LawNext

On Sept. 4, 2019, the cloud practice management company Clio announced $250 million funding round -- one of the largest ever for a legal technology company. Shortly after making the announcement during an event in Clio's Burnaby, B.C., headquarters, cofounder and CEO Jack Newton sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for this live recording session to discuss the news.  In this special edition of...

Often called the app store of law, Reynen Court has fast become one of the most talked-about companies in legal technology. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to the rapidly growing universe of vertically integrated SaaS providers. In this episode of LawNext,...

For the 50th episode of LawNext, we could think of no more appropriate topic than the state of podcasting in the legal industry. And we could think of no one better suited to the topic than Adam Camras , CEO of the Legal Talk Network , and Laurence Colletti , its executive producer.  Camras is a longtime entrepreneur in the legal industry whose company Lawgical acquired the Legal Talk Network in 2...

Which firms are best prepared to keep pace with changes in the legal market? That was the question explored in a recent survey of U.S. and European law firms, the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer Survey , conducted by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory . Among the findings: The firms that are best prepared for the future are those that already leverage technology.  In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambr...

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi travels to Toronto to sit down for a live recording with the founders of the AI-driven legal research platform ROSS Intelligence , CEO Andrew Arruda and CTO Jimoh Ovbiagele . Along with a third founder, Pargles Dall'Oglio , Arruda and Ovbiagele first developed ROSS at the University of Toronto in 2014, rapidly gaining international attention for what th...

E-discovery company Casepoint is unusual among legal technology companies in that it has achieved significant growth in recent years, without taking on outside funding. Since 2015, the company has grown from 45 employees to 370, and in just the last year has seen its install base grow by more than 70 percent.  In this episode of LawNext, Haresh Bhungalia, the chief executive officer of Casepoint,...

Judy Perry Martinez is a lawyer who has made public service a part of her career from the start. She continues that legacy in August as she assumes the presidency of the 400,000-member American Bar Association during its annual meeting in San Francisco. On this episode of LawNext, Martinez joins host Bob Ambrogi for a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the ABA and t...

It was 20 years ago that two Covington & Burling associates, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal , made the audacious move of quitting their jobs and launching the legal research company Fastcase . Their goal was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology. Two decades later, that once-scrappy company is now a major player in the legal research market.  At the recent annual...

By any measure, the London-based legal AI startup Luminance has had spectacular success. Not yet three years old, it has raised $23 million in funding, has achieved a valuation of $100 million, is used by more than 150 organizations on six continents, and has won numerous technology awards, including the prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise in the innovation category.  In this episode of LawNe...

As director of applied innovation at UC Hastings College of the Law, Alice Armitage oversees two innovation-focused projects at the law school: LexLab , a multifaceted innovation program for students, startups and the broader legal tech community; and Startup Legal Garage , a program offering free legal assistance to early-stage technology and biotech companies. LexLab has three areas of focus: bu...

"We are not your grandfather's law librarian." As president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Femi Cadmus makes that point emphatically. Her organization recently completed it first-ever AALL State of the Profession report, an in-depth look at what information professionals do and how they do it. The report's bottom line is that technology is making the role of the law librarian more d...

Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and ter...

A lawyer, economist and scholar, Gillian K. Hadfield has devoted much of her career to studying how legal systems can be improved to ensure they meet the needs of the people they are meant to serve. In her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy , she argues that the complexity of today's global, digital economy has pushed law to it...

This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams , author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting .   On this episode of LawNext, Adam...

A tremor rolled through the legal industry recently when Thomson Reuters announced that it had sold its managed services business , Pangea3, to global Big Four professional services firm Ernst & Young, a sign of Ernst & Young's increasing expansion into legal services. On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with two of the leaders of Pangea3, Joe Borstein, global director at Pangea3,...

"Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone," says Andy Wilson , cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull . "We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth." Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-p...

Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium's lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even inc...

Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin , helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice. Paladin has attracted some notable investors, includi...

Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting. This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings' legal innovation hub, LexLab . The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some...

Everlaw is an e-discovery company that has attracted the interest of some big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms, raising nearly $35 million in the last three years. It was the first legal technology company to receive an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a firm known for backing a wide-ranging portfolio of successful companies such as Facebook Twitter, Airbnb, Box, Skype and Slack. Its...

In February, Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini announced the launch of SixFifty , a software subsidiary that will develop automated tools designed to make legal processes more efficient and affordable for individuals, small businesses and emerging companies. Named president of SixFifty was Kimball Dean Parker , the lawyer who helped develop the innovative LawX design lab at BYU Law School. On...

Gordon Smith , dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, once said : "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." Since becoming dean in 2016, Smith has worked tirelessly to make that happen, launching the nationally recognized LawX legal design lab, developing courses to tea...

On Feb. 27, 2019, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition , moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite. In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording of the live event. Listen as th...

In January, the world's largest law firm, Baker McKenzie , announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty , to help the firm "enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients." They join a team led by David Cambria , who last year left Fortune 50 company Archer Daniels Midland to become the firm's global director of legal op...

For some two decades, Mark Chandler has been a leading voice for innovation and technology in the operation of legal departments and the delivery of legal services. Executive vice president and chief legal officer at technology giant Cisco, he has been the company's top lawyer since 2001 and a member of its legal department since 1996, when Cisco acquired Stratacom, where he had been general couns...