Version Up

Denisa Kopandi, a senior associate at a leading Romanian law firm, joins to talk about LegalTechTalk 2026. The conversation quickly turns into an exploration of what it means for law firms to prepare for changes to the legal market caused by AI. One key takeaway for me: one of the first steps for law firms looking to prepare for AI's impact on their business is to understand what their clients are...

Dan Sito, former federal tax partner and AI innovation partner at Perkins Coie, joins VersionUp to discuss why he left Big Law to launch Sito PC, an AI-native law firm. Our conversation reveals that going "AI-native" does not mean building a tech company, chasing high-volume/low-value work, or rebuilding a practice from scratch — it means a specialist lawyer using agentic tools to deliver premium...

Abhijat (Ab) Saraswat comes on the podcast to address *the* question that is on the minds of law firm innovation leaders: what makes AI transformation stick? On the surface, it looks like everything is going great. Training sessions, positive usage stats, vibe-coded POCs, vendor demos and pilots, some nice publicity on LinkedIn and at conferences. A law firm going AI-native. But underneath the sur...

Jamie Tso and Raymond Sun join for a check-in on Legal Quants, their growing community of elite AI-native lawyers who design and deploy AI in their legal practice. A previous episode covered the origin story. This one ends up mostly being about LQ Brain — their adaptation of the "digital brain" concept, applied not to an individual's knowledge but to the collective intelligence of their entire com...

Does legal tech still add value to the foundation models it is built on top of? Today's episode is a debate on the AI Wrapper -- a topic that's been moving to the foreground as the foundational models that legal tech tools are built on top of improve in effectiveness and promote their capabilities to a legal vertical.  Will Chen — former lawyer and developer of Mike, a new open source legal AI pla...

What are the fundamental building blocks for becoming an AI-native law firm? Julian Gilson comes on the pod to lay out a framework for a successful transformation: people, process, and tech. Julian is founder of IntensifAI, which advises law firms on AI transformation end-to-end. He brings a grounded perspective forged by a product management background to try to answer a question many law firms a...

The question is no longer whether the frontier AI labs are coming for the legal market. The only remaining question is: how fast and how far do they plan to take it? Claude and others are making significant moves that signal the same thing: LLMs aren't content to be infrastructure that other LegalTech vendors build on top of. They want to service the legal user directly by offering them some of th...

You could say in-house legal is having its AI moment. Agentic AI enables corporates to not only automate existing work but also to insource additional tasks currently bveing shipped out to external providers. It requires a change in mindset as much as an upgrade in technology. Mathieu Van Assche comes on the podcast to talk about an outcome-driven approach to helping corporate legal departments ma...

Not being able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of AI tools is a major barrier to effective procurement and deployment of AI in legal. But it's also a problem for vendors who struggle to make better-performing products stand out from better-funded ones.  Anna Guo and Elgar Weijtmans, seek to solve this problem with Legal Benchmarks. Anna and Elgar joined forces after independently discovering...

As a fellow in-house lawyer, I’m impressed and even a bit jealous of how quickly Amy Posner is able to innovate to supercharge her work at a large technology company. Amy comes on the show to drop some knowledge for in-house legal teams looking to benchmark their efforts and law firms wanting to understand their clients’ expectations. Lots of great takeaways for lawyers who want to know how in-hou...

The iPhone didn’t just improve mobile phone, it reshaped entire industries around it. That’s the opportunity law firms have with AI, according to Scott Kveton, CEO and co-founder of CaseMark.  From Y2K to GenAI, Scott has been a witness to a lot of change in tech. With that experience, he brings to the conversation some powerful insights on how AI forces law firms to rethink how work is produced,...

What is a "legal quant"? According to Jamie Tso, who coined the term, it describes a new breed of elite legal practitioners operating at the frontier of tech who will be the rainmakers of the AI era.  Jamie, who is a practicing lawyer, is not a software engineer. But he does identify as a "legal quant". It's a term he coined to describe a small but growing group of lawyers who use the latest in AI...

As the technical co-founder of Version Story, Jordan Bryan draws from his experience as a developer seeing how technology solved a major industry pain point: collaborating on coding projects (the solution there was GitHub). He and his co-founder found an analog to a pain point that every lawyer knows well: version control over documents and contracts. This was the genesis for the idea to develop t...

The good news for law firms? Most already have the building blocks needed to innovate on their operating model for the AI era. Rok Popov Ledinski explains why. Rok is a developer turned strategic thinker and tech implementor for law firms. So I put on my BigLaw hat and ask him to walk me through the steps of planning, deploying, and driving adoption of technology in a business of law.  Quick botto...

I confess I didn't fully "get it" about Claude Code-Cowork-Skills-Plugins until legal engineer Antoine Louis explained it on this episode. It is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand why it all means that we are crossing the Rubicon in AI for lawyers. An engineer by trade and a researcher by training, Antoine provides just the right level of detail needed to understand why the last few...

Joined by Kevin Keller. Kevin has done it all -- from product counsel to General Counsel, developer to inventor, from advisor to investor. And he's done it through the formative years of the internet era. The secret to his success? I doubt it can be summed up in one sentence, but one thing that stood out to me is how Kevin has continually invested in himself by developing the skills that position...

I talk to Matt Pollins, a former BigLaw partner turned LegalTech founder. Matt spent many years practicing tech law before transitioning to building LegalTech products. Matt and I talk lawyer-to-lawyer about the practical implications of agentic AI on the practice and business of law. We also explore what it means in the market for legal software when lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal depart...

What does innovation at a law firm look like? How do you match client/lawyer needs to the internal resources that can address them? I explore this with Benjamin Llinas, Matter Optimization Manager at Linklaters, a global law firm. Ben is that unicorn in the law firm org structure sitting at the intersection of supporting lawyers, servicing clients, and deploying technology. His work is part art, p...

I talk with Gwendolyn Lindsay Cooley, founder of Taimet, about productized AI solutions for lawyers, by lawyers. Her product seeks to solve a specific problem set that comes up in the day-to-day practice of every antitrust deal lawyer: screening M&A transactions for regulatory risk. We talk about how she came up with her solution, how it works, and what it means for lawyers and the clients the...

I talk with Daniel Schwarz, co-founder of CompetitionAI, about bespoke AI tools for subject matter experts. We discuss what it means to build AI tools tailored to the specific needs of lawyers practicing in a specific area of law. We also explore what AI means for law firms, the lawyers working in them, and the law students aspiring to enter the profession.  

The AI Legal revolution is already here.  That’s the bottom line from my conversation with LegalTech thought leader, educator, and founder, Thomas G. Martin.  It’s no longer just about using tools to be more productive. What we’re looking at is a transformation of what a “legal service provider” is. Tom’s theory is that every law firm is now a software company. Whether or not you agree with the ul...

Alex Baker, founder of Legal Tech Collective, comes on to talk about how practicing lawyers can leverage their know-how and experience to develop and productize LegalTech solutions. Whether its internal solutions to streamline your practice or client-facing tools that improve how you offer legal services, lawyers who think like LegalTech founders can position themselves and their practices to out-...

I'm joined by LegalTech consultant Emma Kelly (quadK) to discuss law firm deployment of technology. We talk about what an "AI law firm" might look like and mean for corporate clients, small businesses, and even individuals seeking legal services. Along the way, we explore the evolution of AI and machine learning from its e-discovery roots to prospects for practice-specific end-to-end digital platf...

Legal practitioners and legal ops professionals play complementary roles that, combined, are critical to the successful deployment of LegalTech solutions at a corporate. I sit down with Michiel Ypma, Group Head of Legal Operations and Finance at ABB, to talk about the role of Legal Ops in helping lawyers identify the problems that need solving, finding the right solutions, securing internal buy-in...

I'm joined by Devon Willitts, Legal Engineering Lead at Robin AI. We talk LegalTech deployment at large corporates, covering the evolution of AI/ML, use cases for contract analysis, measuring the effectiveness of tech tools, and successful user adoption in-house.