LawNext

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...

The legal marketplace Priori Legal today announced a $6.3 million Series A financing, with existing investors joined by several legal industry heavyweights. In this special edition of LawNext, the company's founders Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the implications of this news for their company and for the legal services market.  Rubin, Priori's CEO, and Levitt, its c...

Nicole N. Morris is a professor in practice at Emory University School of Law and director of the TI:GER program (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), an innovative partnership between Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology that brings together graduate students in law, business, science and engineering to work on ways to take innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace....

A solo serving the Hispanic community in St. Paul, Minn., Inti Martinez-Alemán knew from the day he opened his Ceiba Forte Law Firm that he wanted to take a creative approach to client service.  It starts from the moment clients first arrive for a consultation, when he offers a drink menu and then asks them to pick a story card that best depicts how they are feeling. It continues through his use o...

In September, Rocket Lawyer became the first national company approved to participate in Utah's regulatory sandbox, a pilot program for licensing new and alternative forms of legal providers and services. For Charley Moore , who founded Rocket Lawyer in 2008, it was yet another step in his quest to deliver high-value legal services at an affordable price.  A former U.S. Naval officer who served in...

After much speculation about the future of Legalweek – one of the world's largest and most-anticipated legal technology and legal business conferences – the conference's organizers announced on Oct. 1 that it will be virtual in 2021.  ALM Media, which produces Legalweek, said the conference will be rebranded as Legalweek( year ) and will be extended into a full year of events, leading up to a resu...

Sept. 30, 2020, was Josh Becker's last day in legal tech, at least for the time being, as he pursues his campaign for election to the California state Senate in the district that encompasses Silicon Valley cities such as Palo Alto, Mountain View and Menlo Park.    Most recently, Becker was chairman of the trailblazing legal analytics company Lex Machina and head of legal analytics at LexisNexis, w...

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the Oct. 1, 2020, launch of LexFusion , we get a first look at the new company from guests Joe Borstein , a legal industry veteran and one of LexFusion's two cofounders, and Basha Rubin , the cofounder and CEO of Priori Legal , the legal talent company that is one of the initial participants in the LexFusion collaborative.  LexFusion's mis...

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the announcement of ASG LegalTech's acquisition of electronic payments company Headnote, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with the two companies' CEOs: Soumya Nettimi of ASG LegalTech and Sarah Schaaf of Headnote, on the reasons for the deal and the significance for customers.  On Sept. 22, 2020, ASG LegalTech, the company that owns cloud practice...

Nicola Shaver , managing director, innovation and knowledge, at the law firm Paul Hastings , was recently named 2020 Innovative Leader of the Year in the International Legal Technology Association's Distinguished Peer Awards. Not only that, but the law firm where she oversees innovation initiatives was named Innovator of the Year.  While a major honor for anyone in the field of law firm innovation...

In 2006, inspired by the success of business process outsourcing company Office Tiger, which RR Donnelley acquired that year for $250 million, Ajay Agrawal and Daniel Reed founded UnitedLex, one of the earliest legal process outsourcing companies. Within months, it was providing legal services to clients such as HP, IBM and Microsoft. Within four years, the company had achieved a valuation of $100...