LawNext

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...

Recently, Silicon Valley-based Gunderson Dettmer , an international law firm of more than 400 lawyers that exclusively represents clients in the innovation economy, launched ChatGD , a generative AI chat app for its lawyers and legal professionals that the firm designed and built itself. The launch appeared to make the firm the first in the U.S. to develop a proprietary internal tool using generat...

Today's episode offers a different perspective on the DoNotPay controversy – and ended up having an unexpected twist.   Earlier this year, DoNotPay , which described itself as the world's first robot lawyer, and its founder Joshua Browder became the subject of harsh criticism after paralegal Kathryn Tewson tested several of DoNotPay's self-help legal apps and concluded they were little more than s...

On July 18, 2023, the top legal officers of three Boston-area technology companies came together for a live panel discussion about the city's unique contributions to the legal tech landscape, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. The panelists graciously agreed to allow LawNext to record the conversation, and this episode is that recording. The three panelists are: Margaret K. Minister , general...

Recently, Derek Miller , a veteran legal technology executive who, as president and CEO of inData Corporation for nearly three decades, oversaw Trial Director , one of the most widely used trial-presentation software products ever, joined Lit Software , the developer of a suite of litigation apps for iPad and Mac, as chief growth officer, to help drive the company's continued expansion, particular...

In a first for a state bar, The Florida Bar is providing its entire membership of more than 111,000 lawyers with access to legal trust accounting software – a move designed to both help lawyers better comply with trust accounting rules and help protect members of the public from trust accounting errors.  The initiative was spearheaded by F. Scott Westheimer , a partner in the Sarasota firm Syprett...

In October 2020, legal industry veterans Joe Borstein and Paul Stroka set out to change the legal tech sales paradigm by founding LexFusion as a go-to-market representative of a curated collection of companies across major categories of legal technology. As the company nears its third anniversary, Borstein joins LawNext to reflect on its successes and failures and to share where it is today. In ad...

Every great trial lawyer will tell you that the key to success in litigation is finding the story in a case. But when a case involves mountains of digital evidence, finding that story isn't always easy or economical. That's the problem the global legal services firm Novus Law aims to address.  Marking its 20th anniversary this year, Novus Law uses an award-winning process, derived from lean manufa...

One of the hottest sectors of the legal tech market these days is contract lifecycle management, or CLM. But Evan Wong believes that, for many inhouse legal teams, CLM is not necessarily the best route for them to streamline workflows. Rather, he believes workflow automation is often the better way for legal teams to transform their operations.  Wong is the founder and CEO of the low-code/no-code...

Noella Sudbury became interested in the issue of criminal records expungement soon after law school, while working as a criminal defense lawyer. Over and over again, she saw clients put in the hard work to get out of the criminal justice system and rebuild their lives, only to have doors slammed in their faces because of their records. That set her down a path that led her last year to found Rasa...

On this episode of LawNext, we're taking you to the conference floor of the CLOC Global Institute, the annual conference of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium that was held May 15-18 in Las Vegas, for a series of brief interviews with 22 of the legal tech companies that exhibited there.  Since the first CLOC Global Institute in 2016, this conference has become a leading event for legal oper...