legal profession. 

A former litigator, Harold was named executive director in April 2022, to succeed retiring executive director Jayne Reardon, who has also been a guest on this podcast. A nationally recognized advocate of bullying prevention efforts, Harold led the commission this summer in launching a statewide initiative to assess the prevalence and impact of bullying in the legal profession and recommend best practices for preventing it. 

Erika is also a former Miss America – the sixth Black woman ever to hold that title – and, as you'll hear, she entered that competition to help fund her education at Harvard Law School, from which she graduated debt free. In 2014, she ran in the Republican primary for Congress to represent Illinois's 13th congressional district. In 2018, she was the Republican candidate for Illinois attorney general. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down live with Harold to record this conversation during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October. 

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As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio's founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview. 

In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today's announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investment and what it means for Clio, its customers, and the legal industry. Newton founded the company 16 years ago and has overseen its growth into a global legal tech powerhouse, with more than 1,100 employees worldwide. 

"My ambition was always to build this into something that would be a multi-decade company, a hundred-plus year company, and a company that would leave a lasting impact on the legal industry, and a company that would transform the legal industry in a really positive way," Newton says in the interview. "And what I see this investment round as being is, number one, a huge validation of the success Clio has had in driving that transformation, but more importantly, positioning us to even have a more transformative and more impactful next chapter to our story."

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

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On today'sLawNext, it's a Clio double header, featuring two separate interviews with two of Clio's top product-focused executives – one with Jonathan Watson, its chief technology officer, and the other with Hemant Kashyap, chief product officer  – both recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October. 

Even though I interviewed Watson and Kashyap separately, their roles at Clio are intertwined. As CTO, Watson was previously responsible for both technology and product. That changed last June, when Kashyap joined the company as its first chief product officer. Now, they tell me, they often work as partners on developing products and delivering them to Clio's customers. 

At the conference, Clio introduced an array of major new products and product updates, in what it called its most expansive product update ever in its 15-year history. These included Clio Duo, a generative artificial intelligence tool that will be built natively into all Clio products starting in 2024; a personal injury add-on for Clio offering a suite of features for PI lawyers; and Clio File, an electronic court filing and service feature built directly in Clio Manage, making it the first law practice management platform to directly incorporate e-filing.

In both of today's interviews, we talk about those new products and others, as well as the company's longer-term product roadmap. Both Watson and Kashyapp also share their thoughts on generative AI and its potential impact on legal technology and legal practice. 

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Did Pras Michel's lawyer botch his defense by relying on an AI program to create his closing argument? That's what the former Fugees rapper claims in asking a court to overturn his April conviction in an illegal foreign influence scheme. 

Michel says his lawyer, David Kenner, made a "frivolous and ineffectual" closing argument because he relied on an experimental AI program called EyeLevel.ai. Michel also alleges that Kenner and cocounsel Alon Israely had undisclosed financial interests in the AI company that motivated them to use the AI in his case as a marketing ploy. 

But Neil Katz, the cofounder and COO of EyeLevel.ai, calls those claims "creative fiction" and "total nonsense." Katz joins LawNext today to give his version of what happened in the Michel case and to tell us more about EyeLevel.ai, a company he says helps businesses and legal professionals build hallucination-free AI applications using private data. 

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On Oct. 9, during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, the law practice management company Clio released the 2023 edition of its annual Legal Trends Report. Since it was first published in 2016, the report has established itself as a benchmark of the state of law practice and technology adoption among smaller law firms. 

Among the findings in this year's report were two pieces of particularly good news: Law firms have seen a remarkable increase in productivity in the years since that first report came out in 2016, and legal professionals are actively embracing technology to boost their efficiency and performance. This year's report also introduces a new metric for measuring a law firm's financial health: Lockup. 

With much to unpack from this year's Legal Trends Report, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio and one of the principal members of the team that develops the report, to get all the details. They spoke in a live interview recorded during the Clio conference.

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This week, LawNext veers slightly off-topic for a conversation about wrongful convictions. But, as you'll hear from our guests, there is a legal tech angle, even to this. 

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Brian Banks, whose aspirations for a career in the NFL were sidetracked when, at age 16, he was falsely accused of sexual assault, resulting in his accepting a plea bargain that put him in prison for five years. It was an experience that has made Banks a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform. 

Joining Banks for that conversation was Michael Semanchik, the lawyer who helped clear Banks' name while working as managing attorney of the California Innocence Project. Recently, Semanchik launched a new project, The Innocence Center, where he is executive director. He also hosts one of the best new podcasts of 2023, the soon-to-be-renamed California Innocence Center Podcast. 

For Banks, there was a happy ending to the story, in that he did clear his name and he even got to play in the NFL. But wrongful convictions continue to plague the criminal justice system. Today we'll hear Banks' story and explore what the system can do to keep other innocent people out of prison. 

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In his keynote address at the recently concluded 2023 Clio Cloud Conference, Jack Newton, the founder and CEO of Clio, said that we are at a time in the legal industry when leveraging technology is more important for lawyers than ever before. Technology, he said, enables lawyers to amplify their impact, and when they do that, they can achieve exponential outcomes. 

This was the 11th year of the Clio Cloud Conference, and the 15th year in business for the company that produces it. In a recent post about the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote that Clio has grown over the years to become one of the largest and most influential companies in legal tech; and that Newton has become somewhat of an industry icon, whose ClioCon keynote is always a seminal event of the conference. 

A few hours after Newton delivered his keynote, Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for a wide-ranging conversation about the conference, the company, and the state of law practice and the legal profession, including findings from the just-released 2023 edition of the Clio Legal Trends Report. 

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

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

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

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

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On July 27, June Hsiao Liebert took office as president of the American Association of Law Libraries, the association that represents more than 3,600 law librarians and legal information professionals throughout the world. The first Asian-American president of AALL, Liebert takes office at a time when some are saying that advances in artificial intelligence could endanger the future of the law library professional. What's her take on the state of the profession today and its prospects for the future? That is the subject we explore on today's show. 

In her day job, Liebert is the director of information services at the law firm O'Melveny & Myers. Having worked as a chief information officer, library and information governance director, law professor, and legal technology consultant, she has an extensive background in both IT and information management. She is a 2021 Fastcase 50 award honoree, was recently named a fellow-elect of the College of Law Practice Management, and serves as the immediate past co-chair of the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Alumni Board. 

Note that the opinions she expresses during the podcast are hers alone and not those of O'Melveny & Myers. Also, any law-related usage of AI that she refers to in the podcast are done purely for testing purposes using private and secure systems only. 

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

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

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As generative AI sweeps through the legal profession, lawyers face challenges in learning to use it responsibly and properly. This summer, one of the world's largest law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, began to address that challenge by partnering with the legal skills training company AltaClaro to develop a training program for its summer associates on prompt engineering and the responsible use of generative AI.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Abdi Shayesteh, the founder and CEO of AltaClaro, a company that takes a unique experiential approach to lawyer training. They  talk about the genesis and development of that AI training program, and what it covers. Shayesteh also provides an update on the company's growth and development since he was last on this podcast in January 2021 – a period during which the company raised a seed financing round of $2.5 million and substantially expanded its menu of course modules. 

When Shaesteh, a serial entrepreneur who became a lawyer, saw how poorly prepared new associates were to practice law, he began to research education science and came up with the concept for AltaClaro. Today, its customers include law firms who use it to train associates and individual lawyers seeking to develop and enhance their skills in areas such as drafting contracts, handling M&A transactions, or closing a commercial loan deal. 

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

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

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Stories are increasingly common of lawyers who leave law practice to start legal technology companies, but few achieve the level of success as an entrepreneur of Matt Spiegel. He was a criminal defense lawyer in 2009 when he founded MyCase, one of the earliest cloud-based law practice management companies. In 2012, he sold MyCase to AppFolio, and then left the company in 2015 to start a software company that helped organizations manage trade shows and events. In 2017, he returned to law to start his current company, Lawmatics, a client relationship management (CRM) platform for law firms. 

Spiegel was previously on episode 16 of this podcast in 2018, not long after he founded Lawmatics. He developed the product because he saw a gap in the legal market for software that would help firms automate their marketing and run their businesses as sales organizations. In the years since, he has raised $12.5 million in funding, expanded the platform with time-and-billing and e-payments capabilities, and added a generative AI feature to help law firms create and edit client emails and email marketing campaigns. 

In this episode of LawNext, Spiegel shares his story as a serial legal tech entrepreneur, discusses why he founded Lawmatics, describes how the platform automates legal marketing and relationship management, and talks about his future plans for the company and the platform.  

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

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

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

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

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

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Jacqueline Schafer, the founder and CEO of Clearbrief, was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later old me, the thought crystalized for her, "If you can show the judge the evidence that really tells your client's story, that's how you win.'"

Soon after, Schafer set to work building Clearbrief, AI-powered software that works within Microsoft Word to help lawyers find the best facts to support their legal writing. This week, the four-year-old company announced that it had raised an additional funding round of $4 million, bringing its total funding to nearly $8 million. Along the way, it has racked up numerous awards, including Legalweek's 2023 litigation product of the year, Clio's 2022 Launch//Code Developer Contest, Legalweek's 2022 new law company of the year, and the American Legal Technology Awards' 2021 legal tech startup of the year.

Schafer is our guest today on LawNext, as she shares her journey from practicing lawyer to startup founder, describes how Clearbrief helps lawyers in their legal writing, and discusses what this latest investment means for the company and its customers.  

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

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Recently in Orlando, Fla., at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded a series of brief live interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Last week on this podcast, we featured the first set of those interviews – with 12 of the legal tech startups that were participating in ILTACON's Startup Hub.This week we are featuring interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were attending the conference.

In these 11 short interviews, we speak with: 

• David Wong, chief product officer, Thomson Reuters. 

• Mike Fouts, chief business officer, ShareFile.

• Carol Lynn Grow, co-owner and COO, LawToolBox.

• Ted Theodoropoulus, CEO, Infodash.

• Jerry Levine, chief evangelist and general counsel at ContractPodAI.

• Monica Harris, product business manager, Cellebrite Enterprise Solutions.

• Ahmed Shaaban, cofounder and managing director, Fulcrum Global Technologies.

• Hossein Jabbar, CEO, PaayaTech. 

• Richard Sayles, head of data analytics, Sapling Data.

• Michael Murray, director of technology, Veritext.

• Daniel Bonner, director of client solutions, Level Legal.

Be sure to also listen to last week's interviews with the legal tech startups. 

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LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is just back from Orlando, Florida, where he attended ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Mic in hand, he recorded a series of brief interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Over the next two episodes of this podcast, we will share those interviews, starting today with the legal tech startups at ILTACON. 

Once again this year, the conference featured a Startup Hub in the exhibit hall, where 27 startups had booths showing their products. Although Bob was not able to interview all 27, he did have the opportunity to speak briefly with a dozen of them. Today's episode features those 12 brief interviews. We speak with:

• Joshua Aaron, CEO and cofounder, Aiden Technologies.

• Anthony Seale, CEO, Legatics.

• Yannic Kilcher, cofounder and CTO, DeepJudge.

• James Ding, CEO and cofounder, DraftWise.

• William Dougherty, cofounder, Capacity.

• Horace Wu, CEO and founder, and Paul Farrell, director of customer success, Syntheia.

• Noah Wittman, cofounder and  CEO of Priviom.

• Ariel Nacson, cofounder and chief customer officer, CiteRight, together with Colin LaChance, CEO, Jurisage Inc.

• Mat Rotenberg, cofounder and CEO, Dashboard Legal.

• Yohei Fujii, cofounder and CEO, BoostDraft.

• Floor Blindenbach, founder and CEO, Organizing4Innovation. 

• Julien Steel, head of product, Henchman. 

In the next episode, we'll feature interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were there. 

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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.

• 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 move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can't serve.

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Recently, Silicon Valley-based Gunderson Dettmer, an international law firm of more than 400 lawyers that exclusively represents clients in the innovation economy, launched ChatGD, a generative AI chat app for its lawyers and legal professionals that the firm designed and built itself. The launch appeared to make the firm the first in the U.S. to develop a proprietary internal tool using generative AI technology and possibly also the first firm anywhere to launch such a tool.

On today's episode of LawNext, the two people who spearheaded the development — Joe Green, the firm's chief innovation officer and also of counsel, and John Scrudato, the firm's legal engineering and data strategy manager, join host Bob Ambrogi to share the story behind ChatGD. They explain why the firm wanted to develop its own generative AI app, describe what it does and how legal professionals can use it, and share how it has been received so far by the lawyers who have used it. 

As you will hear, Green and Scrudato see the development of the app as somewhat of a learning exercise — for the firm and for its lawyers — in anticipation of the enormous impact generative AI is likely to have on both legal professionals and clients. "We view this whole stage as very experimental and learning oriented," Green says in the interview. "This is about getting the tool in the hands of lawyers in a safe way that they can really start learning about how to get value out of it."

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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.

• 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 move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

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Today's episode offers a different perspective on the DoNotPay controversy – and ended up having an unexpected twist.

Earlier this year, DoNotPay, which described itself as the world's first robot lawyer, and its founder Joshua Browder became the subject of harsh criticism after paralegal Kathryn Tewson tested several of DoNotPay's self-help legal apps and concluded they were little more than smoke and mirrors – in some cases getting the law wrong, in others failing even to deliver the promised output. 

In the wake of Tewson's allegations, this podcast recorded an exclusive interview with Browder, in which he called the criticism "a bit of a nothingburger." I followed that Interview with one with Tewson, in which she described in detail how she tested the DoNotPay products and responded to Browder's dismissal of her critique. 

Following those events, our guests today, Maya Markovich, executive director and cofounder of the Justice Technology Association and executive in residence for Justice Tech at Village Capital, and Tom Gordon, executive director of Responsive Law, an organization that represents the consumers' voice in the legal system, co-authored an op-ed in which they argued that reforms in the regulation of the practice of law, such as those implemented in Utah, could have prevented the DoNotPay debacle, since DoNotPay would have had to have been licensed and regulated.

They submitted their op-ed to the American Bar Association's Center for Innovation, which agreed to publish it in the Center's biannual innovation trends report, slated to be released Aug. 1. In anticipation of that publication, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded the interview you're about to hear with Markovich and Gordon, in which they discussed their op-ed and their views more broadly on regulatory reform. The interview was scheduled to post Aug. 1, in conjunction with the op-ed's publication that day. 

But then the plan hit an unexpected twist. Instead of publishing the op-ed that day, the Center notified the authors that it had canceled the publication because of what it described as "political challenges" within the ABA, but that it had neglected to inform them of that. 

Because this interview was recorded before the ABA canceled the op-ed, you will hear references to the ABA's publication of the op-ed. But since that never happened, Markovich and Gordon allowed us to publish the op-ed on LawNext. Ambrogi has also written a blog post detailing the whole sordid story. 

• Opinion: DoNotPay Controversy Illuminates Urgent Need for Regulatory Reform.

• Citing 'Political Challenges,' ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn't Publish.

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 move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

• Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can't serve.

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

On July 18, 2023, the top legal officers of three Boston-area technology companies came together for a live panel discussion about the city's unique contributions to the legal tech landscape, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. The panelists graciously agreed to allow LawNext to record the conversation, and this episode is that recording. The three panelists are:

• Margaret K. Minister, general counsel for Evisort, an AI-driven contract lifecycle management company that was founded out of Harvard Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

• William "Mo" Cowan, chief legal and external affairs officer at Devoted Health, a tech-enabled all-in-one healthcare company founded to dramatically improve overall health and well-being for seniors by caring for them like family. Cowan is a former interim U.S. senator from Massachusetts. 

• Matt Rowe, chief legal officer at Parallel Wireless and former general counsel to Shoobx, the equity management platform acquired by Fidelity in January 2023.

 The panel took place as part of the inaugural meeting of LegalTech Boston, a group formed to bring together the community of those involved in legal tech in the area. The event was hosted by the law firm Gunderson Dettmer and sponsored by the professional training company SkillBurst Interactive. 

The first voice you'll hear on this recording is that of Joe Green, chief innovation officer at Gunderson Dettmer. Following Joe is Anusia Gillespie, chief strategy and growth officer at SkillBurst Interactive, and the driving force behind organizing this event. Because it was a live event, you will also hear members of the audience making comments and asking questions. 

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 move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

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Recently, Derek Miller, a veteran legal technology executive who, as president and CEO of inData Corporation for nearly three decades, oversaw Trial Director, one of the most widely used trial-presentation software products ever, joined Lit Software, the developer of a suite of litigation apps for iPad and Mac, as chief growth officer, to help drive the company's continued expansion, particularly into larger firms, corporations and insurance companies.

Lit Software, founded in 2010 by Ian O'Flaherty and Tara Cheever, is the company that developed TrialPad, trial presentation software that was the first legal-specific app developed for the iPad. It went on to develop TranscriptPad, for reviewing transcripts; DocReviewPad, for reviewing documents; and ExhibitsPad, for organizing trial exhibits. Its Lit Suite bundles these apps in a single subscription. 

Given that Miller's joining the company represents a bridge, of sorts from established trial software to a newer generation of mobile-first products, it seemed an apt occasion to take a deeper dive into the trial software market — where it's been, where it is, and where it's heading. To do that, Derek Miller and Tara Cheever join host Bob Ambrogi to share their experiences and perspectives. 

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 move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You To Our Sponsors

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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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 has been a notable year for BriefCatch, a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company's raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics. 

All of that culminated in BriefCatch's announcement last week of its hires of three legal tech veterans into key executive roles in marketing, sales and product management, all to help lead it into its next stage of growth and development: Lydia Flocchini as chief marketing officer, Darren Schleicher as chief sales officer, and Kyle Bahr as product manager of AI and other new products.

Ross Guberman, the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is our guest today to discuss the company's history, growth, recent news, and future plans – which will include the launch of a suite of AI-enabled products. A former practicing lawyer, he was a legal writing coach and speaker when he conceived of BriefCatch, which he formally launched in 2018. 

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 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets. 

But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today's episode, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project's cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master's degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.

Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation. 

The Free Law Project's data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices. 

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.