LawNext

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Jonathan Watson , Clio's chief technology officer.  With over 20 years of leadership experience in large-scale SaaS and live gaming solutions, Watson's unique approach and passion for intertwining product developm...

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Reagan Attle , chief marketing officer at Clio.  Known for building and leading high-performing and award-winning teams, Attle has 20 years of experience and has played a major role in Clio's growth to date, havin...

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Shubham Datta, vice president of corporate development at Clio. Datta oversees the development and execution of Clio's strategic growth strategy through acquisitions and investments. He brings to Clio years of M&A...

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, about the recently released 2022 Legal Trends Report. An attorney admitted to the New York Bar, Lenon brings legal scholarship to the conversations happening both within...

Among the most divisive issues facing the legal profession today is that of revising the rules that regulate law practice – and more specifically the questions of whether to liberalize the rules to allow those who are not licensed lawyers to own law practices or to engage in the practice of law. Two states, Arizona and Utah, have implemented regulatory schemes loosening restrictions on law practic...

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Curt Sigfstead, chief financial officer. He is responsible for managing Clio's financial affairs, including finance, accounting, capital, treasury, taxation, and corporate development. With over two decades of tec...

In an episode of LawNext recorded in person at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton discusses the "antifragile" law firm, a concept he introduced in his conference keynote — derived from the book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — that certain firms thrive in the face of stressors and adversity, as we saw so clearly during...

An increasing number of startups are defining themselves not as legal tech, but as justice tech. So what, exactly, is justice tech, who are some of the companies that represent it, and what is the business opportunity they present for potential investors? Our guest this week is Maya Markovich , executive director of the Justice Technology Association , an organization formed earlier this year to s...

At a time when law firms are struggling to retain talent and wrestling to balance hybrid workplaces, the Texas-based corporate law firm Vela Wood did something unique: It sent its employees and their families to Portugal for a month. Why did it do it? How did it do it? What did clients think? And are there lessons for other firms? For the answers to those questions and more, our guests this week a...

For those who have to go to court without a lawyer, navigating the justice system can be daunting. Courtroom5 is a unique justice tech company that addresses that problem by providing pro se litigants with the training, tools, documents and support they need to represent themselves. For litigants who need extra help, it also offers access to à la carte lawyer services. Our guest this week, Courtro...

Devshi Mehrotra was a computer science undergraduate at the University of Chicago when she and classmate Leslie Jones-Dove developed JusticeText , an platform that makes it easier for public defenders to review and analyze the massive quantities of police body cam and other video footage that is becoming increasingly common in criminal cases.  At the time, Mehrotra never envisioned it as a company...

Last week, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, said that it had acquired majority ownership of vLex, the international legal research platform that lays claim to having the largest collection of legal information on a single service.  On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined from London by Masoud Gerami, managing director, vLex Global Markets, who oversees vLex...

On her LinkedIn profile , Natalie Knowlton describes her work as "succession planning for an outdated legal industry." It is an apt description for someone who has spent her career studying reform of the U.S. legal system — and particularly now, as she launches Access to Justice Ventures , a think tank devoted to reinventing the legal system to provide justice for all by eliminating systemic barri...

In the world of legal technology, perhaps no company looms larger than Thomson Reuters, whose products such as Westlaw, Practical Law, HighQ, Findlaw, 3E and many others span virtually every aspect of law practice and are used by legal professionals throughout the world.  Our guest this week, Kriti Sharma , is chief product officer, legal tech, at Thomson Reuters, a role she stepped into less than...

Should the legal industry have a common set of data standards for classifying the work we do? The SALI Alliance – short for Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry – believes we should, and it recently released version 2.0 of its Legal Matter Standard Specification, which sets out an ontology of some 10,000 tags.  The argument for standards, SALI says, is that they will simplify and improve t...

Last week, on the last day of the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries , the nationwide organization of law librarians and legal information professionals, Elizabeth Adelman took office as the association's new president. A key focus of her term will be on increasing the pipeline of those coming into the profession and working to enhance diversity within both the AALL and th...

For 28 years, John Mayer has been executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction , or CALI, a non-profit consortium of some 200 law schools that describes itself as "the innovative force pushing legal education toward change for the better." Along the way, CALI's mission expanded to include addressing access to justice, primarily through its development, in partnership wi...

It was a mighty bold move for the legal technology company Mighty . After seven years in business serving personal injury lawyers, the company recently pivoted to launch Mighty Law , a law firm that directly competes against those PI firms by offering lower fees, greater transparency, and tech-driven efficiencies.  For founder and CEO Joshua Schwadron , the move was motivated by what he sees as th...

Sang Lee believes that algorithm-based assessments can help law firms make better, more ethical and less-biased decisions when hiring associates and laterals. The SaaS company she founded in 2019, Thine , leverages custom hiring algorithms and industrial and organizational (IO) psychology to create assessments that it says can reduce inconsistencies in how law firms evaluate candidates, promote eq...

LawVu is a New Zealand company that says it is revolutionizing legal operations by waging war on a multiplicity of point solutions and providing in-house legal teams with the first truly connected platform for matter, contract and spend management.  LawVu recently conducted a survey of in-house lawyers and legal operations  professionals and found that 77% of them spend more than an hour a day jus...

The law practice management platform Litify is unique in several ways. For one, it is built on top of Salesforce, the sales and marketing automation platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. For another, it was developed by a team of people who came out of Morgan & Morgan, the largest plaintiffs' law firm in the United States.  Since its launch in 2016, Litify has raised $50 million in Series A...

As this episode is being released, news is breaking that is likely to have a profound impact on the law practice management market: AffiniPay, the parent company of the electronic payments platform LawPay, has acquired the law practice management company MyCase, along with several other practice management products that MyCase acquired over the past year.  Just ahead of today's announcement, the C...

If ever there was a process ripe for disruption, notarization would seem to be it. A function that may date back to Ancient Egypt, it has changed little for centuries – still typically done in person, on hard-copy paper, using physical seals, and recorded in written ledgers.  Pat Kinsel , founder and CEO of Notarize , believes society has grappled for too long with how to scale this simple process...

Lawyers are largely limited to practicing law in the states in which they are licensed. But now, calling that rule anachronistic, the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers has asked the American Bar Association to amend the model rules that govern law practice to allow lawyers admitted in any U.S. jurisdiction to practice law and provide legal advice to clients anywhere in the country...

No one has worked harder, worked longer or had more success at the cause of making government information accessible to the public than Carl Malamud and his organization Public. Resource. Org . From putting the SEC's EDGAR database online in 1993 – effectively shaming the SEC into putting it online itself two years later – to his 2020 U.S. Supreme Court victory defeating the state of Georgia's cla...