LawNext

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, Clio released its ninth annual Legal Trends Report , a report that uses both survey responses and anonymized data from Clio users to paint a picture of key trends in law practice and legal technology. This year's report has some intriguing findings on lawyers' adoption of AI and the types of tasks within a law office that could be automated usi...

This has been a significant year for the law practice management company Clio, which in July raised a record-setting $900 million financing round – the largest ever for a legal tech company, and which recently wrapped up its 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference , its largest ever with some 2,600 attendees in person in Austin, Texas, and almost as many attending virtually from all over the globe.  At...

We've just returned from the Clio Cloud Conference, held this year in Austin, Texas, where, in what has become an annual tradition, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton for a live interview.  At the conference, Clio launched Clio Duo, the generative AI legal assistant integrated into Clio's flagship product, Clio Manage. In this interview, Newton discusses what D...

One year ago, in September 2023, James Schellhase was named chief executive officer of the alternative legal services provider UnitedLex . The move was particularly significant, as he was only the second person ever to hold that title at the company, having succeeded Dan Reed, who cofounded UnitedLex in 2006 and had been its CEO ever since. Reed is now chairman of the board. A year into his tenure...

At its recent customer conference in Salt Lake City, called LEX Summit, the case management company Filevine unveiled a number of product releases and updates. Among them were several products for litigators driven by generative AI, including a first-of-its-kind tool, Depo CoPilot, that helps guide a lawyer during a deposition, and another, DemandsAI, that generates settlement demand letters in th...

In today's episode, we feature three impromptu conversations with leaders of the case management company Filevine. Last week, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was in Salt Lake City to attend LEX Summit, the Filevine customer conference. While there, he snagged three of the company's top executives for brief, impromptu conversations about the company, its products, and the conference.  In today's show, you...

Matt Rasmussen had worked for some 20 years in litigation technology and support at major law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and litigation services providers, when he wondered why mobile collections had to be so time-consuming, inefficient and invasively overbroad.  As he looked into it, he realized there was a better way to manage mobile collections. Two years ago, Rasmussen and his cofounders br...

On Oct. 17 and 18, 2024, two of the legal industry's leading experts on knowledge management and innovation, Patrick DiDomenico , founder and CEO of InspireKM Consulting , and Joshua Fireman , president of Fireman & Company , which is owned by Epiq, the global provider of technology-enabled legal services, will present the second-annual KM&I for Legal Conference in New York City.  The conference,...

In what it says is the first AI agent for law , the legal technology company Spellbook just released Spellbook Associate , an application that can plan and execute complex, multi-step workflows in transactional matters, much as an associate would. This is the same company that introduced the first generative AI copilot for contract drafting and review back in 2022, even before ChatGPT was released...

For at least two decades, artificial intelligence has been used in e-discovery to help surface and prioritize review of potentially responsive documents from large document collections. But while technology-assisted review (TAR) has traditionally been driven by AI in the form of supervised machine learning, some vendors and e-discovery professionals are starting to experiment with the use of gener...

Last month, KKR , a major global investment firm, announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft , the contract lifecycle management company. As part of the deal, the growth equity firm FTV Capital , already an Agiloft investor, is making an additional investment, and another growth equity firm, JMI Equity , is joining as a new investor. The deal was a feath...

As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio's founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview.  In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today's announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investmen...

Jacqueline Schafer , the founder and CEO of Clearbrief , was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later...

Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public's access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a c...

This has been a notable year for BriefCatch , a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company's raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics.  All of that culminat...

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener , its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite , which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.  But ther...

In recent months, Epiq , a global company providing technology-enabled legal services, has announced new artificial intelligence and analytics features built using the AI capabilities of Amazon Web Services. These new features include a framework for building, training and deploying bespoke machine learning models as secure APIs for customers; integration of Amazon Bedrock for custom copilot devel...

As this episode is released, Aderant , a technology company that provides business and practice management software for mid- to large-sized law firms worldwide, is in the midst of its Global Momentum user conference, taking place in Nashville. At the conference, the company made a major news announcement – the launch of Stridyn , a new cloud platform that will form the foundation for all the cloud...

Almost exactly one year ago, a new legal tech startup, The Contract Network , came out of stealth , with a mission to "radically accelerate the time for contract negotiations'' through an AI-powered contract collaboration platform where all parties to a deal engage in a secure and neutral environment.  The company's cofounder and CEO, Jim Wagner , is a legal tech veteran with a track record of sta...

With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certifie...

Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician , developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns.  But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha , expanding its platform to help l...

With the tagline "Making Knowledge Work," the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported , it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.    But over the 30 years since i...

March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project , it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.  The massive undertaki...

InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.  Our guest today, Ed Watts , CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company i...

The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company. With new requirements for companies...