LawNext

Kimberly Y. Bennett describes herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, legal industry disruptor, and business coach who happens to be a lawyer. Nowhere are all those facets more evident than in the way she has structured her law practice, K Bennett Law , where she focuses on brand protection and growth strategy. Soon after starting her own practice, which is entirely virtual, she decided there had t...

It should have come as no surprise when California attorney Erin Levine recently announced her plan to go nationwide with her do-it-yourself divorce platform Hello Divorce . After all, the site has been seeing rapid growth and has earned Levine broad accolades, including the 2020 James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering from the American Bar Association and the 2019 Reisman Award...

Touting it as the next phase in its global expansion to transform the business of law, Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has launched its Legal Business Services practice in the United States, which it describes as "a comprehensive suite of legal management consulting and technologically-enabled legal managed services for corporate legal departments designed to accelerate the transforma...

Here's one that gets a bit meta. Back in November 2017, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi spoke at BYU Law School about a lawyer's ethical duty to be technologically competent. The talk prompted the school to explore ways it could help students improve their technological abilities. What resulted was the school's Legal Technology Initiative, a multi-pronged program to provide law students with technology t...

In 2015, the husband-and-wife team of James Jones Jr. and Kristina Jones founded Court Buddy , a service that matches consumers with vetted lawyers at affordable prices. Last November, the couple stepped aside from the business to pursue other interests. In their time running the company, they had raised $7.1 million and won numerous awards and honors.  Achieving success as a legal tech startup is...

Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur is one of the world's leading scholars on access to justice. Professor at the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, she is also a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative. In 2018, she was named a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" for her work promoting...

At BYU Law in Provo, Utah, a first-of-its-kind technology platform is enabling legal researchers to explore the meanings of legal words and phrases by examining the contexts in which they historically were used. The Law and Corpus Linguistics platform enables users to examine large collections of historical texts to help determine, for example, what early drafters meant by a phrase such as "bear a...

LinkSquares , the Boston-based provider of AI-powered contract management and analysis technology for corporate legal departments, announced a major new product this week. Called LinkSquares Finalize, it extends the company's technology into the pre-signature stage, helping its customers create and approve contracts more quickly and efficiently.  This news comes just three months after LinkSquares...

Today on LawNext: A coronavirus success story – how a state bar, anticipating a tidal wave of unemployment claims, partnered with two legaltech companies to launch a pro bono portal in barely more than a week.  On April 27, 2020, the New York State Bar Association launched a website devoted to helping those who need unemployment assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The site provides assistance...

Mark Harris is sounding an alarm – or, as he puts it, staging an intervention – for corporate counsel.  Harris and Alec Guettel , the original founders 20 years ago of alternative legal services provider Axiom and, since last year, the CEO and CFO of contract management company Knowable , have taken the unusual step of posting an open letter that they describe as an unsolicited intervention for ge...

Virtually overnight, COVID-19 changed the landscape for law firms and how they serve clients. While some firms were caught unprepared – struggling to adapt to a remote work environment and lacking the technologies and procedures to ensure seamless client service and team performance – other firms made the pivot quickly. What gave these successful firms the edge?  In this episode, which was recorde...

The coronavirus crisis has created turmoil for legal education and bar admissions, as law schools have shut down their campuses and states have put off bar exams. One proposal, advocated by Jennifer L. Mnookin , dean of UCLA Law School , and Erwin Chemerinsky , dean of UC Berkeley Law School , in The National Law Journal , is for states to provisionally license law school graduates for two years,...

As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself.  Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduli...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced legal professionals to work remotely, many are scrambling to find the best tools and technology to help them manage their legal matters and continue to closely collaborate with their colleagues. While many law firms already use Microsoft Office 365 , fewer are as familiar with its core collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams .   Our guests for this episode of LawNex...

Ever since the publication of his seminal 1996 book, The Future of Law , Richard Susskind has remained the world's most-recognized and most-respected speaker and author on the future of legal services. But even he could not have foreseen the sudden relevance of his latest book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice .  On this episode of LawNext, Susskind joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation...

David Lat defied the popular conception of who should be hit with a serious case of COVID-19. Just 44 years old, a two-time marathoner, with a young family and a successful career as a legal recruiter and journalist, and best known as the founder of the blog Above the Law , he did not fit the mold of a person at high risk.  But what started early in March as fever and chills eventually led to 17 d...

In Australia, as elsewhere, COVID-19 is creating a surge in the demand for legal help, especially among low-income individuals, as people face job losses, evictions, bankruptcy, domestic violence, and end-of-life issues. Further complicating the situation there is that parts of the country are still recovering from the bush fires that only recently were extinguished. With face-to-face legal help n...

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled any sense of business as usual last week, the document-automation company Litera seemed to stay a step ahead, becoming one of the first major legal technology companies to take steps to continue operations , quickly pivoting to develop a lite version of its deal-management platform to offer for free , and completing the notable acquisition of Best Authority...

On Monday, March 23, the practice management company Clio announced that it was committing $1 million to a disaster relief fund to help the legal community successfully navigate the challenges and hurdles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. "We want to ensure lawyers are set up to succeed as well as ensuring their their clients can continue to get the legal help they need," Jack Newton , the comp...

On Thursday, March 12, facing the escalating threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Brigham Young University Law School made the decision to close down live classes, send students home, and teach the remainder of the semester online.  As it happened, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the law school that day, where he was scheduled to interview the school's head of infrastructure and technology, David A...

At ABA TECHSHOW 2020, Vicki Huff Eckert , U.S. and global new ventures and innovation leader at PwC , was the featured speaker at the Rebels Riot Luncheon, an event honoring the Legal Technology Resource Center's 2020 Women of Legal Tech and the ABA Journal's Legal Rebels.  Shortly after the luncheon, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Eckert for a live conversation to discuss innovation in pr...

When Jerry Levine became general counsel of IPsoft in December 2015, the artificial intelligence company had been in business since 1998, but it had never had an inhouse lawyer. That meant Levine had the daunting task of creating a legal department from scratch, within an established company that had customers worldwide.  More than four years later, Levine has built an international team of inhous...

The growing use of legal analytics is rapidly transforming the practice of law. Within law firms, analytics drive litigation strategy, business development efforts, and hiring decisions. Within corporate legal departments, analytics drive outside counsel hiring and internal business operations.  In a special episode of LawNext recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City, we bring together...

As corporate legal departments seek to control costs and drive innovation, how can better use of data, metrics and analytics help? How are corporate counsel using analytics to measure and improve performance internally and among outside counsel? These questions were the topic of a special episode of LawNext, recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City with a panel of four corporate counse...

In the legal industry, the concept of design thinking has become synonymous with the name Margaret Hagan . Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School's Center on the Legal Profession , she is also a lecturer at the Stanford d.school , a ubiquitous speaker at legal conferences worldwide, and a leading advocate for making the law more accessible. After graduating from Stanford Law in 20...