LawNext

Last month, KKR , a major global investment firm, announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft , the contract lifecycle management company. As part of the deal, the growth equity firm FTV Capital , already an Agiloft investor, is making an additional investment, and another growth equity firm, JMI Equity , is joining as a new investor. The deal was a feath...

As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio's founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview.  In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today's announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investmen...

Jacqueline Schafer , the founder and CEO of Clearbrief , was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later...

Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public's access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a c...

This has been a notable year for BriefCatch , a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company's raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics.  All of that culminat...

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener , its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite , which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.  But ther...

In recent months, Epiq , a global company providing technology-enabled legal services, has announced new artificial intelligence and analytics features built using the AI capabilities of Amazon Web Services. These new features include a framework for building, training and deploying bespoke machine learning models as secure APIs for customers; integration of Amazon Bedrock for custom copilot devel...

As this episode is released, Aderant , a technology company that provides business and practice management software for mid- to large-sized law firms worldwide, is in the midst of its Global Momentum user conference, taking place in Nashville. At the conference, the company made a major news announcement – the launch of Stridyn , a new cloud platform that will form the foundation for all the cloud...

Almost exactly one year ago, a new legal tech startup, The Contract Network , came out of stealth , with a mission to "radically accelerate the time for contract negotiations'' through an AI-powered contract collaboration platform where all parties to a deal engage in a secure and neutral environment.  The company's cofounder and CEO, Jim Wagner , is a legal tech veteran with a track record of sta...

With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certifie...

Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician , developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns.  But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha , expanding its platform to help l...

With the tagline "Making Knowledge Work," the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported , it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.    But over the 30 years since i...

March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project , it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.  The massive undertaki...

InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.  Our guest today, Ed Watts , CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company i...

The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company. With new requirements for companies...

Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr , a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry's first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product. At the Legalweek conference in New York in J...

On this episode of LawNext: A conversation about Thomson Reuters' strategy around generative artificial intelligence with two of the executives most directly responsible for its development and implementation.  In a year dominated by discussion of generative AI and its potential impact on the legal profession, Thomson Reuters has played a leading role. It started in June, when the company announce...

In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035.  In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebe...

At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina , a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab...

One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack , the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association , the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice,...

At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?   This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district fro...

In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he and his team decided to build the solution they needed for themselves.  By 2018, they had dubbed the software...

What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley , who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter, and Ilona Logvinova , managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal. Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Manage...

Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City.  First up is Nicole Clark , cofounder and CEO of Trellis , an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in...

Today's episode features two interviews on disruption and innovation in legal, with the two keynote speakers from the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City: Andrea Alliston , partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada's largest law firm, and Mark Smolik , chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americ...