LawNext

"We are not your grandfather's law librarian." As president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Femi Cadmus makes that point emphatically. Her organization recently completed it first-ever AALL State of the Profession report, an in-depth look at what information professionals do and how they do it. The report's bottom line is that technology is making the role of the law librarian more d...

Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and ter...

A lawyer, economist and scholar, Gillian K. Hadfield has devoted much of her career to studying how legal systems can be improved to ensure they meet the needs of the people they are meant to serve. In her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy , she argues that the complexity of today's global, digital economy has pushed law to it...

This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams , author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting .   On this episode of LawNext, Adam...

A tremor rolled through the legal industry recently when Thomson Reuters announced that it had sold its managed services business , Pangea3, to global Big Four professional services firm Ernst & Young, a sign of Ernst & Young's increasing expansion into legal services. On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with two of the leaders of Pangea3, Joe Borstein, global director at Pangea3,...

"Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone," says Andy Wilson , cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull . "We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth." Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-p...

Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium's lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even inc...

Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin , helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice. Paladin has attracted some notable investors, includi...

Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting. This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings' legal innovation hub, LexLab . The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some...

Everlaw is an e-discovery company that has attracted the interest of some big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms, raising nearly $35 million in the last three years. It was the first legal technology company to receive an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a firm known for backing a wide-ranging portfolio of successful companies such as Facebook Twitter, Airbnb, Box, Skype and Slack. Its...

In February, Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini announced the launch of SixFifty , a software subsidiary that will develop automated tools designed to make legal processes more efficient and affordable for individuals, small businesses and emerging companies. Named president of SixFifty was Kimball Dean Parker , the lawyer who helped develop the innovative LawX design lab at BYU Law School. On...

Gordon Smith , dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, once said : "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." Since becoming dean in 2016, Smith has worked tirelessly to make that happen, launching the nationally recognized LawX legal design lab, developing courses to tea...

On Feb. 27, 2019, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition , moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite. In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording of the live event. Listen as th...

In January, the world's largest law firm, Baker McKenzie , announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty , to help the firm "enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients." They join a team led by David Cambria , who last year left Fortune 50 company Archer Daniels Midland to become the firm's global director of legal op...

For some two decades, Mark Chandler has been a leading voice for innovation and technology in the operation of legal departments and the delivery of legal services. Executive vice president and chief legal officer at technology giant Cisco, he has been the company's top lawyer since 2001 and a member of its legal department since 1996, when Cisco acquired Stratacom, where he had been general couns...

We thought 2018 was a banner year for investment in legal technology companies. But then, less than two weeks into 2019, the year got off to a roaring start with news of a $200 million strategic investment in Onit , a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process automation. To discuss one of the largest investments ever i...

Mark A. Cohen has long been ahead of the curve. After 25 years as an accomplished trial lawyer, he founded one of the first legal process outsourcing companies and then cofounded Clearspire, the groundbreaking two-company law firm and service provider that became the blueprint for a new generation of innovative legal services providers. Now, Cohen puts his experience to work as a legal business co...

What do you get if you combine a virtual receptionist service with artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert: The answer is not robots answering the phone. Rather, the folks at Smith.ai say the combination results in a superior receptionist service for both live calls and website chat. By incorporating AI, they say, their service continually gets smarter as it comes to know your practice and your cli...

With Judicata , Itai Gurari believes he has built a better legal research platform. A lawyer and computer scientist, his approach to designing a legal research engine was to first "map the legal genome" -- that is, map the law with extreme accuracy and granularity. The result is a research engine that returns the best results the fastest, he says. Gurari and his company also built Clerk , a tool t...

Our guest this week on LawNext is Daniel B. Rodriguez , who recently stepped down as dean of Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law , where he gained wide recognition for his work to innovate legal education, and recently stepped up to become chair of the governing council of the ABA Center for Innovation , which focuses on improving the affordability, effectiveness, efficiency, and acce...

In major legal industry news, global law company Elevate announced its acquisition of the legal AI technology and consulting firm LexPredict . The move combines the comprehensive legal services offering of Elevate with the data science team and AI engine of LexPredict. With Elevate's alternative services model and LexPredict's cutting-edge technology, does this acquisition foreshadow the future of...

Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman , CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we're on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements. Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the launch of the Agreements Network , which he describes as the...

In this special bonus episode of LawNext, we bring you a panel discussion on savvy podcasting for lawyers. Recently, at the 2018 Northeast Regional Conference of the Legal Marketing Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi joined a panel of legal marketing and media experts to discuss podcasting for lawyers and law firms. The panelists shared their tips and experiences on starting, producing and prom...

In this episode of LawNext, we take you live to Russia, where we interview two of the leading experts on Russian legal technology to get their insights and perspectives on the state of innovation and development there. What they say may surprise you. Host Bob Ambrogi recently visited Moscow as the keynote speaker at the Skolkovo LegalTech conference. While there, he recorded these two interviews o...

When Alvin Tedjamulia cofounded NetDocuments in 1998 as the first cloud-based platform for document and email management, few lawyers had any concept of what it meant to work in the cloud. Today, NetDocuments has grown to become one of the leading DMS systems in legal, counting some of the world's leading law firms and corporations as its customers. Now chief technology officer at NetDocuments, Te...