LawDroid Manifesto Podcast

Tifiny Swedensky spent years inside the Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing world before founding Sharp Cookie, the fractional CMO practice she runs today for law firms. In this episode of LawDroid Manifesto, she explains why marketing needs an owner, not just a plan, and why the tools promising to replace that owner keep handing firms a to-do list without ever doing the work. Drawing on the Doorm...

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋I’m excited to share with you the 77th episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one! If you want to understand what it actually looks like to build a long-term creative partnership with an AI, and why that might matter for the future of lega...

Will Chen left a Latham & Watkins associate role to follow his interest in code, and ended up building Mike OSS, an open source tool that does much of what firms pay millions for. In this episode he tells Tom Martin how a glance at his friends' screens convinced him that premium legal AI was far simpler than advertised, why he chose to open source it, and how the launch drew millions of impression...

Search is changing faster than at any point in its history, and most lawyers are betting everything on the one channel that's shifting beneath them. In this episode of LawDroid Manifesto, Tom Martin sits down with Gyi Tsakalakis, Co-founder and President of AttorneySync, to unpack what AI overviews and AI mode really mean for law firm marketing. Gyi's counsel is refreshingly grounded: stop overrel...

Claire Robinson, Chief Product Officer at Upsolve, started her career as a paralegal—answering thousands of questions from low-income Americans navigating bankruptcy. That firsthand experience became the blueprint for Upsolve's AI Paralegal: a context-aware assistant embedded inside the app that guides users through one of the most stressful legal processes of their lives. The tool proved so effec...

Beau Atkins, CEO of Evolve Family Law — Canada's first national family law firm — nearly left the legal profession before deciding to rebuild it from scratch. In this episode, Beau explains how lessons from construction work, behavioral economics, and a philosophy background led him to eliminate the billable hour, apply nudge theory to divorce proceedings, and build a firm designed from day one fo...

Does using AI make you a worse lawyer? Professor Daniel Schwarcz of the University of Minnesota ran the first randomized controlled trial to find out—and the results surprised even him. In this episode, Daniel breaks down his landmark empirical study of 100 law students, explains what his data actually says about AI and legal reasoning, and brings the rigorous grounding that the AI conversation de...

Ron Flagg, President of the Legal Services Corporation, joins Tom Martin for a keynote and fireside chat recorded at the LawDroid AI Conference 2026. Ron makes the case that closing the justice gap — where 92% of the civil legal needs of people in poverty go unmet — requires more than funding or technology alone. It requires a community of innovators building together, intentionally. He shares how...

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋 I’m excited to share with you the 70th episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one! If you want to understand how AI is reshaping the future of dispute resolution and why lawyers must be part of building that future, you need to listen to...

Fresh from the LawDroid AI Conference 2026, this episode features Nikki Shaver's landmark keynote on the true state of legal AI. As founder of Legal Tech Hub, Nikki tracks every generative AI solution in the legal market and advises law firms, corporate legal departments, and investors around the globe. Her keynote delivers a data-grounded picture of a market that is not slowing down—and a clear-e...

Jonathan Petts, co-founder and CEO of Upsolve, has spent a decade building a nonprofit TurboTax for bankruptcy that has helped tens of thousands of low-income Americans find a fresh financial start. In this episode, Jonathan traces his path from a Brooklyn bankruptcy court clerk's office to Y Combinator, sharing how Upsolve's AI Paralegal now enables paralegals to serve four times as many people w...

David Colarusso—physicist, Fulbright teacher, public defender, data scientist, and co-director of Suffolk Law's LIT Lab—joins Tom Martin for a conversation about what it really takes to prepare lawyers for an AI-driven world. David shares his extraordinary career journey and walks us through a classroom simulation that reveals how quickly lawyers fall into automation bias: trusting AI tools so com...

Sam Harden taught himself to code as a criminal defense lawyer because he saw a problem no one else was solving: people missing court dates they never knew about, setting off a spiral of warrants, job loss, and eviction. That tool became the foundation of a career at the intersection of law, technology, and justice. Now an Innovation Strategist at Affinity Consulting Group, Sam shares his vision o...

What does it mean to work with AI consciously—and why does it matter for lawyers? In this episode, Tom Martin interviews Mia Ihamuotila, Legal Tech & Design Lawyer at Castrén & Snellman and Chair of the Legal Design Summit, about her human-centered approach to legal AI transformation. Mia shares how she helps lawyers and clients expand their skill sets, adopt process thinking, and engage with AI a...

Edward Bukstel built one of the first networked electronic health records in 1987, fought a pharmaceutical giant over stolen software, and is now applying that same builder's instinct to legal client acquisition. As CEO of Giupedi, Edward has the data: AI overviews are capturing 56% of clicks that used to go to law firm websites, while 40% of people who ask ChatGPT for a lawyer will act on its rec...

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋 I’m excited to share with you the 63rd episode of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one! If you want to understand how technology can be used as a force for access to justice, and what it really takes to build a mission-driven legal tech nonpro...

What happens when a legal entrepreneur dares to turn his ship? In Episode 62 of LawDroid Manifesto, Tom Martin sits down with David Schnurman—CEO of LawLine and author of the Amazon bestseller 11 Suitcases —to explore how courage, vision, and intentional family values transformed his life and his business. From rebuilding LawLine from scratch to uprooting his family for two years in Barcelona, Dav...

Zack Shapiro's article on building a Claude-Native Law Firm reached over 7.5 million views—and in this episode, he explains exactly how he did it. As founder of Raines LLP, Zack runs a two-person firm serving 200 startups using custom AI skills and agentic workflows, not expensive legal tools. His core insight: the secret to great AI output is the quality of your input, and lawyers are uniquely po...

Kristen Sonday, co-founder and CEO of Paladin, has built the infrastructure the pro bono world always needed. In this episode, she shares her journey from the U.S. Department of Justice to founding the country's leading pro bono management platform—one that has facilitated over 55,000 connections between people in need and the attorneys who can help them. Kristen unpacks the professionalization of...

After 35 years in corporate law—including 27 as Managing Director and Associate General Counsel at Bank of America—Robert Dilworth didn't retire. He reinvented. Now Executive Director of the Digital Leaders Exchange at the Liquid Legal Institute and Honorary Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, Robert shares how the pandemic sparked a complete reimagining of his purpose, why legal innovation...

In this episode of the LawDroid Manifesto, I interview Kenton Brice, Senior Manager of Academic Partnerships at Clio and Adjunct Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Kenton shares his remarkable journey from theology doctoral studies to becoming a pioneering voice in legal technology education over the past decade. What makes Kenton's perspective unique is his "eternal mindset"...

Tara Waters, founder of TLW Consulting and author of Innovation Esquire, shares her journey from dot-com consultancy to becoming a leading legal innovation strategist based in London. In this conversation, Tara reveals how UK law firms are finally viewing AI as genuine opportunity rather than threat, though they're still searching for the right implementation path. As one of the first to implement...

In this episode of LawDroid Manifesto, I interview Ari Kaplan, principal of Ari Kaplan Advisors and one of legal technology's most prolific community builders. With over 1,000 podcast episodes and three decades of connecting people in the legal tech space, Ari shares the personal practices and professional strategies that have sustained his remarkable career. Ari reveals his 30-year journal tradit...

In this episode, I interview Joey Gartner, Director and Counsel at the ABA Center for Innovation, about his journey from legal aid attorney to helping guide the legal profession through AI transformation. Joey shares insights from the ABA's comprehensive two-year AI Task Force study and discusses practical resources the Center has developed to help lawyers understand and implement new technologies...

Hey there Legal Rebels! 👋 I’m excited to share with you the 54th episode of the 2026 season of the LawDroid Manifesto podcast, where I will be continuing to interview key legal innovators to learn how they do what they do. I think you’re going to enjoy this one! If you want to understand how AI can democratize access to justice through radical transparency and community-driven innovation, you nee...