LawNext

Last week, Filevine , the Utah-based case management company, raised $108 million in a Series D funding round. Founded in 2014 with an original focus on litigation and personal injury law, the company has been steadily expanding its platform into other areas of law practice — including larger firms, insurance defense, corporate legal, and government — and it plans to use this funding to further fu...

For 23 years, Pro Bono Net has been working to harness the potential of technology to connect pro bono attorneys to those most in need of their services and to provide legal tools to help individuals advocate for themselves. In 2021 alone, the non-profit helped more than 8.4 million people connect to a legal resource and helped self-represented individuals create more than 900,000 legal documents...

In his day job, Jonathan Pyle is the contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where he is responsible for compliance, reporting, and implementing new uses of technology to analyze, streamline, and expand service delivery. But in the legal tech world, Pyle is better known as the developer of Docassemble , a free and open source document assembly application that has been widel...

She has been called the patron saint of solo and small law firms. For two decades, Carolyn Elefant has helped solo and small firm lawyers start and build their law practices. You know her as the creator of MyShingle.com , the longest-running blog on solo and small law firm practice, and she just released the third edition of her book that is a bible for lawyers going off on their own, Solo by Choi...

As head of managed services and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions , Jeffrey Solomon oversees a database that tracks over $150 billion in legal spend data. Legal departments are able to use this data in multiple ways, including to benchmark outside firms' billing rates and to evaluate staffing of legal matters.  In this episode of LawNext, Solomon joins host Bob Ambrogi for a deep dive into...

As Time By Ping , a company devoted to helping lawyers break free from timekeeping, announces its Series B raise of $36.5 million, cofounder and CEO Ryan Alshak joins LawNext for an exclusive interview about the financing, the company, and its mission to help lawyers break free from timekeeping and get back time in their days.  As Alshak shares in the interview, the roots of the company's mission...

Is there a better way to train lawyers to draft and negotiate contracts? Laura Frederick thinks so. This former Tesla and BigLaw commercial contracts attorney is the founder of How to Contract , a learning platform that trains lawyers and professionals how to draft and negotiate contracts in the real world. She is also managing attorney of her own firm, Laura Frederick Law , in Austin, Texas, wher...

In this second of a two-part interview, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Carr , a trailblazing general counsel who describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream.  As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted...

One of the most innovative general counsel ever, Jeffrey Carr describes his career as decades spent on the radical fringe of reforming legal services delivery. Yet many of his ideas for revamping legal departments, once viewed as radical, have now become mainstream.  As general counsel at FMC Technologies in the early 2000s, Carr disrupted how legal departments hire and compensate outside counsel,...

Two years into the pandemic, what has been its impact on e-discovery and what lies ahead for the industry? The 2022 State of the Industry Report takes a deep dive into these questions, surveying lawyers, consultants, software and service providers, and others to paint a picture of where the industry is today and what trends will dominate in the year ahead.  Joining us on LawNext to discuss the rep...

At a time when corporations are demanding greater accountability, transparency and predictability from their legal departments, automation of manual processes is a critical strategic priority, offering the promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness. But what does it really mean for a legal department to digitally transform itself and how should it go about it?  In this special edition of LawN...

As a litigator in Los Angeles, Nicole Clark saw that state court data could be a secret weapon for winning, but she also saw how difficult it was for her and other lawyers to access that data. That inspired Clark to found Trellis in 2018, to collect and provide access to that data so that other litigators would not have to operate blind.  Recently, Trellis raised $14.1 million in a Series A fundin...

Bobby Balachandran , founder and CEO of governance, risk and compliance company Exterro , has just been named LegalTech CEO of the Year in the Legaltech Breakthrough Awards . In a year in which so many legal tech companies have seen significant growth, it is a notable honor. But Balachandran is hardly resting on his laurels. He is already eyeing an IPO in the year ahead.    A computer scientist by...

When COVID-19 first swept across the United States in March 2020, it forced courts across the country to shut down, bringing trials and other legal proceedings to a screeching halt. A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts examined how courts responded in the aftermath of that shutdown, and it concluded that they did pretty well overall, rapidly embracing technology and revolutionizing their opera...

In July, the e-discovery company DISCO became one of just a handful of legal technology companies ever to go public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. That made it the third legal tech company this year to go public, after no U.S. legal tech company had gone public since 2002.  On this episode of LawNext, Kiwi Camara , DISCO's cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss DISCO's publ...

Earlier this month, e-discovery company Everlaw became one of the few legal technology companies to join the elite ranks of unicorn status — companies valued at over $1 billion — with the announcement of a $202 million Series D funding at a valuation of over $2 billion. It had already been a big year for the company, which saw 80% year-over-year growth, the launch of several new products, and its...

It has been a year of notable developments for the practice management company MyCase . After starting the year with the arrival of a new CEO, Jim McGinnis , the company went on to make two significant acquisitions — of case management platform CASEpeer and document automation software Woodpecker — and this week is holding its first-ever customer conference, where McGinnis announced a third acquis...

This week on LawNext: A look at the innovative Tech Edge J.D. program at Santa Clara University School of Law . As law schools come under fire for failing to teach the practical skills students need to succeed in the real world, this program does the opposite. It aims to change the return on investment in legal education by providing law students with the essential legal, technology and business s...

This marks the 20th year in business for Nextpoint , and it is shaping up to be a momentous one for the Chicago-based e-discovery and case preparation company. Having been bootstrapped since its founding, Nextpoint recently closed its first round of outside financing. Having never made an acquisition, it recently acquired deposition software company WarRoom . And this week, Nextpoint is holding a...

This week, the College of Law Practice Management named Digitory Legal winner of its 2021 Innovation Award for a unique partnership with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to drive diversity, equity and inclusion among its outside counsel by applying analytics to billing data to get a deeper understanding of the type and quality of work firms are assigning to diverse lawyers.  As our guest Catherine Kr...

You would be hard-pressed to find two people in legal technology more experienced in user interface and user experience design than Nicole Bradick and Andy Wishart . Bradick is founder and CEO of the legal tech design and development firm Theory and Principle . Wishart is chief product officer at contract lifecycle management company Agiloft and formerly was co-founder and chief technology officer...

The ABA Journal dubbed Fred Rooney the father of legal incubators. He developed the first incubator in 2007 at City University of New York Law School, spawning the launch of some 70 incubators in the years since, many with Fred's guidance or based on his model. While most are in the U.S., Rooney is now helping create incubators worldwide, in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Bulgaria...

Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms, Conga acquired Contract Wrangler . For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Neil Peretz , it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to simply identify key clauses, but that...

Gavin McGrane was a litigation attorney in San Francisco when he saw an opportunity to improve how legal professionals interface with the federal courts electronic records system, PACER, and to enable them to better tap into the data and knowledge contained within that system.  In 2012, he founded PacerPro , originally focusing on providing an enhanced interface to the PACER system, but, in the ye...

There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services.  So critical is the issue that GPSolo , the magazine of the American Bar Ass...