LawNext

"Everybody understands the world is volatile, but they don't necessarily understand why it's volatile or how to deal with it," says Sean West, cofounder of Hence Technologies and author of the new book, Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business . "Unruly is a play on words. ... The world is kind of 'unruling.' The rules and norms that were developed during global...

LawDroid Founder Tom Martin on Building, Teaching and Advising About AI for Legal If you follow legal tech at all, you would be justified in suspecting that Tom Martin has figured out how to use artificial intelligence to clone himself.  While running LawDroid , his legal tech company, the Vancouver-based Martin also still manages a law practice in California, oversees an annual legal tech awards...

In the gold rush of generative AI, it seems that every legal tech vendor wants to be a one-stop shop for legal technology. But after 15 years of developing legal tech, Nik Reed , CEO of Knowable , a legal technology company devoted to helping enterprises bring order and organization to their executed agreements, believes that lawyers should be wary of the hype. Often, the most successful AI soluti...

In January, a merciless firestorm swept through the Pacific Palisades and surrounding areas of Los Angeles, becoming the most destructive wildfire in the city's history. Driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and fueled by record-dry conditions, the Palisades Fire destroyed over 6,800 structures, burned nearly 24,000 acres, and dramatically altered the lives of thousands of residents. Among the...

As reported yesterday in an exclusive at LawSites blog, two leading international legal transformation organizations, the Digital Legal Exchange (DLEx) and the Liquid Legal Institute (LLI), have joined forces in a strategic union that brings together more than 1,500 members representing more than 140 multinational corporations, organizations, institutions and agencies across more than 20 countries...

"The landscape we all stand on is shifting, and massive amounts of change are upon us," Phil Saunders , the chief executive officer of e-discovery and legal technology giant Relativity , recently wrote in a post on the company's blog . Driving that change are three transformative forces, he wrote: new legal data challenges, advancing generative AI, and legal's journey to the cloud.  On this episod...

Recently, legal technology company SurePoint Technologies acquired the legal practice management company ZenCase in a strategic move aimed at enhancing SurePoint's practice management offerings for mid-sized law firms. In this episode of LawNext, Eric Thurston , who recently marked his two-year anniversary as CEO of SurePoint Technologies, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the acquisition and shar...

On this week's show: LawNext takes you to the movies. Well, to a specific movie, anyway – a documentary being made to raise public awareness and understanding of the access to justice crisis in this country.  Today's guests are the film's director, documentary filmmaker Laura Hand , who previously directed The Tent Mender, about homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and Maya Markovich , a legal...

After building his career as an engineer at Facebook and as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jay Madheswaran and his cofounders spotted an opportunity to deploy cutting-edge AI to transform what they saw as an underserved segment of the legal market, launching Eve , an AI platform purpose-built for plaintiffs' law firms. Eve has quickly gained traction, recently securing a $47...

Earlier this month, a legal tech startup called Fortuna Arbitration launched what it says is the first true AI judge – an automated arbitration system called Arbitrus.ai that the company claims can fully replace human arbitrators in resolving legal disputes. The system promises to cut the cost of arbitration from an average of $100,000 to just $10,000, while delivering consistent, unbiased decisio...

When former Wall Street lawyer Jonathan Petts joined forces in 2016 with Rohan Pavuluri , then a research assistant in Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab, and Mark Hansen , a software engineer, to create Upsolve, they had a simple but powerful vision: make bankruptcy filing as accessible as online tax preparation for Americans crushed by debt.  Today, their nonprofit has helped over 16,000...

When it comes to contract negotiations, lawyers often find themselves spending countless hours haggling over standard agreements such as NDAs and SaaS contracts, with both sides often saying more or less the same thing, but in different words. What if there was a better way?  Today's guests believe there is. Electra Japonas , chief legal officer at Law Insider and founder of the successful oneNDA...

In the United States, we face a staggering crisis in access to justice, with over 90% of low-income Americans' civil legal needs estimated to be going unmet. But what if there was a way to dramatically expand legal help by empowering a new category of legal helpers?  That's exactly what today's guest, Nikole Nelson , is working to achieve as CEO of Frontline Justice . After 25 years as a legal aid...

Earlier this month, the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States, held its annual Innovations in Technology Conference in Phoenix. This year's conference was particularly special for two reasons. For one, it was the conference's 25th anniversary, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Technology Initiative Grants program that was the genesis of the con...

From legal aid attorney to legal tech innovator, Sateesh Nori brings a unique perspective to the intersection of artificial intelligence and access to justice.  After spending two decades in the trenches as a housing lawyer at legal aid offices in New York City, Nori now bridges multiple worlds – continuing his legal aid work at the Legal Aid Society of NYC while also serving as an adjunct clinica...

Anastasia Boyko likes to say that she's Goldilocks-ed her way through her career. True, it's been a varied career, as she's tried out different roles, but it is a career that has taken her full circle, from Yale Law School, where she graduated, and then eventually back to Yale Law to create a program in leadership for lawyers, and from Salt Lake City, where she grew up after she and her mother fle...

On Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned...

On today's LawNext: we hand over the podcast to NotebookLM to discuss the state of law practice management technology.  If you haven't heard of NotebookLM, it is a generative AI tool from Google that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions. Its output sounds a whole lot like, well, a podcast, with two hosts chatting it up about your documents.  To quote Google's own description, "With...

You cannot have innovation without adoption. That was a theme I heard repeatedly when I attended the Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal conference in New York City in October. Our guest today, Paul Henry , would take that a step further and say you do not really have adoption without engagement.  Henry is the founder and CEO of NGAGE Intelligence , a platform that provides law firms with...

Everlaw for Good is a program run by the e-discovery company Everlaw , through which it makes its software available at no cost to legal aid organizations, nonprofit organizations, and investigative journalists.  One beneficiary of that program is the Center for Justice and Accountability , a human rights nonprofit that works to seek justice on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including tortu...

In the field of legal knowledge management and innovation, Sally Gonzalez is both a legend and a trailblazer. Over the course of her 40-year career, she has worked for some of the world's largest law firms to develop and lead KM and strategic technology initiatives. She has overseen KM and information technology programs at such global firms as Norton Rose Fulbright, Dentons, Akin Gump, Covington...

Recently, the Everlaw Summit , the annual customer conference of the e-discovery company Everlaw , convened in San Francisco. In his keynote address there, cofounder and CEO AJ Shankar announced the general availability, after a year of beta testing, of a suite of generative AI features for reviewing, coding and analyzing documents in discovery and litigation prep.  LawNext host Bob AmbrogiI was a...

At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal design...

Recently, the law practice management company Clio launched Clio Duo, its generative AI legal assistant. On today's LawNext, Jonathan Watson , Clio's chief technology officer, joins the show to discuss Duo's development, capabilities and future direction. He also talks about some of the other products Clio recently launched, including native accounting and custom reporting.  Watson and LawNext hos...

When Zach Posner was last on this podcast , it was 2021 and he was less than a year into having cofounded The LegalTech Fund , the first venture capital firm to be laser-focused on law and legal technology. Since then, his firm, of which he is managing director, has gone on to build up a portfolio of more than 60 legal tech companies in which it invests.  His firm has also launched his own confere...