LawNext

We thought 2018 was a banner year for investment in legal technology companies. But then, less than two weeks into 2019, the year got off to a roaring start with news of a $200 million strategic investment in Onit , a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process automation. To discuss one of the largest investments ever i...

Mark A. Cohen has long been ahead of the curve. After 25 years as an accomplished trial lawyer, he founded one of the first legal process outsourcing companies and then cofounded Clearspire, the groundbreaking two-company law firm and service provider that became the blueprint for a new generation of innovative legal services providers. Now, Cohen puts his experience to work as a legal business co...

What do you get if you combine a virtual receptionist service with artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert: The answer is not robots answering the phone. Rather, the folks at Smith.ai say the combination results in a superior receptionist service for both live calls and website chat. By incorporating AI, they say, their service continually gets smarter as it comes to know your practice and your cli...

With Judicata , Itai Gurari believes he has built a better legal research platform. A lawyer and computer scientist, his approach to designing a legal research engine was to first "map the legal genome" -- that is, map the law with extreme accuracy and granularity. The result is a research engine that returns the best results the fastest, he says. Gurari and his company also built Clerk , a tool t...

Our guest this week on LawNext is Daniel B. Rodriguez , who recently stepped down as dean of Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law , where he gained wide recognition for his work to innovate legal education, and recently stepped up to become chair of the governing council of the ABA Center for Innovation , which focuses on improving the affordability, effectiveness, efficiency, and acce...

In major legal industry news, global law company Elevate announced its acquisition of the legal AI technology and consulting firm LexPredict . The move combines the comprehensive legal services offering of Elevate with the data science team and AI engine of LexPredict. With Elevate's alternative services model and LexPredict's cutting-edge technology, does this acquisition foreshadow the future of...

Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman , CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we're on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements. Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the launch of the Agreements Network , which he describes as the...

In this special bonus episode of LawNext, we bring you a panel discussion on savvy podcasting for lawyers. Recently, at the 2018 Northeast Regional Conference of the Legal Marketing Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi joined a panel of legal marketing and media experts to discuss podcasting for lawyers and law firms. The panelists shared their tips and experiences on starting, producing and prom...

In this episode of LawNext, we take you live to Russia, where we interview two of the leading experts on Russian legal technology to get their insights and perspectives on the state of innovation and development there. What they say may surprise you. Host Bob Ambrogi recently visited Moscow as the keynote speaker at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference. While there, he recorded these two interviews o...

When Alvin Tedjamulia cofounded NetDocuments in 1998 as the first cloud-based platform for document and email management, few lawyers had any concept of what it meant to work in the cloud. Today, NetDocuments has grown to become one of the leading DMS systems in legal, counting some of the world's leading law firms and corporations as its customers. Now chief technology officer at NetDocuments, Te...

The recently launched Caselaw Access Project is the capstone to a massive undertaking executed over three years to digitize all U.S. case law, some 6.4 million cases dating back to 1658. Leading the project was Adam Ziegler , director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, which partnered with Ravel Law to digitize the school's entire library of U.S. cases. In this episode of LawNext...

Sarah Schaaf wanted to revolutionize how lawyers get paid. After growing up with lawyer parents and then becoming a lawyer herself, including a stint in Google's legal department, she saw the problems lawyers had in collecting from clients. She envisioned a platform as easy to use as PayPal or Venmo, but made specifically for the legal field and fully compliant with lawyers' professional responsib...

They say you can't go home again, but Matt Spiegel came back to legal technology after selling the first company he founded, MyCase , and then moving to other verticals. Earlier this year, Spiegel launched his second legal technology startup, Lawmatics , a cloud-based platform designed to automate legal marketing, CRM and client intake. Spiegel had been a criminal defense lawyer when, in 2009, he...

It was big news earlier this month when practice management company Clio announced that it had acquired Lexicata , the first cloud-based CRM and client-intake platform for lawyers. It was the first acquisition by 10-year-old Clio, which says it will continue to operate Lexicata but will also develop its technology into a new, more advanced client-engagement platform, Clio Grow. Lexicata CEO Michae...

At just 17 years old, Joshua Browder made international news when he created DoNotPay , a chatbot that helped appeal parking tickets, reportedly saving motorists in the U.S. and UK millions of dollars. Now 21, he has just released a series of apps designed to help consumers solve common legal problems without the help of a lawyer -- including one to file small claims lawsuits in any U.S. jurisdict...

Kevin O'Keefe believes that lawyers get their best work from relationships and a strong word-of-mouth reputation, and that blogging is the perfect way to build relationships and reputation. In 2003, he founded LexBlog, a company devoted to helping lawyers and law firms launch their own blogs. Today, LexBlog has grown to a network of nearly 20,000 legal professionals worldwide blogging on the platf...

What if a lawyer could know how a judge is likely to rule in a case or how heavy is a judge's workload? Rick Merrill was a litigator at a large law firm who became frustrated over his inability to get meaningful information about the judges before whom he appeared. So last year, he launched Gavelytics , a California company that uses analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze docket data and...

Earlier this year, Mark Britton left Avvo , the often-controversial company he founded in 2006 and led as CEO, after selling it to web behemoth Internet Brands . Explaining his departure in a memo to his staff , he wrote, "It's time for me to go." In this episode of LawNext, Britton reflects on his 12 years at Avvo. In a face-to-face interview with host Bob Ambrogi, he recounts why he started the...

  In July, Thomson Reuters unveiled Westlaw Edge, the next generation of its legal research platform that uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help legal professionals find answers and perform research more efficiently. The engineering of the AI that went into that was spearheaded by Dr. Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of research and development at Thomson Reuters and head of t...

Should legal ethics rules be changed to allow non-lawyer ownership of legal services providers? So controversial is the question that it was major news in July when the State Bar of California voted to appoint a task force to study and make recommendations on the issue. What spurred the bar to take this action was the Legal Market Landscape Report it commissioned from William D. Henderson , profes...

In September 2017, venerable Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy launched Fuse , setting aside a portion of its London office for a collaborative innovation space to develop and test new legal technologies, and it named lawyer Shruti Ajitsaria to head the project. On this episode of LawNext, Ajitsaria joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why Allen & Overy started Fuse, explain what it does, and descr...

What does it mean to practice data-driven law? On this episode, Bob speaks with Jeff Pfeifer, the LexisNexis vice president charged with driving overall product strategy for LexisNexis Legal and Professional, North America. Over the past several years, Pfeifer has spearheaded a series of acquisitions and product developments, all with the goal of establishing LexisNexis as the leader in legal anal...

It was around the world in 40 days – the legal tech world that is. Earlier this year, Dera Nevin traveled to 19 destinations in 15 countries on six continents over 40 days, meeting with legal hackers and legal entrepreneurs all over the world. The trip, in conjunction with the Global Legal Hackathon , taught her lessons about legal technology and innovation on a global scale, and even taught her s...

What does legal innovation look like? For all the talk about innovation in law, who are the real innovators and what are they doing? This week's guest, Daniel W. Linna Jr. , an attorney and law professor, helps us answer that question.   Linna is the creator of the Legal Services Innovation Index , where he is cataloging and indexing innovations at law firms and law schools. Through his work, he i...

The $500 million secondary investment announced recently by online legal services company LegalZoom is the largest investment ever in a legal technology company. It comes as the company continues to expand both its services and its geographic reach. With a valuation of $2 billion and a customer base of 4 million, what will this investment mean for LegalZoom now and into the future?   In this episo...