LawNext

Nearly two years ago on this podcast , we discussed the American Arbitration Association's innovation initiatives – and specifically its embrace of generative AI – with Bridget Mary McCormack , who became its president and CEO in 2023 after having been chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and Diana Didia , its chief information and innovation officer. On today's episode, McCormack and Didi...

With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need. But what if the solution is not just about providing more legal services — what if it lies in fundamentally rethinking who can provide legal help? In today's episode, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two of th...

As Leslie Witt took to the stage Sept. 3 to deliver the keynote at Kaleidoscope, 8am's inaugural customer conference, it was the culmination of a whirlwind summer. It had been just four months since she had joined the company formerly known as AffiniPay as chief product officer, responsible for leading product transformation and strategy for established legal tech brands LawPay, MyCase, CASEpeer a...

Daniel Lewis has witnessed legal technology's evolution from multiple vantage points that few others can claim. As a Stanford law student in 2012, he and classmate Nik Reed co-founded the legal research startup Ravel Law with the audacious goal of taking on LexisNexis and Westlaw using machine learning and data analytics – at a time when such challengers were few and far between. Not only was Rave...

The e-discovery company Reveal Data recently announced that it will launch its new generative AI-powered document review platform, called "aji," in late September. Notably, the company said it is offering full access to the platform at no cost through Dec. 31, in order to enable "the entire legal community to explore and master the next era in GenAI review innovation."   To discuss the launch of a...

This year's ILTACON, which starts later this week, marks the second anniversary of Harbor , a global expert services company formed through the merger of three long-established legal consulting firms: HBR Consulting, LAC Group, and Wilson Allen, and that formally launched at ILTACON in 2023.    The company, which counts among its clients some 80% of the 200 largest global law firms and 50% of the...

What happens when a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer, tired of copying and pasting contract language, starts reading about self-driving cars? In Shashank Bijapur's case, it sparked the creation of SpotDraft , a contract lifecycle management company that just raised $54 million in Series B funding and that counts major companies such as Airbnb among its customers. In this episode of LawNext, host B...

If generative AI was the biggest story in legal tech in 2023 and 2024, agentic AI is proving to be the most talked-about topic of 2025. Spurring this, at least in part, has been Thomson Reuters' announcement of its forthcoming release of a new agentic version of CoCounsel, its AI legal assistant, that will be able to plan, reason and execute complex multi-step workflows for legal professionals. On...

When legal research giant LexisNexis and legal AI giant Harvey announced a strategic alliance last month , legal tech commentator Richard Tromans called it "possibly the most important legal tech move in a decade." On today's episode of LawNext, we go deep into the partnership and its implications with Sean Fitzpatrick , CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland.  Through the partnership, Lexi...

Supio , an AI-driven platform developed specifically for personal injury lawyers, has been generating a lot of buzz. On the heels of reporting record growth last year and raising $25 million in Series A funding in October, last month it raised another $60 million in a Series B round. But what do the lawyers who use the platform think of it? On today's LawNext, we hear from one of those lawyers, as...

When Chris Cartrett was named CEO of legal technology company Aderant in 2022, he did so with the mission of aggressively advancing a cloud-first strategy throughout the company's suite of business and financial software for law firms. Given that Aderant is a nearly 50-year-old company with many customers who still use the on-premises version of its software, that was not an easy mission to fulfil...

What happens when a CEO steps away from a legal tech company just before the generative AI revolution explodes, then returns two years later amid a landscape that is being dramatically transformed? For Litera's Avaneesh Marwaha , that is exactly what happened.  As the CEO of Litera from 2016 to 2022, Marwaha led the legal tech company through a remarkable period of expansion and diversification, i...

Cornell Winston , president of the American Association of Law Libraries , brings a unique perspective to law librarianship, having spent 45 years in libraries across diverse settings — from a hospital library where he started as a student worker; to the former Whittier Law School; to prominent law firms Munger, Tolles & Olson and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; and, for the last 24 years, as law...

Monica Zent is a true pioneer in legal innovation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of ZentLaw, an award-winning alternative legal services provider that broke the traditional law firm mold when she founded it in 2002. ZentLaw has since grown into a nationwide legal services provider, serving global brands and major corporations with a unique subscription-based model and flexible talent app...

On May 5, 2025, PERSUIT , a technology company that specializes in helping corporate legal departments select and manage outside counsel, announced that it had acquired Apperio , a spend-management platform for corporate legal, in a move designed to create an end-to-end workflow solution spanning everything from matter intake to invoice payment.   "This acquisition accelerates our ability to conne...

"Everybody understands the world is volatile, but they don't necessarily understand why it's volatile or how to deal with it," says Sean West, cofounder of Hence Technologies and author of the new book, Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business . "Unruly is a play on words. ... The world is kind of 'unruling.' The rules and norms that were developed during global...

LawDroid Founder Tom Martin on Building, Teaching and Advising About AI for Legal If you follow legal tech at all, you would be justified in suspecting that Tom Martin has figured out how to use artificial intelligence to clone himself.  While running LawDroid , his legal tech company, the Vancouver-based Martin also still manages a law practice in California, oversees an annual legal tech awards...

In the gold rush of generative AI, it seems that every legal tech vendor wants to be a one-stop shop for legal technology. But after 15 years of developing legal tech, Nik Reed , CEO of Knowable , a legal technology company devoted to helping enterprises bring order and organization to their executed agreements, believes that lawyers should be wary of the hype. Often, the most successful AI soluti...

In January, a merciless firestorm swept through the Pacific Palisades and surrounding areas of Los Angeles, becoming the most destructive wildfire in the city's history. Driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and fueled by record-dry conditions, the Palisades Fire destroyed over 6,800 structures, burned nearly 24,000 acres, and dramatically altered the lives of thousands of residents. Among the...

As reported yesterday in an exclusive at LawSites blog, two leading international legal transformation organizations, the Digital Legal Exchange (DLEx) and the Liquid Legal Institute (LLI), have joined forces in a strategic union that brings together more than 1,500 members representing more than 140 multinational corporations, organizations, institutions and agencies across more than 20 countries...

"The landscape we all stand on is shifting, and massive amounts of change are upon us," Phil Saunders , the chief executive officer of e-discovery and legal technology giant Relativity , recently wrote in a post on the company's blog . Driving that change are three transformative forces, he wrote: new legal data challenges, advancing generative AI, and legal's journey to the cloud.  On this episod...

Recently, legal technology company SurePoint Technologies acquired the legal practice management company ZenCase in a strategic move aimed at enhancing SurePoint's practice management offerings for mid-sized law firms. In this episode of LawNext, Eric Thurston , who recently marked his two-year anniversary as CEO of SurePoint Technologies, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the acquisition and shar...

On this week's show: LawNext takes you to the movies. Well, to a specific movie, anyway – a documentary being made to raise public awareness and understanding of the access to justice crisis in this country.  Today's guests are the film's director, documentary filmmaker Laura Hand , who previously directed The Tent Mender, about homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and Maya Markovich , a legal...

After building his career as an engineer at Facebook and as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jay Madheswaran and his cofounders spotted an opportunity to deploy cutting-edge AI to transform what they saw as an underserved segment of the legal market, launching Eve , an AI platform purpose-built for plaintiffs' law firms. Eve has quickly gained traction, recently securing a $47...

Earlier this month, a legal tech startup called Fortuna Arbitration launched what it says is the first true AI judge – an automated arbitration system called Arbitrus.ai that the company claims can fully replace human arbitrators in resolving legal disputes. The system promises to cut the cost of arbitration from an average of $100,000 to just $10,000, while delivering consistent, unbiased decisio...