LawNext

As NetDocuments rolls out a completely redesigned user experience, a new Microsoft 365 integration, and real-time co-authoring, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Chief Product Officer Dan Hauck in an episode recorded live at the company's Inspire conference in Orlando in October. Hauck, who last appeared on the show in 2022, explains how the company rethought its interface for an agent-ready world, why customers can switch freely between the old and new experiences with no forced migration, and how the new M365 add-in replaces legacy desktop integrations so lawyers can work across Windows, Mac and mobile devices. Hauck also digs into the legal context graph, the proprietary knowledge infrastructure the company launched earlier this year that continuously maps the relationships among every matter, document, communication and person across a firm's entire document repository. He explains how it works, how it helps agents perform better, and how it can dramatically reduce the cost of token consumption. He…

NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter believes the document management system is becoming something else entirely: a law firm's organizational intelligence layer. As lawyers increasingly do their work inside AI tools such as Claude, Harvey, Legora and ChatGPT, Baxter says NetDocuments' job is to build and preserve the firm's context, then make it accessible through whatever interface the user chooses. He even acknowledges that the DMS may eventually become "headless." Recorded live at NetDocuments' Inspire conference in Orlando, this episode finds host Bob Ambrogi and Baxter, who joined the company as president in 2017 and became CEO the following year, discussing how generative AI is reshaping both the company and the legal market. Baxter lays out his three-layer view of legal AI: the models, which NetDocuments does not build; the "harness," which users will swap at will; and the organizational data and context, which he argues is the layer that will endure. He describes how NetDocuments' document intelligence…

Five years ago, Noah Waisberg sold Kira Systems, the pioneering AI contract-analysis company he co-founded, to Litera. Even though the deal itself went well, the experience of going through the sale was hard, Waisberg now says. But that experience provided the fuel that turned into his next business. As part of the sale, he kept a copy of the underlying Kira technology and about 30 of the company's roughly 180 employees, and used them to launch Zuva. Zuva started as an API-only company, but it has since turned its focus to the sell side of M&A. After interviewing some 200 dealmakers about the most painful parts of selling a business, Zuva built software to help sellers manage the flood of bidder questions. It also launched a tech-enabled diligence service that pairs Kira's AI with experienced former Big Law associates. Zuva says the service delivers work product comparable to Big Law at a fraction of the cost. Waisberg was last on LawNext in 2021, marking the 10th anniversary of Kira and the release of his…

Legal tech company Clio has long said that its mission is to transform the legal experience for all. Until now, that "all" has largely focused on law firms and their clients, but recently Clio announced a major initiative to develop technology for the judiciary. As part of that initiative, it hired Pablo Arredondo, the former cofounder of Casetext and developer of CoCounsel, one of the first AI legal assistants, to lead product development. Arredondo was on this show on Sept. 1 to discuss his new role. Now, Clio has made another major hire to help lead this project: Bridget Mary McCormack, the innovative former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and current president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association, who will join Clio in October as general manager, judiciary, to lead the market and commercial strategy for the judiciary business. On the day her hiring was announced, McCormack sat down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why she considered this an offer she could not turn down and how she…

Call it Alex Su, redux. We do not usually have the same guest on LawNext twice in the same year, but there is good reason to have Alex back, as he has just been named president of Latitude Legal, the flexible legal staffing company. Last February, Alex and host Bob Ambrogi recorded a live episode of this podcast over lunch in a Cambodian restaurant in Alex's hometown of Alameda, Calif., as part of our LawNext on Location series. They talked about his winding career, from Sullivan & Cromwell associate to federal clerkship to legal tech startups and finally to chief revenue officer at Latitude. In that interview, Bob asked Alex what was coming next. His answer was that as AI got better, the demand for lawyers with real judgment — to direct it, check it, and own the work — would only grow. Seven months later, that prediction is proving prescient. In just the first half of this year, Latitude says it has seen a 52 percent jump in new law firm and corporate clients. So with Latitude's promotion of Su to…

Chronologies have become one of legal tech's hottest categories, with a wave of AI startups promising to turn a messy evidentiary record into a structured timeline in minutes. Jeff Kerr and his company Casefleet were more than a decade ahead of the pack. Kerr finished law school in 2010 and made what he calls the crazy decision to start a law firm as his first job after graduating. Running an employment practice, he found that winning cases came down to knowing the chronology cold. But the only tools for building one were a Word document and a lot of patience. So he taught himself to code, left practice in 2015, and founded Casefleet. On this episode of LawNext, Kerr joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss what a decade of building fact-management software looks like now that AI has arrived. Last month, Casefleet launched Casey, a conversational AI agent that proposes facts, links them to legal issues, and drafts documents — with a citation engine that rejects any citation not matching the exact text of the…

Pablo Arredondo, the Casetext cofounder who helped build some of the earliest and most influential applications of AI in legal practice, is joining Clio as senior vice president, judiciary, where he will lead the company's strategy for extending its technology into the courts. In this episode, recorded just ahead of the announcement, Arredondo tells host Bob Ambrogi why he is turning his attention to the judiciary — and why he believes the challenge starts with the sheer torrent of material flooding into the courts. "On Monday, somewhere on the order of three billion tokens are going to hit court dockets," he says. Arredondo cofounded Casetext in 2013 and helped develop CARA, the first brief analyzer, and CoCounsel, the product that brought generative AI into everyday legal workflows. After Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in 2023, he joined that company, leaving at the end of last year. In this conversation, he traces how his interest shifted toward the courts — from watching judges…

This week, LexisNexis announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City — a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Amazon Web Services sit in the same room and build legal AI together, in real time. The company is calling it a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped: Instead of developing products internally and asking customers to validate them afterward, customers bring their pain points into the lab, engineers code against them on the spot, and prototypes that pass muster can move into Lexis+ with Protégé in a matter of weeks. Our guest today is the person leading that effort: Greg Dickason, chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Dickason joined LexisNexis in 2019 and previously ran the company's Asia-Pacific business, where he launched Lexis+ AI in that region. Before LexisNexis, he was chief technology officer at CoreLogic. In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi recorded just ahead of the…

SurePoint Technologies, a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named Jeff Steinberg its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating Eric Thurston, who had led the company since 2023, to executive chairman. Two weeks into the job, Steinberg joins LawNext to speak with host Bob Ambrogi about what his appointment means for the company's customers. His answer to that question is direct: This is a mandate for change, not business as usual. Steinberg is candid that SurePoint still has integration work ahead of it after acquiring four companies in four years — Coyote Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, and ZenCase in 2025 — and he says the company will keep looking at acquisitions while it does that work. Steinberg is no stranger to legal technology. He founded Redwood Analytics in 2000, an early innovator in helping law firms use their own data to understand their profitability, and sold the company to LexisNexis in…

As chief technology officer at Casetext, Ryan Walker helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. But Walker came away unsatisfied. Although the legal tech tools kept getting better, he believed, clients were seeing no benefit. Billing rates kept climbing and the efficiency gains never reached them. That spurred him to pivot from building products to forming a practice — General Legal, an AI-native law firm he cofounded and leads as CEO, built on the premise that the fastest path to transforming legal services is not retrofitting AI onto traditional firms, but rebuilding the law firm from the ground up on an AI-forward foundation. Just six months out of Y Combinator, the firm has some 400 clients, a newly launched venture financing practice, and, in what may be a first for a law firm, an MCP server that lets clients' AI agents engage the firm directly. In this…

Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice? That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to Renee Knake Jefferson at the start of today's conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work sits at the intersection of legal ethics, judicial ethics, lawyer regulation, legal education and access to justice. She is also the coauthor of the acclaimed book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal…

When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company's biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that's been simmering since Anthropic's first legal plugin briefly rattled the stock prices of Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer back in January: Is Anthropic's entry into the legal market a major step forward for legal productivity? Or is it a threat to trust, governance and the existing legal-tech infrastructure? In today's episode, Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic and product lead for Claude for Legal, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the inside story of Claude for Legal and his own unconventional path into leading its development. Pike, who went from Facebook to Slack to building internal tools for Anthropic's own legal team, talks about how that work turned into a product that has ignited both excitement and concern…

Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced a major push into legal, much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem. But the less talked about side of the story was potentially the more impactful – Anthropic's explicit commitment to access to justice, highlighted by a direct partnership with the Free Law Project and its CourtListener free legal research platform. Suddenly, anyone with a legal problem and a chat window could access verified, authoritative legal materials, significantly reducing the risk of using a general AI assistant to answer legal questions. As the Free Law Project itself put it: "A response built on verified CourtListener data is categorically different from one built on even the best model alone." In today's episode, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Mike Lissner, executive director and co-founder of the Free Law Project, the…

Once upon a time, a legal tech vendor's goal in getting seen by potential customers was to rank on the first page of Google search. But in the age of AI, that is no longer enough. Now, when a potential buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a vendor, what matters is whether the company shows up in the answer the AI generates. And that, increasingly, depends on who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you as the authority in your category. On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two legal marketing and communications leaders who are seeking to help their clients get ahead of that shift. Amy Juers is CEO of Edge Marketing, a firm she founded in 1997 that serves clients across legal technology and accounting. Valerie Chan is CEO of Plat4orm, a strategic communications firm working across legal, cybersecurity, AI, and other regulated industries. Last week, these longtime competitors announced a strategic partnership and a new framework they call the Trusted Answer Growth System,…

When Thoma Bravo took a majority stake in Casepoint in January 2025 and merged it with the government-software company OPEXUS, it set the e-discovery pioneer on a broader course — deeper into the government market and squarely into FOIA and case management. Now the company has a new leader to see that course through: Paul Colangelo, a 25-year veteran of government and enterprise software, who was named Casepoint's CEO this week. In this episode, recorded just before the announcement, Colangelo joins host Bob Ambrogi for his first podcast interview in the role. He talks about the mandate he's been handed 18 months into the Thoma Bravo era, why he believes mission-critical government software is "DOGE-proof, recession-proof, pandemic-proof," and how Casepoint intends to stand apart in a crowded e-discovery field on security and governance. He also discusses the company's investment in agentic AI and the need to keep a "human in the loop," the customer tension between AI's promise and unpredictable token-based…

Neil Araujo, the CEO and cofounder of iManage, was last on this podcast almost exactly two years ago. In the dog years of the legal industry's AI age, that feels like a long time ago. Our conversation then was about law firms still feeling their way around generative AI. But now, as you will hear in this episode, the focus is about what it actually takes to put AI to work at scale — and iManage's answer is that it starts with what Neil calls a knowledge foundation: the content, context and governance layer that makes AI responses not just fluent, but relevant and trustworthy. Two weeks before we recorded this episode, iManage unveiled the next evolution of its document- and knowledge-management platform, one built around what iManage calls a "context fabric" — an architectural layer the company says transforms an organization's accumulated documents and activity into a "living, governed foundation" for AI agents. It also announced iManage MCP, a standardized, open-protocol connection that enables any AI…

Law firms sell experience — but for decades, harnessing and operationalizing that experience has been a largely manual, chaotic process. In this episode, recorded live at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference in New Orleans, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Jason Noble, president and chief of product strategy at Ikaun, to talk about how his company is changing that. Ikaun is a managed service and technology platform that helps law firms streamline the proposal and RFP response process — from capturing and organizing matter experience data to using AI to assemble and draft competitive pitches. Jason explains how the platform works, how the arrival of generative AI transformed what was previously possible, and why Ikaun positions itself as a managed service rather than a self-serve SaaS tool. Jason and Bob also get into the bigger picture of how law firms are responding to AI-driven changes in the competitive landscape, whether the billable hour can survive in an AI-augmented world, and whether the…

Recorded live at the annual meeting of the Legal Marketing Association in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with Rachel Shields Williams, president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel was named a recipient of ALM's Monica Bay Women in Legal Tech Award. Rachel and host Bob Ambrogi discuss how AI is reshaping the work of legal marketers, and why she believes the marketing community is uniquely positioned to help law firms move past the "I'm curious, I want to click the buttons" stage of AI adoption to sustained, repeatable value. They get into the state of innovation in big law — including Rachel's view that firms cannot use AI or money to "skip the canyon of despair" in change management — and why she thinks meaningful innovation often looks less like a headline and more like getting one percent better…

We don't usually say this, but for today's LawNext, you're going to want to watch the video version, if you can. The audio will be good, but the video will be great. You can find it on YouTube. Why? Because we're going to be talking today about vibe coding, and you're going to want to see what our guests are showing today, not just hear them tell about it. Those guests are Damien Riehl and Michael Bommarito. By day, Damien works on AI products at Clio and Mike is CEO of 273 Ventures, a company that provides AI strategy and services for law firms and legal professionals. But outside their day jobs, they are also founders of the ALEA Institute, the Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI, where a central focus of theirs is the FOLIO Project, which is seeking to develop and maintain open legal standards and a comprehensive ontology to enable different legal systems to communicate with each other. FOLIO is an outgrowth of the SALI Alliance, whose ontology was largely developed by Damien. So what…

Are courts the next frontier for legal AI? Shlomo Klapper, founder and CEO of the AI-driven judicial case-preparation platofrm Learned Hand, believes they are. A former litigator at Quinn Emanuel and law clerk for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Klapper is building what he calls a "reasoning engine" for judges — AI tools designed to help them manage crushing caseloads by organizing case materials, flagging when lawyers bend the truth, and drafting bench memos and orders. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviews Klapper on the heels of significant news: Learned Hand just announced a partnership with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the largest trial court in the nation, to explore how AI can support judicial officers across the full arc of a case — from filing through drafting. The company's technology — the only AI built exclusively for the judiciary — is also used by the Michigan Supreme Court and trial courts in 10 states. In today's conversation, Klapper discusses why courts are the next…

E-discovery platforms have gotten great at narrowing millions of documents down to manageable sets. But what happens next — the grueling work of extracting facts, organizing them, and building a reliable case narrative — has remained largely manual. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with Daniel Lord-Doyle, cofounder and CEO of Mary Technology, about the Australian startup's bet that "fact management" is the missing layer in litigation technology. Mary's approach is distinct from the large AI platforms that store documents as embeddings in vector databases. Instead, the company extracts every individual fact, enriches it with metadata, and links it directly back to its source — creating what Lord-Doyle calls a verifiable chain from work product to evidence. He makes a compelling case that in litigation, where fault tolerance is low and the stakes are high, the nuance lost by compression-based AI systems is exactly what matters most. The company just closed a $7 million (Australian) seed round…

For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, Bob heads across the bay, from San Francisco to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw, where he sits down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long game. AJ grew up in Connecticut, came west in 2002 for a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived within a few blocks of the Berkeley campus ever since. He stumbled into the legal industry almost by accident — recruited to serve as a technical expert in litigation involving how the internet worked — and quickly realized that the legal world was home to some of the most technically fascinating and underserved problems he'd ever encountered. He never left. AJ had a prior startup, a computer vision company that was acquired, before launching Everlaw in 2011. The company was cloud-native and ML-infused from the start, built on the conviction, AJ says, that there's no single way to find the needle in a discovery…

Continuing his on-location interview tour of San Francisco, Bob heads an hour north to Santa Rosa to sit down with Nathan Walter, cofounder and CEO of Briefpoint, over a bottle of red wine at Paradise Ridge Winery, a spot literally around the corner from Nathan's house, sitting on the edge of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that divides Sonoma and Napa counties. It is a fitting setting for a founder who grew up in Sonoma wine country, where wine is less a luxury than a way of life, and where his family's most treasured heirloom was a bottle from the year he was born. Nathan's path to founding Briefpoint is an origin story rooted in genuine frustration with the legal system. A U.C. Santa Barbara philosophy major who drifted into law school for lack of better options, he ultimately landed in civil litigation – and grew increasingly disillusioned with how discovery was weaponized to bleed defendants dry financially, even when they had done nothing wrong. After a particularly infuriating mediation where opposing…

As Bob continues his LawNext on Location series – all recorded live in the San Francisco area at locations of each guest's choosing – he sits down with Pablo Arredondo at his home in Tiburon, a quaint Marin County town with a history stretching from Mexican land grants to naval outposts to a southern railway terminus. From Pablo's home office, the view looks out over Richardson Bay towards Sausalito and, if you look carefully, the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen in the distance. It is a setting that is entirely fitting for a conversation with someone who helped shape one of the more remarkable journeys in the annals of legal technology. Pablo was cofounder of Casetext, the once-scrappy startup that spent a decade iterating, pivoting and persisting before striking gold with CoCounsel, the first GPT-4-powered AI legal assistant, unveiled on the nationally televised Morning Joe show on March 1, 2023. Just four months later, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in cash. Now, 2.5 years later, Pablo…

This episode is recorded live, and is best enjoyed on YouTube. Watch the episode here. While Bob is visiting San Francisco for two weeks, he is sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs "in their natural habitats" – places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, Bob sits down for lunch with Alex Su, chief revenue officer at Latitude Legal, over Thai iced tea and tofu dishes at Phnom Penh House, a Cambodian restaurant in Alameda that Alex considers something of a personal institution, frequenting it for both family meals and business meetings. Alex's career path is anything but linear. He started as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, clerked for a federal judge in Chicago, then drifted through a plaintiff's firm, a brief solo practice, and ultimately a leap of faith into legal tech sales – joining e-discovery company Logikcull in 2016. From there, he moved to Everlaw, then to Ironclad, where he served as head of community…

In this episode of LawNext, we talk with Ryan Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Filevine, and Sona Sulakian, former CEO and co-founder of Pincites, about Filevine's acquisition of the AI-powered contract redlining company. The deal, which closed in December, marks Filevine's second major AI acquisition of the year. Even more notably for this traditionally litigation-focused company, it represents a significant strategic expansion into the corporate and transactional legal market — a segment where Filevine saw 120% growth in 2025. What makes this acquisition particularly compelling is its origin story: Filevine was actually a customer of Pincites before acquiring the company. After Filevine's legal team became early adopters and enthusiastic users of the product, Anderson and his team recognized that Pincites' Word-native contract intelligence platform filled a critical gap in their offerings. The acquisition brings aboard sister co-founders Sona and Mariam Sulakian and their team, who will continue developing…

Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg started legal AI company Harvey in 2022 as roommates in a San Francisco apartment. Pereyra had been working on AI research at Meta and Google, while Weinberg was a first-year litigation associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Today, they still share that same apartment, but their company has grown into a global enterprise serving more than 1,000 law firms and corporate legal departments and valued at a whopping $8 billion. In this episode of LawNext, Pereyra and Weinberg take us back to Harvey's earliest days, when they were sending thousands of LinkedIn messages trying to get anyone to look at their product. They share the pivotal moment when early access to GPT-4 transformed what they could build, the breakthrough that came when Allen & Overy became their first major client, and how they have evolved from building an AI assistant for individual lawyers to constructing what they call "essential infrastructure" for legal work. With host Bob Ambrogi, they discuss Harvey's vision…

In the last in a series of interviews recorded during the ClioCon conference in Boston in October 2025, we bring you a doubleheader – two interviews with two of the legal tech company's key executives. In the first, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Reagan Attle, chief marketing officer at Clio since 2017. In a year in which Clio made the biggest acquisition in legal tech history with its $1 billion purchase of vLex, and in which Clio is aiming to dramatically expand its market and its use of AI, what are the challenges and opportunities for the person tasked with leading the company's global brand and marketing strategy? One thing for sure, Attle says: It makes her job more complex. Listen to the interview to hear Attle's perspective. In the second interview, Ambrogi sits down with A.J. Axelrod, who joined Clio in November 2024 as vice president of payments and financial services. He fills us in on the two financial products unveiled at ClioCon: Clio Capital, a capital-advance program offering law firms…

The biggest deal of 2025 – in fact, the biggest deal ever in legal tech – was legal tech company Clio's acquisition of vLex for $1 billion. A global legal research company founded in Spain, vLex had, just two years earlier, merged with the U.S. legal research company Fastcase, and the union of those two companies – which also included the Docket Alarm trove of court docket data – had further accelerated the development of Vincent, vLex's generative AI technology. Now, with Clio's acquisition of vLex, comes a combustible combination that has the potential to unify the fuel of all that vLex legal research and docket data with Clio's cloud practice management technology to create an unprecedented, AI-driven platform that unifies both the business and practice of law. Against this backdrop, I sat down with Ed Walters, the founder and CEO of Fastcase, during ClioCon in October, to discuss the acquisition and its implications for the legal industry. Walters cofounded Fastcase in 1999 along with his former…

For legal technology company Clio, this was a particularly significant year, marked by major announcements – including its $1 billion acquisition of vLex – that many saw as transformative for the company. This was on full display at the company's ClioCon conference in October, where CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote laying out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do. In today's episode, recorded live at ClioCon, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with the two key executives leading Clio's product and technology vision: John Foreman, who joined as chief product officer in May, bringing experience from major SaaS companies including MailChimp and Podium, and Jonathan Watson, the chief technology officer who's been with Clio for eight years. They explore the company's ambitious vision to develop AI and…

As new tools using generative AI promise to change the way we litigate and conduct discovery, what are the implications for day-to-day litigation workflows? On today's episode of LawNext, we feature a conversation with three guests about how law firms are navigating the urgency around gen AI adoption while staying grounded in practical realities. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation at e-discovery company Everlaw's annual Summit in San Francisco, where gen AI was very much the talk of the conference — from new product announcements to candid discussions about how law firms are actually putting these tools to work. His guests are: Adam Borgman, senior associate in the labor and employment group at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease. Julie Brown, director of practice technology at Vorys. Joshua Schnoll, Everlaw's chief marketing officer. They talk about how Vorys has taken a disciplined approach to mapping lawyers' workflows before plugging in AI, why understanding how your professionals currently…

Legal technology company Clio recently released the 10th edition of its Legal Trends Report, its annual analysis of data and survey responses on legal practice and emerging trends, and this year's report ventured into new territory. For the first time, the report included a neuroanalytics study of legal professionals, analyzing electrical brain activity in legal professionals as they performed various work-related tasks, in order to paint a picture of their emotional strain and mental focus as they worked. For an in-depth look at this year's Legal Trends Report, its principal author, Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, sits down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation recorded live at the 13th annual ClioCon, Clio's annual conference, which was held this year in Boston. They discuss the results of this first-ever cognitive study, as well as the report's other key findings, including what it shows about: AI adoption and its relationship to law firm growth. Clients' expectations around lawyers'…

If content is the raw material of generative AI, it only makes sense that an AI-driven contract automation platform would want to acquire the world's largest database of contracts and clauses. That is exactly what happened recently when SimpleDocs, a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, acquired Law Insider, which claims to be home to 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spanning more than 50 languages. One aspect of this acquisition that makes it particularly interesting is that both companies were founded by the same person – and that person, Preston Clark, is our guest today. In that sense, you might say this isn't a typical acquisition story, but more the deliberate convergence of two complementary businesses that were built separately over more than a decade, each with its own DNA, but always with an eye toward this eventual combination. In an AI market increasingly criticized for being "just GPT wrappers," Clark and his team are betting that workflow-specific tools…

Last week brought the 13th annual ClioCon — the annual conference of legal technology company Clio — to Boston, Mass., where cofounder and CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote in which he laid out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work. That new era is one in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do. Many had wondered what Newton's keynote would bring, coming on the heels of the company's $1 billion acquisition of legal research and AI company vLex, the largest deal ever in legal tech. Newton did not disappoint, announcing a slew of new products and features, ambitious plans to integrate AI throughout Clio's products, and formal expansion into the enterprise legal market with a new division and a new platform. It was a keynote that left some people thrilled, others shell-shocked. Perhaps most striking was that so much of what he outlined was…

In the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything. One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its AI for Justice program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more…

Recently, the legal technology company Case Status held its inaugural Client Experience Summit in Charleston, S.C., a conference devoted to exploring how AI, data and ethical practices can enable law firms to deliver a better experience for their clients.In an opening keynote at the conference, Andy Seavers, the cofounder and CEO of Case Status, unveiled several new products, including, most notably, Client Intelligence, an AI-driven platform that the company says represents a significant shift for law firms from reactive client management to predictive client engagement. Shortly after Seavers delivered that keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who attended the conference, sat down with him for this interview to learn more about the company and its latest announcements. When Case Status first launched, it was often described as the Dominos pizza tracker for law, insofar as it enabled clients to easily keep track of the status of their case. As you'll hear from Seavers in today's interview, it has expanded…

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Logikcull, the company that CEO Andy Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang founded with the goal of automating and democratizing e-discovery. But the company actually evolved out of an earlier company the pair founded in 2004, Logik Systems, to digitize archaic paper-based discovery workflows where lawyers would print emails to paper to review them. While that first company saw rapid growth and even made the Inc 500 in 2009 at number 181, the Great Recession took the wind out of its sails and caused the two founders to reassess their business model. Aiming to automate what they had previously done manually, they eventually launched Logikcull as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. Not only did they aim to automate the process, but also to democratize it by making that automation affordable and accessible for anyone. Ten years after launching Logikcull, Wilson joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the growth of the company and the evolution of its platform, which…

As vice president, Data Analytics and Operational Excellence, at Wolters Kluwer, Abhishek Mittal is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision making in core operational processes. He leads a large global team of process engineers, design thinkers, data scientists and domain experts to develop expert solutions for both internal processes and new products. In 2021, Wolters Kluwer's Business Intelligence Group named him a Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award winner for his leadership in developing and advancing the AI technology that drives Wolters Kluwer's products such as LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer, for which he helped the company receive a patent; LegalVIEW Predictive Insights; Intelligent Invoice Conversion; and CLM Matrix contract lifecycle management. Mittal joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he combines data analytics and operational excellence in developing new products. He also discusses how he leads and manages a diverse global team…

Over the past year, the sibling legal technology companies MyCase and LawPay have published a series of reports on law practice, including benchmark reports based on anonymized data from the two companies' customers, as well as an in-depth 2022 year-end legal industry report, based on a survey of over 2,300 legal professionals. Together, they provide an in-depth look at the state of legal practice in the wake of the pandemic. All of the reports were written by Nicole Black, who joins host Bob Ambrogi on this episode to share the findings from these reports and the picture they paint of how the pandemic has transformed the practice of law, particularly for solo and smaller firm lawyers. Black is head of SME and external education at MyCase, as well as an author and legal tech journalist, who writes regular columns for Above the Law, The ABA Journal, and The Daily Record. Among the topics they discuss are the overall state of solo and small firm practices, the pandemic's impact on firm's financial health, the…

Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI, the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson Sonsini, the law firm known not only for representing tech pioneers, but also for its own tech initiatives. Now Lexion has just raised another $20 million in a Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, with those prior investors again participating. The company, says its cofounder and CEO Gaurav Oberoi, is on a mission to use AI to help corporate operations teams and legal departments close deals faster by accelerating business contracting across sales, procurement, legal, HR, security, and more. His resume includes having been a product manager, engineer, and founder for over a decade, and, before Lexion, he started and…

It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world's largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries. It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and potentially even threaten the longstanding legal research duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis. So what does it mean for the companies? What does it mean for their customers? And what does it mean for the legal market more broadly? To explore these questions and more, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the four founders of the two companies: Lluis Faus, cofounder and CEO of vLex and now global CEO of the combined entity, known as the vLex Group. Angel Faus, cofounder and chief technology officer of vLex. Ed Walters, cofounder and former CEO of Fastcase and now chief strategy officer of vLex. Phil Rosenthal, cofounder…

With the news last week of the merger of legal research companies Fastcase and vLex, it seemed a good time to revisit our 2019 interview with the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal. The occasion of this interview was the company's 20th anniversary, and we recorded it live, on the exhibit hall floor, at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries. In this interview, Walters and Rosenthal recount how, as two young associates at the law firm Covington & Burling, they came to found Fastcase in 1999. They also recall some of their greatest successes and worst mistakes over the years as founders, and offer their predictions for the future of Fastcase. How do their predictions in 2019 stand up in 2023? Well, you'll have to listen to find out the answer to that. Although Fastcase started as a legal research company, in recent years, it had diversified and expanded into areas such as legal analytics, legal publishing, legal news, and even legal document automation. That…

In the 15 years since he and Rian Gauvreau cofounded the legal practice management company Clio in 2008, Jack Newton has learned a thing or two about what it takes to build a successful company. As its CEO since the start, Newton has overseen the growth of the company from fledgling startup to a centaur with annual recurring revenue of over $100 million, a valuation of over $1 billion, and a workforce of nearly 1,000 employees. Newton has won numerous awards for his leadership, including Canada's most admired CEO and EY's Entrepreneur of the Year. He is also an advisor to and investor in a number of startups. As Clio marks its 15th anniversary in 2023, Newton joins host Bob Ambrogi to share 15 lessons he has learned along the way regarding what makes a successful company and a successful leader. He also reminisces about the early days of starting Clio and his early successes and challenges. Notably, he and Gauvreau founded Clio in the middle of the Great Recession, and one of the lessons he shares in this…

Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world's first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's just-released latest version of its GPT model. "GPT-4 leaps past the power of earlier language models," said Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer for Casetext. "The model's ability not just to generate text, but to interpret it, heralds nothing short of a new age in the practice of law." Not only that, but Casetext played a central role in a study to have GPT-4 take the bar exam. Just two months ago, I had legal scientists Dan Katz and Michael Bommarito on this show to talk about their experiment having GPT-3.5 take the bar exam. Spoiler alert: It…

Two years after D. Gordon Smith was appointed dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors, "I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country." Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean in the school's history. So how did he do in pursuit of that goal? During his tenure, he drove a number of innovations around innovation and technology, including the launch of LawX, a legal design lab committed to tackling access-to-justice issues with solutions that address pressing legal problems such as debt collection, eviction and asylum. He also served on two Utah Supreme Court task forces that led to the creation of the Utah Sandbox. Also during his tenure as dean, he more than tripled the amount of scholarships available to students, saw the law school's ranking rise…

On this episode of LawNext, we take a closer look at Smokeball, the law practice management company whose roots are in Australia but that is firmly entrenched in the United States. In fact, after Smokeball was founded in 2010, its very first customer was a law firm in Chicago. Appropriately, then, it was in Chicago last week, during ABA TECHSHOW, that host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a face-to-face conversation with two of Smokeball's top executives, Jane Oxley, chief revenue officer for Smokeball internationally, and Ruchie Chadha, president of Smokeball in the U.S. On the day that they spoke, Smokeball had just announced the expansion of its practice management platform with the addition of Smokeball Intake, an intake workflow system that the company says is designed to enable law firms to provide their clients with the kind of digital experience they expect from a modern law firm. In this interview, Oxley and Chadha say this announcement is just the start of a period of major global acceleration and…

Kathryn Tewson was a little-known paralegal when, on Jan. 24, she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That day, she published a scathing series of tweets recounting her investigation of DoNotPay, the company that describes itself as "the world's first robot lawyer." She concluded that the company's supposed AI-driven products were little more than smoke and mirrors and that its representations about its products constituted consumer fraud. Her findings stirred intense interest both on social media and in the traditional media. Soon after she published her findings, DoNotPay's founder Joshua Browder announced he was taking down the products she tested. Now, Tewson has filed a legal action against DoNotPay and Browder in New York state that is the first step in a potential consumer class action. Last week on this podcast, Browder was our guest to respond to Tewson's allegations and other criticisms of him and his company that have come out over the past month. In the interview, he dismissed much of the…

On this episode of LawNext: Joshua Browder, founder of DoNotPay. Browder achieved international recognition when, at just 17 years old in 2015, he founded DoNotPay, touted as the world's first robot lawyer, to help people appeal parking tickets. The company claims the app has saved motorists in the U.S. and UK many millions of dollars. DoNotPay went on to release a series of apps designed to help consumers – and, more recently, small businesses – solve common legal problems, all without the need for a lawyer, and, along the way, it has raised some $28 million in venture funding. In recent weeks, however, Browder has been the subject of harsh criticism, both on social media and in the news media. The criticism came on two principal fronts. One was what many viewed as a pair of ill-conceived publicity stunts – first when Browder offered to pay a lawyer $1 million to argue a case in the Supreme Court guided via AirPods by DoNotPay's artificial intelligence, and the other when Browder said he would send a pro se…

Last week, Documate, the no-code document automation platform, rebranded as Gavel, a move designed to better reflect the company's mission to become the platform of choice for legal professionals and legal organizations wanting to "productize" the delivery of legal services by packaging services as online legal products. Gavel founder and CEO Dorna Moini joins LawNext this week to discuss how her company has evolved from document automation to come to support law firms, courts, legal aid organizations, and even legal tech companies such as Hello Divorce, as they build tools to automate legal services. She also discusses how a law firm can get started on productizing its own services, why a firm would want to to this, and whether some practices are better suited for productization than others. Moini was an associate at the law firm Sidley Austin in San Francisco when she left in 2017 to found what was originally called HelpSelf Legal and focused on automating legal help to domestic violence victims. Interest…

When this podcast launched in July 2018, the very first guest on the very first episode was Nicole Bradick, who six months earlier had launched the legal technology design and development company Theory and Principle. As the company marks its fifth anniversary, Bradick returns to LawNext with news that the company is branching off in a new direction, launching T&P Studio, an arm of the business devoted to co-developing legal tech products in partnership with others. The new business will work with partners in the legal industry who have ideas for products but who may not have the product team, budget or other elements needed to bring a product to market.T&P will validate partner ideas and then manage all areas of product strategy, design, development, and launch. Depending on the terms of the partnership, the T&P team will also participate in ownership, go-to-market strategy, sales and marketing. After five years, how has Theory and Principle evolved and what has Bradick learned about building SaaS products…