LawNext
395 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★★ - 32 ratingsLawNext is a weekly podcast hosted by Bob Ambrogi, who is internationally known for his writing and speaking on legal technology and innovation. Each week, Bob interviews the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in the legal industry. From legal technology startups to new law firm business models to enhancing access to justice, Bob and his guests explore the future of law and legal practice.
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Episodes
Ep 245: All About KL3M, The First LLM Built From Scratch for Legal, with 273 Ventures’ Jillian Bommarito
April 16, 2024 18:23 - 45 minutes - 62.9 MBWith 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 ...
Ep 244: How Maptician Is Helping Law Firms Optimize Hybrid Office Space, with CEO Alaa Pasha
April 08, 2024 17:25 - 21 minutes - 30.1 MBTiming 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 evo...
Ep 243: How iManage Is ‘Making Knowledge Work’ for Legal Professionals, with CEO Neil Araujo
April 03, 2024 15:58 - 36 minutes - 50.7 MBWith 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...
Ep 242: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen
March 25, 2024 18:39 - 50 minutes - 70 MBMarch 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 ...
Ep 241: InfoTrack’s Mission to Revolutionize Litigation Services Such as E-filing and Process Serving, with CEO Ed Watts
March 18, 2024 17:51 - 46 minutes - 63.9 MBInfoTrack 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 workfl...
Ep 240: The New Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirement and How Legal Tech Can Help Companies Comply
March 11, 2024 20:13 - 45 minutes - 62.5 MBThe 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 co...
Ep 239: Oddr CEO Milan Bobde On How AI Can Help Law Firms Stem Revenue Leakage and Turn Invoices into Cash
March 05, 2024 18:30 - 21 minutes - 29 MBCan 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 Mila...
Ep 238: Thomson Reuters’ AI Strategy for Legal, with Mike Dahn, Head of Westlaw, and Joel Hron, Head of AI
February 28, 2024 18:21 - 57 minutes - 79.2 MBOn 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 CoCounse...
Ep 237: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline Justice
February 13, 2024 01:08 - 46 minutes - 64.5 MBIn 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...
Ep 236: How One Legal Aid Program Is Creating A Culture Of Innovation To Enhance Access to Justice
February 05, 2024 18:13 - 46 minutes - 63.3 MBAt 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. Developm...
Ep 235: How the American Arbitration Association embraced Generative AI, with CEO Bridget McCormack and CIO Diana Didia
January 29, 2024 05:37 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MBOne 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 – pa...
Ep 234: How Courts, Lawyers and Legal Tech Companies Should Handle Sealed Court Documents: A Panel Discussion
January 22, 2024 19:18 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBAt 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...
Ep 233: Zen and the Art of Law Practice Management, with ZenCase’s CEO TJ Fraser and COO Olivia Mockel
January 16, 2024 17:33 - 41 minutes - 57 MBIn 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-...
Ep 232: An Inside Look At Driving Innovation within A Major Law Firm and A Major Legal Department
January 10, 2024 16:40 - 23 minutes - 31.6 MBWhat 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 inn...
Ep 231: The Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of Centari
January 03, 2024 19:40 - 34 minutes - 47.5 MBToday 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, a...
Ep 230: KM Keynotes: Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in Legal
December 18, 2023 19:10 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MBToday’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, presiden...
Ep 229: AffiniPay CEO Dru Armstrong on the Intersection of Fintech, Legal Tech and AI
December 11, 2023 22:07 - 42 minutes - 58.2 MBDru 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 d...
Ep 228: The Law Students Working to End Racism in the Legal System
December 04, 2023 18:49 - 44 minutes - 60.9 MBEach 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 stud...
Ep 227: Erika Harold, Executive Director, Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism
November 20, 2023 22:23 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MBOn 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 bullyin...
Ep 226: Clio Double Header: Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Watson and Chief Product Officer Hemant Kashyap
November 13, 2023 17:23 - 44 minutes - 60.8 MBOn 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. Tha...
Ep 225: Did EyeLevel.ai Cause Pras Michel’s Lawyer To Botch His Defense? Cofounder Neil Katz Says That Is ‘Total Nonsense’
November 06, 2023 20:25 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MBDid 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...
Ep 224: Unpacking the 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report, with Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in Residence
October 30, 2023 18:32 - 33 minutes - 45.3 MBOn 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 fi...
Ep 223: A Conversation About Wrongful Convictions, with Brian Banks and Michael Semanchik
October 23, 2023 16:21 - 30 minutes - 41.3 MBThis 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 barga...
Ep 222: Clio CEO Jack Newton On Why It’s More Important Than Ever for Lawyers to Leverage Tech
October 16, 2023 17:53 - 52 minutes - 71.5 MBIn 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 rec...
Ep 221: Building A Subscription Law Practice, with Fidu Cofounder Kimberly Bennett
October 09, 2023 19:04 - 50 minutes - 69.5 MBSoon 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 scalin...
Ep 220: June Hsiao Liebert, President of the American Association of Law Libraries, On AI and the Future of Law Librarians
October 03, 2023 17:38 - 49 minutes - 67.7 MBOn 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 th...
Ep 219: Training Lawyers to Use Generative AI, with AltaClaro Founder Abdi Shayesteh
September 26, 2023 09:19 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBAs 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 Shayest...
Ep 218: Lawmatics Founder Matt Spiegel On Automating CRM for Law Firms
September 19, 2023 04:03 - 47 minutes - 65.2 MBStories 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 s...
Ep 217: Litera CEO Sheryl Hoskins On Her First 17 Months and What’s Ahead For Her Company
September 12, 2023 09:40 - 35 minutes - 48.9 MBIt 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 growt...
Ep 216: The Voices of ILTACON 2023, Part 2: Chats with 11 Legal Tech Companies
September 05, 2023 15:49 - 32 minutes - 44 MBRecently 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 ...
Ep 215: The Voices of ILTACON 2023: Brief Chats with 12 Legal Tech Startups
August 29, 2023 17:05 - 34 minutes - 48 MBLawNext 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, wh...
Ep 214: The Story Behind Gunderson Dettmer’s Launch of ChatGD, Its ‘Homegrown’ Generative AI App, with Joe Green and John Scrudato
August 17, 2023 19:34 - 48 minutes - 67.2 MBRecently, 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 e...
Ep 213: DoNotPay, Legal Regulatory Reform, and the Op-Ed the ABA Wouldn’t Publish, with Maya Markovich and Tom Gordon
August 07, 2023 16:26 - 36 minutes - 50.3 MBToday’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...
Ep 212: Three General Counsel Discuss Boston’s Unique Contributions to the Legal Tech Landscape
July 27, 2023 18:30 - 1 hour - 90.5 MBOn 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 ...
Ep 211: The Past, Present and Future of Trial Presentation Software, with Lit Software’s Tara Cheever and Derek Miller
July 17, 2023 16:47 - 44 minutes - 60.5 MBRecently, 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 ...
Ep 210: The Florida Bar’s Precedent-Setting Decision To Give Every Lawyer Access To Trust Accounting Software
July 10, 2023 14:51 - 33 minutes - 46.3 MBIn 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...
Ep 209: LexFusion CEO Joe Borstein On His Company’s Third Anniversary and His Client Casetext’s Acquisition By Thomson Reuters
July 05, 2023 16:51 - 44 minutes - 60.5 MBIn 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 b...
Ep 208: Novus Law Cofounder Ray Bayley On Using Process Management And Tech To Find The Story In Legal Matters
June 20, 2023 16:43 - 41 minutes - 57.1 MBEvery 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...
Ep 207: Checkbox CEO Evan Wong on Why Workflow Automation Beats CLM for Many Legal Departments
June 12, 2023 16:15 - 45 minutes - 62.5 MBOne 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 ...
Ep 206: Rasa Legal Founder Noella Sudbury On Simplifying Criminal Records Expungement
June 06, 2023 18:16 - 50 minutes - 69.5 MBNoella 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 i...
Ep 205: Live from the CLOC Global Institute: Interviews with 22 Legal Tech Exhibitors
May 30, 2023 17:16 - 1 hour - 97.5 MBOn 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 exhibi...
Ep 204: Logikcull Cofounder Andy Wilson on 10 Years of Disrupting and Democratizing E-Discovery
May 22, 2023 17:38 - 46 minutes - 63.6 MBThis 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 ...
Ep 203: Wolters Kluwer V.P. Abhishek Mittal on Data Management and Operational Excellence
May 15, 2023 16:53 - 41 minutes - 56.4 MBAs 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 Art...
Ep 202: The Post-Pandemic State of Legal Practice, with Nicole Black of MyCase
May 09, 2023 17:03 - 44 minutes - 61 MBOver 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...
Ep 201: Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi on His $20M Raise and Getting Deals Done Faster with AI
May 01, 2023 16:48 - 48 minutes - 67.2 MBLexion 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 init...
Ep 200: The Four Founders of vLex and Fastcase on the Merger Of Their Two Companies
April 25, 2023 16:41 - 43 minutes - 60.1 MBIt 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 ...
Ep 199: Revisiting the Fastcase Origin Story: Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal on How Their Company Came To Be
April 10, 2023 17:25 - 41 minutes - 56.6 MBWith 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...
Ep 198: 15 Years, 15 Lessons: Clio Founder Jack Newton On What He’s Learned About Building a Successful Company
April 03, 2023 17:46 - 1 hour - 85.6 MBIn 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 Ca...
Ep 197: Casetext’s Three Top Execs On CoCounsel, GPT-4 and ‘A New Age in the Practice of Law’
March 21, 2023 20:14 - 50 minutes - 68.8 MBNow 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 it...
Ep 196: As He Steps Down As Dean, Gordon Smith Reflects On His Mission To Make BYU Law ‘One Of The Most Innovative Law Schools in the Country’
March 13, 2023 18:24 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MBTwo 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 pursui...