LawNext

When former Wall Street lawyer Jonathan Petts joined forces in 2016 with Rohan Pavuluri , then a research assistant in Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab, and Mark Hansen , a software engineer, to create Upsolve, they had a simple but powerful vision: make bankruptcy filing as accessible as online tax preparation for Americans crushed by debt.  Today, their nonprofit has helped over 16,000...

When it comes to contract negotiations, lawyers often find themselves spending countless hours haggling over standard agreements such as NDAs and SaaS contracts, with both sides often saying more or less the same thing, but in different words. What if there was a better way?  Today's guests believe there is. Electra Japonas , chief legal officer at Law Insider and founder of the successful oneNDA...

In the United States, we face a staggering crisis in access to justice, with over 90% of low-income Americans' civil legal needs estimated to be going unmet. But what if there was a way to dramatically expand legal help by empowering a new category of legal helpers?  That's exactly what today's guest, Nikole Nelson , is working to achieve as CEO of Frontline Justice . After 25 years as a legal aid...

Earlier this month, the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States, held its annual Innovations in Technology Conference in Phoenix. This year's conference was particularly special for two reasons. For one, it was the conference's 25th anniversary, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Technology Initiative Grants program that was the genesis of the con...

From legal aid attorney to legal tech innovator, Sateesh Nori brings a unique perspective to the intersection of artificial intelligence and access to justice.  After spending two decades in the trenches as a housing lawyer at legal aid offices in New York City, Nori now bridges multiple worlds – continuing his legal aid work at the Legal Aid Society of NYC while also serving as an adjunct clinica...

Anastasia Boyko likes to say that she's Goldilocks-ed her way through her career. True, it's been a varied career, as she's tried out different roles, but it is a career that has taken her full circle, from Yale Law School, where she graduated, and then eventually back to Yale Law to create a program in leadership for lawyers, and from Salt Lake City, where she grew up after she and her mother fle...

On Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned...

On today's LawNext: we hand over the podcast to NotebookLM to discuss the state of law practice management technology.  If you haven't heard of NotebookLM, it is a generative AI tool from Google that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions. Its output sounds a whole lot like, well, a podcast, with two hosts chatting it up about your documents.  To quote Google's own description, "With...

You cannot have innovation without adoption. That was a theme I heard repeatedly when I attended the Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal conference in New York City in October. Our guest today, Paul Henry , would take that a step further and say you do not really have adoption without engagement.  Henry is the founder and CEO of NGAGE Intelligence , a platform that provides law firms with...

Everlaw for Good is a program run by the e-discovery company Everlaw , through which it makes its software available at no cost to legal aid organizations, nonprofit organizations, and investigative journalists.  One beneficiary of that program is the Center for Justice and Accountability , a human rights nonprofit that works to seek justice on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including tortu...

In the field of legal knowledge management and innovation, Sally Gonzalez is both a legend and a trailblazer. Over the course of her 40-year career, she has worked for some of the world's largest law firms to develop and lead KM and strategic technology initiatives. She has overseen KM and information technology programs at such global firms as Norton Rose Fulbright, Dentons, Akin Gump, Covington...

Recently, the Everlaw Summit , the annual customer conference of the e-discovery company Everlaw , convened in San Francisco. In his keynote address there, cofounder and CEO AJ Shankar announced the general availability, after a year of beta testing, of a suite of generative AI features for reviewing, coding and analyzing documents in discovery and litigation prep.  LawNext host Bob AmbrogiI was a...

At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal design...

Recently, the law practice management company Clio launched Clio Duo, its generative AI legal assistant. On today's LawNext, Jonathan Watson , Clio's chief technology officer, joins the show to discuss Duo's development, capabilities and future direction. He also talks about some of the other products Clio recently launched, including native accounting and custom reporting.  Watson and LawNext hos...

When Zach Posner was last on this podcast , it was 2021 and he was less than a year into having cofounded The LegalTech Fund , the first venture capital firm to be laser-focused on law and legal technology. Since then, his firm, of which he is managing director, has gone on to build up a portfolio of more than 60 legal tech companies in which it invests.  His firm has also launched his own confere...

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, Clio released its ninth annual Legal Trends Report , a report that uses both survey responses and anonymized data from Clio users to paint a picture of key trends in law practice and legal technology. This year's report has some intriguing findings on lawyers' adoption of AI and the types of tasks within a law office that could be automated usi...

This has been a significant year for the law practice management company Clio, which in July raised a record-setting $900 million financing round – the largest ever for a legal tech company, and which recently wrapped up its 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference , its largest ever with some 2,600 attendees in person in Austin, Texas, and almost as many attending virtually from all over the globe.  At...

We've just returned from the Clio Cloud Conference, held this year in Austin, Texas, where, in what has become an annual tradition, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton for a live interview.  At the conference, Clio launched Clio Duo, the generative AI legal assistant integrated into Clio's flagship product, Clio Manage. In this interview, Newton discusses what D...

One year ago, in September 2023, James Schellhase was named chief executive officer of the alternative legal services provider UnitedLex . The move was particularly significant, as he was only the second person ever to hold that title at the company, having succeeded Dan Reed, who cofounded UnitedLex in 2006 and had been its CEO ever since. Reed is now chairman of the board. A year into his tenure...

At its recent customer conference in Salt Lake City, called LEX Summit, the case management company Filevine unveiled a number of product releases and updates. Among them were several products for litigators driven by generative AI, including a first-of-its-kind tool, Depo CoPilot, that helps guide a lawyer during a deposition, and another, DemandsAI, that generates settlement demand letters in th...

In today's episode, we feature three impromptu conversations with leaders of the case management company Filevine. Last week, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was in Salt Lake City to attend LEX Summit, the Filevine customer conference. While there, he snagged three of the company's top executives for brief, impromptu conversations about the company, its products, and the conference.  In today's show, you...

Matt Rasmussen had worked for some 20 years in litigation technology and support at major law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and litigation services providers, when he wondered why mobile collections had to be so time-consuming, inefficient and invasively overbroad.  As he looked into it, he realized there was a better way to manage mobile collections. Two years ago, Rasmussen and his cofounders br...

On Oct. 17 and 18, 2024, two of the legal industry's leading experts on knowledge management and innovation, Patrick DiDomenico , founder and CEO of InspireKM Consulting , and Joshua Fireman , president of Fireman & Company , which is owned by Epiq, the global provider of technology-enabled legal services, will present the second-annual KM&I for Legal Conference in New York City.  The conference,...

In what it says is the first AI agent for law , the legal technology company Spellbook just released Spellbook Associate , an application that can plan and execute complex, multi-step workflows in transactional matters, much as an associate would. This is the same company that introduced the first generative AI copilot for contract drafting and review back in 2022, even before ChatGPT was released...

For at least two decades, artificial intelligence has been used in e-discovery to help surface and prioritize review of potentially responsive documents from large document collections. But while technology-assisted review (TAR) has traditionally been driven by AI in the form of supervised machine learning, some vendors and e-discovery professionals are starting to experiment with the use of gener...