LawNext

A new $110 million Series E financing round for legal technology company Clio puts its valuation at $1.6 billion, making it the first law practice management company to achieve unicorn status and one of just a few legal tech companies to pass that milestone.  In an exclusive LawNext interview, Jack Newton, Clio's cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss this news and what it means for...

Possibly the hottest market in legal tech today is contract lifecycle management, and one of the most talked-about companies in that market is Ironclad , a six-year-old startup that recently raised a $100 million Series D – at a reported valuation of $1 billion – and that just made its first acquisition, of the clickwrap transaction platform PactSafe.  What makes Ironclad different than other CLM...

Throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, Holger Zscheyge is widely regarded as a leading authority on legal technology and innovation. President of the European Legal Technology Association , he is also founder and managing director of Infotropic Media , a Moscow-based legal publisher and producer of legal technology conferences, and a cofounder of Moscow Legal Hackers.  Zscheyge was a guest on LawNe...

It was recently announced that Andrew Ballheimer , who retired last October as global managing partner at Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy , one of the largest law firms in the world, has joined the board of directors of the managed services company Factor , which spun off in 2019 from the alternative legal services provider Axiom.   Some are saying the move represents a bridge between traditio...

Jeffrey Marple , who has gained a national reputation for law department innovation in his role as director of innovation for corporate legal at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, has moved to Keesal Propulsion Labs , a company that assists Fortune 500 law departments in automating their business and legal processes, where has taken the position of director of digital transformation strategy. In an...

Gordon Smith has just been appointed to a second five-year term as dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. Two years after becoming dean in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors , "I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country." As we recounted when Smith was first o...

No sector of the legal technology market is hotter right now than contract lifecycle management. And while that sector is crowded with companies that are relative newcomers, one of the companies making the biggest waves is 30 years old.  Over the past year, Agiloft , the no-code CLM company, raised $45 million in growth equity funding – its first outside funding ever – named a new CEO and manageme...

You have just been named global chief innovation officer for one of the world's largest law firms. Where and how do you start? That is one of the questions we put to Amol Bargaje , whom Mayer Brown named to that position on Feb. 9, 2021. Coming into this newly created role, Bargaje has plenty of experience on which to draw. He has been at Mayer Brown since 2018 as global director of IT Practice an...

Contract lifecycle management has become one of the hottest sectors of legal tech in recent years, and within that sector, Evisort , founded in 2016, has become one of the hottest companies, experiencing four-times revenue growth in 2020 and having just completed a $35 million Series B funding round, for total funding of $55 million. But Evisort cofounder and CEO Jerry Ting sees his company's AI-d...

In January 2020, Axiom Managed Services, one of two companies spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, rebranded as Factor , a move the company characterized as a relaunch, and named a new CEO , Varun Mehta , a veteran of the legal tech industry who had previously helped found the e-discovery managed services firm The Clutch Group. It has been a year of challenges and oppor...

Have you ever wanted to found a tech company but needed the right idea? A California company called LaunchFactory has the ideas and is looking for founders to take them on – including in the legal tech space. The company takes a decidedly unique path to launching companies. Rather than invest in existing startups, it identifies and vets startup ideas and then recruits entrepreneurs to launch them....

Barely six months into his new position as senior vice president and general counsel for The Coca-Cola Company, Bradley M. Gayton has taken dramatic action to increase diversity and inclusion among the company's outside counsel, telling firms that they must meet minimum diversity commitments or face consequences ranging from fee reductions to outright firing.  While even he describes this as a bol...

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Kira Systems , the first company to develop AI-powered contract analysis, technology that is now becoming commonplace in the legal profession. To mark the anniversary, Kira's cofounders are releasing a book, AI For Lawyers: How Artificial Intelligence is Adding Value, Amplifying Expertise, and Transforming Careers . When CEO Noah Waisberg , a former lawyer,...

As we begin to look ahead to a post-pandemic world, what will the legal market look like in 2021 and beyond? Has the pandemic's impact on law firms resulted in a tipping point that will forever alter law firms and the business of law? A report by the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Institute , 2021 Report on the State of the Leg...

Legal technology company AltaClaro describes itself as "rocket fuel for legal skills training. It uses a unique experiential framework based on education science, with mock transactions and live feedback, all done online. Our guest this week on LawNext is AltaClaro's founder and CEO Abdi Shayesteh, who says he first developed his entrepreneurial bent as an 11-year-old Iranian immigrant helping his...

Just a few days into 2021 came news that could end up being one of the biggest legal technology stories of the year. On Jan. 5, two leading legal research companies, Casemaker and Fastcase – two companies that have been rivals for as long as they've been in business – announced their merger.  The combined company, which will operate under the Fastcase name, has a subscriber base estimated to be mo...

ASG LegalTech, a portfolio company composed of four leading legal practice products — PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and Headnote — has introduced a new brand for itself, Paradigm , to better represent how the company views itself, its customers and its plans for moving forward. In this special episode of LawNext recorded in advance of the announcement, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the rebran...

Twenty-five years ago, in the still-fledgling days of the web, the husband-and-wife team of Tim Stanley and Stacy Stern founded FindLaw and quickly developed it into the most highly trafficked legal site on the internet. In 2001, they sold FindLaw to the West Group, and two years later, they founded Justia , repeating their earlier success and then some with what is now one of the most popular leg...

Jules Miller knows what it is to be a legal tech entrepreneur. She is a three-time founder, twice of legal tech companies: Hire an Esquire in 2012 and Evolve Law in 2015. Now a partner in venture capital firm Mindset Ventures , she is leading her firm's expansion into legal tech investing, most recently with the Series A financing of legal marketplace Priori Legal .  On this episode of LawNext, Mi...

Dan Broderick believes businesses waste billions in repetitive work reviewing and negotiating semantically similar contracts. As a former lawyer, he saw the problem first-hand. It led him to found BlackBoiler , whose AI-based technology automates the review and mark-up of inbound contracts right in Word's Track Changes.  This week, BlackBoiler announced two new U.S. patents for its contract review...

Andrew Perlman is one of the nation's leading forces helping to establish the future of legal education and legal practice.  As a professor and now dean at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, he has helped drive the creation and development of programs for teaching about legal innovation and technology. He was founding director of Suffolk's Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology and its...

After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building, sold last year to OpenText for $75 million, John Tredennick was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings — Merlin Digital Magic , a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and...

To say that Stevie Ghiassi is a busy man is an understatement. In addition to founding Legaler , a secure video meeting platform for lawyers, the Australia-born entrepreneur is the founder of the recently launched Legaler Aid , a charity to support social justice legal cases worldwide, and founder of the Global Legal Tech Report , which will release its final report in December after nearly a year...

A recent report from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation's legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a 2018 paper published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review that documented these legal deserts and rural America's increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis.  Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper, Lau...

The practice management company Clio recently released its annual Legal Trends Report , based on analysis of data from tens of thousands of legal professionals and surveys of legal professionals and legal consumers, and it showed that the coronavirus crisis has resulted in a decided shift in legal practice , away from bricks-and-mortar offices and towards cloud-based technologies and virtual deliv...