LawNext

Earlier this month, e-discovery company Everlaw became one of the few legal technology companies to join the elite ranks of unicorn status — companies valued at over $1 billion — with the announcement of a $202 million Series D funding at a valuation of over $2 billion. It had already been a big year for the company, which saw 80% year-over-year growth, the launch of several new products, and its...

It has been a year of notable developments for the practice management company MyCase . After starting the year with the arrival of a new CEO, Jim McGinnis , the company went on to make two significant acquisitions — of case management platform CASEpeer and document automation software Woodpecker — and this week is holding its first-ever customer conference, where McGinnis announced a third acquis...

This week on LawNext: A look at the innovative Tech Edge J.D. program at Santa Clara University School of Law . As law schools come under fire for failing to teach the practical skills students need to succeed in the real world, this program does the opposite. It aims to change the return on investment in legal education by providing law students with the essential legal, technology and business s...

This marks the 20th year in business for Nextpoint , and it is shaping up to be a momentous one for the Chicago-based e-discovery and case preparation company. Having been bootstrapped since its founding, Nextpoint recently closed its first round of outside financing. Having never made an acquisition, it recently acquired deposition software company WarRoom . And this week, Nextpoint is holding a...

This week, the College of Law Practice Management named Digitory Legal winner of its 2021 Innovation Award for a unique partnership with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to drive diversity, equity and inclusion among its outside counsel by applying analytics to billing data to get a deeper understanding of the type and quality of work firms are assigning to diverse lawyers.  As our guest Catherine Kr...

You would be hard-pressed to find two people in legal technology more experienced in user interface and user experience design than Nicole Bradick and Andy Wishart . Bradick is founder and CEO of the legal tech design and development firm Theory and Principle . Wishart is chief product officer at contract lifecycle management company Agiloft and formerly was co-founder and chief technology officer...

The ABA Journal dubbed Fred Rooney the father of legal incubators. He developed the first incubator in 2007 at City University of New York Law School, spawning the launch of some 70 incubators in the years since, many with Fred's guidance or based on his model. While most are in the U.S., Rooney is now helping create incubators worldwide, in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Bulgaria...

Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms, Conga acquired Contract Wrangler . For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Neil Peretz , it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to simply identify key clauses, but that...

Gavin McGrane was a litigation attorney in San Francisco when he saw an opportunity to improve how legal professionals interface with the federal courts electronic records system, PACER, and to enable them to better tap into the data and knowledge contained within that system.  In 2012, he founded PacerPro , originally focusing on providing an enhanced interface to the PACER system, but, in the ye...

There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services.  So critical is the issue that GPSolo , the magazine of the American Bar Ass...

On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission is to lead the school's next chapter of innovation.    But she also...

Zach Posner cofounded The Legaltech Fund in 2020 as the first venture capital firm laser-focused on law and legal technology. But even with that industry focus, he takes a broad view when it comes to what he considers legal tech, looking for startups that have "legal in the middle," but that may also span fintech, govtech, or consumer tech.    Posner, a three-time entrepreneur before becoming an i...

Does the billable hour get a bum rap? Nicholas d'Adhemar , founder and CEO of the London-based spend management company Apperio , believes so. The real culprit for out-of-control legal costs is something else altogether, he believes. By identifying it, d'Adhemar says, both clients and law firms will be better positioned to manage legal costs. In this episode of LawNext, d'Adhemar joins host Bob Am...

Sixteen months after UpCounsel announced it would shut down, it is not only alive and well, but showing double-digit revenue growth, consistent profitability, and accelerating demand for legal services through its lawyer marketplace. Now it is launching a crowdfunding campaign with the mission of bringing legal to the people.    [The crowdfunding campaign opens to the public July 28, but listeners...

With his contract-management company having just raised $40 million in Series B funding, Linksquares cofounder and CEO Vishal Sunak is aiming for some big goals, including "to build legal tech solutions that simply weren't possible before." In announcing the raise, which brings the company's total funding to $61.4 million, Sunak vowed that the company will develop its AI technology to "offer funct...

Mary Shen O'Carroll pioneered the field of legal operations during her 13 years as director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming the influential organization CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – and was elected its president in 2019.  In April, she walked away from both of those roles, leaving Google and stepping down as CLOC presiden...

The past year has laid bare, in shockingly explicit detail, the racial inequities of the justice system. Now, LexisNexis and the Historically Black Colleges and University Law School Consortium have partnered to launch a fellowship initiative for 12 law students to spend nine months working to end this systemic racism and further the rule of law.  On this episode of LawNext, we discuss this initia...

As the legal profession continues to transform and evolve, how can a law firm or legal department be "future ready"? What are the characteristics that define future-ready organizations and foretell their continued success?  Just out from Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is its 2021 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report , documenting the top trends affecting legal professionals and looking at how well...

New findings show that law firms that piloted the Mansfield Rule have grown the racial and ethnic diversity of their leadership by more than 30 times the rate of other firms. These firms have also exceeded the norm in the rates at which racially diverse lawyers progressed into partnership and at which women lawyers progressed into leadership roles.  As the legal industry continues to struggle with...

The past year has seen the launch of several legal technology marketplaces, but Theorem LTS aims to be something more — an integrated legal technology ecosystem to power workflow-driven tech adoption by law firms and legal departments, as well as a marketplace for vendors to sell their products and connect with customers.  Founder Joshua Maley is a former lawyer and venture investor who started th...

There is an element of serendipity in the story of Nehal Madhani and his company Alt Legal. Even though he had been an insolvency lawyer who had never practiced trademark law, an early attempt at entrepreneurship — and at registering his own trademarks — showed him the need for better software to automate trademark applications. After creating and launching that product, he heard from his customer...

One of the most dynamic areas of legal tech right now is practice management, which has seen a surge of investments and acquisitions over the past year. And one of the companies that best represents that trend is Paradigm, which was founded two years ago as ASG LegalTech and rebranded this year as Paradigm, to represent its goal of bringing about a paradigm shift for legal technology.  Paradigm is...

There is broad agreement that if law schools are to adequately train students for careers in law, then technology is a critical part of the curriculum. Despite this, many law schools get a failing grade when it comes to teaching tech. So how, exactly, should law schools teach tech? And what topics should such teaching cover?  April G. Dawson has given a lot of thought to those questions. A former...

Last August, Arizona became the first state to eliminate the ban on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. In ordering that change, as well as a package of additional reforms, the Arizona Supreme Court acted on the recommendations of a task force that had called for fundamental changes in the regulation of legal services, all with the goal of enhancing access to justice,  On today's episode of LawNext...

LexLab , the legal innovation hub at UC Hastings Law School, recently wrapped up the fourth cohort of its legal tech accelerator program with a demo day at which the seven startup participants got to pitch their products to potential investors.  But this demo day, in fact this entire cohort, was noticeably different than prior ones, in that it was the first to take place 100% virtually, without th...