LawNext

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...

Dru Armstrong was named CEO of AffiniPay , the parent company of LawPay , in July 2021. Less than a year later, AffiniPay shook up the legal tech landscape by acquiring MyCase , one of the leading law practice management platforms, in a deal that also included four other practice management products: CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, Soluno for billing and a...

Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five "cluster projects" t...

On this episode of LawNext: An interview recorded live with Erika Harold, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, an organization charged with working to enhance civility and professionalism and to eliminate bias within the legal profession.  A former litigator, Harold was named executive director in April 2022, to succeed retiring executive director Jayne R...

On today'sLawNext, it's a Clio double header, featuring two separate interviews with two of Clio's top product-focused executives – one with Jonathan Watson , its chief technology officer, and the other with Hemant Kashyap , chief product officer  – both recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.  Even though I interviewed Watson and Kashyap separately, their roles at Clio...

Did Pras Michel's lawyer botch his defense by relying on an AI program to create his closing argument? That's what the former Fugees rapper claims in asking a court to overturn his April conviction in an illegal foreign influence scheme.  Michel says his lawyer, David Kenner, made a "frivolous and ineffectual" closing argument because he relied on an experimental AI program called EyeLevel.ai . Mi...

On Oct. 9, during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, the law practice management company Clio released the 2023 edition of its annual Legal Trends Report . Since it was first published in 2016, the report has established itself as a benchmark of the state of law practice and technology adoption among smaller law firms.  Among the findings in this year's report were two pieces of particularly...

This week, LawNext veers slightly off-topic for a conversation about wrongful convictions. But, as you'll hear from our guests, there is a legal tech angle, even to this.  At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Brian Banks , whose aspirations for a career in the NFL were sidetracked whe...

In his keynote address at the recently concluded 2023 Clio Cloud Conference, Jack Newton , the founder and CEO of Clio , said that we are at a time in the legal industry when leveraging technology is more important for lawyers than ever before. Technology, he said, enables lawyers to amplify their impact, and when they do that, they can achieve exponential outcomes.  This was the 11th year of the...

Soon after starting her own law practice, Kimberly Bennett decided there had to be a better way than the billable hour to charge for her services. She wanted predictable pricing for her intellectual property clients and predictable income for herself. That led her to subscription-based legal services, charging her clients a flat monthly fee, and it worked so well for her that she became not just a...

On July 27, June Hsiao Liebert took office as president of the American Association of Law Libraries , the association that represents more than 3,600 law librarians and legal information professionals throughout the world. The first Asian-American president of AALL, Liebert takes office at a time when some are saying that advances in artificial intelligence could endanger the future of the law li...

As generative AI sweeps through the legal profession, lawyers face challenges in learning to use it responsibly and properly. This summer, one of the world's largest law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe , began to address that challenge by partnering with the legal skills training company AltaClaro to develop a training program for its summer associates on prompt engineering and the responsib...

Stories are increasingly common of lawyers who leave law practice to start legal technology companies, but few achieve the level of success as an entrepreneur of Matt Spiegel . He was a criminal defense lawyer in 2009 when he founded MyCase , one of the earliest cloud-based law practice management companies. In 2012, he sold MyCase to AppFolio , and then left the company in 2015 to start a softwar...

It has been nearly a year and a half since Sheryl Hoskins joined Litera as its new CEO in April 2022. She came into that role following a period in which the company saw significant growth, fueled in part by a series of some 17 acquisitions, through which the company expanded from a primary focus on document technology into such areas as contract review, transaction management, firm intelligence,...

Recently in Orlando, Fla., at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded a series of brief live interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Last week on this podcast, we featured the first set of those interviews – with 12 of the legal tech startups that were participating in ILTACON's Startup Hu...

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is just back from Orlando, Florida, where he attended ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Mic in hand, he recorded a series of brief interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Over the next two episodes of this podcast, we will share those interviews, starting today with the legal tech startups at...