LawNext

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...

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Logikcull , the company that CEO Andy Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang founded with the goal of automating and democratizing e-discovery. But the company actually evolved out of an earlier company the pair founded in 2004, Logik Systems, to digitize archaic paper-based discovery workflows where lawyers would print emails to paper to review them. While that first co...

As vice president, Data Analytics and Operational Excellence, at Wolters Kluwer, Abhishek Mittal is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision making in core operational processes. He leads a large global team of process engineers, design thinkers, data scientists and domain experts to develop expert solutions for both internal proc...

Over the past year, the sibling legal technology companies MyCase and LawPay have published a series of reports on law practice , including benchmark reports based on anonymized data from the two companies' customers, as well as an in-depth 2022 year-end legal industry report, based on a survey of over 2,300 legal professionals. Together, they provide an in-depth look at the state of legal practic...

Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI , the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi ; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson S...

It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world's largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.  It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and pot...

With the news last week of the merger of legal research companies Fastcase and vLex , it seemed a good time to revisit our 2019 interview with the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal . The occasion of this interview was the company's 20th anniversary, and we recorded it live, on the exhibit hall floor, at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.  In this...

In the 15 years since he and Rian Gauvreau cofounded the legal practice management company Clio in 2008, Jack Newton has learned  a thing or two about what it takes to build a successful company. As its CEO since the start, Newton has overseen the growth of the company from fledgling startup to a centaur with annual recurring revenue of over $100 million, a valuation of over $1 billion, and a work...

Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel , which it calls the world's first reliabl...

Two years after D. Gordon Smith was appointed dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors , "I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country." Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after ha...

On this episode of LawNext, we take a closer look at Smokeball , the law practice management company whose roots are in Australia but that is firmly entrenched in the United States. In fact, after Smokeball was founded in 2010, its very first customer was a law firm in Chicago.  Appropriately, then, it was in Chicago last week, during ABA TECHSHOW, that host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a face-to-face...

Kathryn Tewson was a little-known paralegal when, on Jan. 24, she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That day, she published a scathing series of tweets recounting her investigation of DoNotPay , the company that describes itself as "the world's first robot lawyer." She concluded that the company's supposed AI-driven products were little more than smoke and mirrors and that its representation...

On this episode of LawNext: Joshua Browder , founder of DoNotPay . Browder achieved international recognition when, at just 17 years old in 2015, he founded DoNotPay, touted as the world's first robot lawyer, to help people appeal parking tickets. The company claims the app has saved motorists in the U.S. and UK many millions of dollars. DoNotPay went on to release a series of apps designed to hel...

Last week, Documate , the no-code document automation platform, rebranded as Gavel , a move designed to better reflect the company's mission to become the platform of choice for legal professionals and legal organizations wanting to "productize" the delivery of legal services by packaging services as online legal products. Gavel founder and CEO Dorna Moini joins LawNext this week to discuss how he...

When this podcast launched in July 2018, the very first guest on the very first episode was Nicole Bradick , who six months earlier had launched the legal technology design and development company Theory and Principle . As the company marks its fifth anniversary, Bradick returns to LawNext with news that the company is branching off in a new direction, launching T&P Studio, an arm of the business...

Axiom , a company that is one of the longest-running alternative legal services providers, this week stepped into the world of regulated legal services as it formally launched Axiom Advice & Counsel, an Arizona law firm. The move was enabled by the Arizona Supreme Court's decision last May to grant Axiom a license as an alternative business structure.  That follows from Arizona's historic decision...