LawNext

Last week, on the last day of the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries , the nationwide organization of law librarians and legal information professionals, Elizabeth Adelman took office as the association's new president. A key focus of her term will be on increasing the pipeline of those coming into the profession and working to enhance diversity within both the AALL and th...

For 28 years, John Mayer has been executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction , or CALI, a non-profit consortium of some 200 law schools that describes itself as "the innovative force pushing legal education toward change for the better." Along the way, CALI's mission expanded to include addressing access to justice, primarily through its development, in partnership wi...

It was a mighty bold move for the legal technology company Mighty . After seven years in business serving personal injury lawyers, the company recently pivoted to launch Mighty Law , a law firm that directly competes against those PI firms by offering lower fees, greater transparency, and tech-driven efficiencies.  For founder and CEO Joshua Schwadron , the move was motivated by what he sees as th...

Sang Lee believes that algorithm-based assessments can help law firms make better, more ethical and less-biased decisions when hiring associates and laterals. The SaaS company she founded in 2019, Thine , leverages custom hiring algorithms and industrial and organizational (IO) psychology to create assessments that it says can reduce inconsistencies in how law firms evaluate candidates, promote eq...

LawVu is a New Zealand company that says it is revolutionizing legal operations by waging war on a multiplicity of point solutions and providing in-house legal teams with the first truly connected platform for matter, contract and spend management.  LawVu recently conducted a survey of in-house lawyers and legal operations  professionals and found that 77% of them spend more than an hour a day jus...

The law practice management platform Litify is unique in several ways. For one, it is built on top of Salesforce, the sales and marketing automation platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. For another, it was developed by a team of people who came out of Morgan & Morgan, the largest plaintiffs' law firm in the United States.  Since its launch in 2016, Litify has raised $50 million in Series A...

As this episode is being released, news is breaking that is likely to have a profound impact on the law practice management market: AffiniPay, the parent company of the electronic payments platform LawPay, has acquired the law practice management company MyCase, along with several other practice management products that MyCase acquired over the past year.  Just ahead of today's announcement, the C...

If ever there was a process ripe for disruption, notarization would seem to be it. A function that may date back to Ancient Egypt, it has changed little for centuries – still typically done in person, on hard-copy paper, using physical seals, and recorded in written ledgers.  Pat Kinsel , founder and CEO of Notarize , believes society has grappled for too long with how to scale this simple process...

Lawyers are largely limited to practicing law in the states in which they are licensed. But now, calling that rule anachronistic, the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers has asked the American Bar Association to amend the model rules that govern law practice to allow lawyers admitted in any U.S. jurisdiction to practice law and provide legal advice to clients anywhere in the country...

No one has worked harder, worked longer or had more success at the cause of making government information accessible to the public than Carl Malamud and his organization Public. Resource. Org . From putting the SEC's EDGAR database online in 1993 – effectively shaming the SEC into putting it online itself two years later – to his 2020 U.S. Supreme Court victory defeating the state of Georgia's cla...

Last week, Filevine , the Utah-based case management company, raised $108 million in a Series D funding round. Founded in 2014 with an original focus on litigation and personal injury law, the company has been steadily expanding its platform into other areas of law practice — including larger firms, insurance defense, corporate legal, and government — and it plans to use this funding to further fu...

For 23 years, Pro Bono Net has been working to harness the potential of technology to connect pro bono attorneys to those most in need of their services and to provide legal tools to help individuals advocate for themselves. In 2021 alone, the non-profit helped more than 8.4 million people connect to a legal resource and helped self-represented individuals create more than 900,000 legal documents...

In his day job, Jonathan Pyle is the contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where he is responsible for compliance, reporting, and implementing new uses of technology to analyze, streamline, and expand service delivery. But in the legal tech world, Pyle is better known as the developer of Docassemble , a free and open source document assembly application that has been widel...

She has been called the patron saint of solo and small law firms. For two decades, Carolyn Elefant has helped solo and small firm lawyers start and build their law practices. You know her as the creator of MyShingle.com , the longest-running blog on solo and small law firm practice, and she just released the third edition of her book that is a bible for lawyers going off on their own, Solo by Choi...

As head of managed services and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions , Jeffrey Solomon oversees a database that tracks over $150 billion in legal spend data. Legal departments are able to use this data in multiple ways, including to benchmark outside firms' billing rates and to evaluate staffing of legal matters.  In this episode of LawNext, Solomon joins host Bob Ambrogi for a deep dive into...

As Time By Ping , a company devoted to helping lawyers break free from timekeeping, announces its Series B raise of $36.5 million, cofounder and CEO Ryan Alshak joins LawNext for an exclusive interview about the financing, the company, and its mission to help lawyers break free from timekeeping and get back time in their days.  As Alshak shares in the interview, the roots of the company's mission...

Is there a better way to train lawyers to draft and negotiate contracts? Laura Frederick thinks so. This former Tesla and BigLaw commercial contracts attorney is the founder of How to Contract , a learning platform that trains lawyers and professionals how to draft and negotiate contracts in the real world. She is also managing attorney of her own firm, Laura Frederick Law , in Austin, Texas, wher...

In this second of a two-part interview, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Carr , a trailblazing general counsel who describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream.  As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted...

One of the most innovative general counsel ever, Jeffrey Carr describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Yet many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream.  As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted how legal departments hire and compensate outside counsel,...

Two years into the pandemic, what has been its impact on e-discovery and what lies ahead for the industry? The 2022 State of the Industry Report takes a deep dive into these questions, surveying lawyers, consultants, software and service providers, and others to paint a picture of where the industry is today and what trends will dominate in the year ahead.  Joining us on LawNext to discuss the rep...

At a time when corporations are demanding greater accountability, transparency and predictability from their legal departments, automation of manual processes is a critical strategic priority, offering the promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness. But what does it really mean for a legal department to digitally transform itself and how should it go about it?  In this special edition of LawN...

As a litigator in Los Angeles, Nicole Clark saw that state court data could be a secret weapon for winning, but she also saw how difficult it was for her and other lawyers to access that data. That inspired Clark to found Trellis in 2018, to collect and provide access to that data so that other litigators would not have to operate blind.  Recently, Trellis raised $14.1 million in a Series A fundin...

Bobby Balachandran , founder and CEO of governance, risk and compliance company Exterro , has just been named LegalTech CEO of the Year in the Legaltech Breakthrough Awards . In a year in which so many legal tech companies have seen significant growth, it is a notable honor. But Balachandran is hardly resting on his laurels. He is already eyeing an IPO in the year ahead.    A computer scientist by...

When COVID-19 first swept across the United States in March 2020, it forced courts across the country to shut down, bringing trials and other legal proceedings to a screeching halt. A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts examined how courts responded in the aftermath of that shutdown, and it concluded that they did pretty well overall, rapidly embracing technology and revolutionizing their opera...

In July, the e-discovery company DISCO became one of just a handful of legal technology companies ever to go public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. That made it the third legal tech company this year to go public, after no U.S. legal tech company had gone public since 2002.  On this episode of LawNext, Kiwi Camara , DISCO's cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss DISCO's publ...