LawNext

On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission is to lead the school's next chapter of innovation.    But she also...

Zach Posner cofounded The Legaltech Fund in 2020 as the first venture capital firm laser-focused on law and legal technology. But even with that industry focus, he takes a broad view when it comes to what he considers legal tech, looking for startups that have "legal in the middle," but that may also span fintech, govtech, or consumer tech.    Posner, a three-time entrepreneur before becoming an i...

Does the billable hour get a bum rap? Nicholas d'Adhemar , founder and CEO of the London-based spend management company Apperio , believes so. The real culprit for out-of-control legal costs is something else altogether, he believes. By identifying it, d'Adhemar says, both clients and law firms will be better positioned to manage legal costs. In this episode of LawNext, d'Adhemar joins host Bob Am...

Sixteen months after UpCounsel announced it would shut down, it is not only alive and well, but showing double-digit revenue growth, consistent profitability, and accelerating demand for legal services through its lawyer marketplace. Now it is launching a crowdfunding campaign with the mission of bringing legal to the people.    [The crowdfunding campaign opens to the public July 28, but listeners...

With his contract-management company having just raised $40 million in Series B funding, Linksquares cofounder and CEO Vishal Sunak is aiming for some big goals, including "to build legal tech solutions that simply weren't possible before." In announcing the raise, which brings the company's total funding to $61.4 million, Sunak vowed that the company will develop its AI technology to "offer funct...

Mary Shen O'Carroll pioneered the field of legal operations during her 13 years as director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming the influential organization CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – and was elected its president in 2019.  In April, she walked away from both of those roles, leaving Google and stepping down as CLOC presiden...

The past year has laid bare, in shockingly explicit detail, the racial inequities of the justice system. Now, LexisNexis and the Historically Black Colleges and University Law School Consortium have partnered to launch a fellowship initiative for 12 law students to spend nine months working to end this systemic racism and further the rule of law.  On this episode of LawNext, we discuss this initia...

As the legal profession continues to transform and evolve, how can a law firm or legal department be "future ready"? What are the characteristics that define future-ready organizations and foretell their continued success?  Just out from Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is its 2021 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report , documenting the top trends affecting legal professionals and looking at how well...

New findings show that law firms that piloted the Mansfield Rule have grown the racial and ethnic diversity of their leadership by more than 30 times the rate of other firms. These firms have also exceeded the norm in the rates at which racially diverse lawyers progressed into partnership and at which women lawyers progressed into leadership roles.  As the legal industry continues to struggle with...

The past year has seen the launch of several legal technology marketplaces, but Theorem LTS aims to be something more — an integrated legal technology ecosystem to power workflow-driven tech adoption by law firms and legal departments, as well as a marketplace for vendors to sell their products and connect with customers.  Founder Joshua Maley is a former lawyer and venture investor who started th...

There is an element of serendipity in the story of Nehal Madhani and his company Alt Legal. Even though he had been an insolvency lawyer who had never practiced trademark law, an early attempt at entrepreneurship — and at registering his own trademarks — showed him the need for better software to automate trademark applications. After creating and launching that product, he heard from his customer...

One of the most dynamic areas of legal tech right now is practice management, which has seen a surge of investments and acquisitions over the past year. And one of the companies that best represents that trend is Paradigm, which was founded two years ago as ASG LegalTech and rebranded this year as Paradigm, to represent its goal of bringing about a paradigm shift for legal technology.  Paradigm is...

There is broad agreement that if law schools are to adequately train students for careers in law, then technology is a critical part of the curriculum. Despite this, many law schools get a failing grade when it comes to teaching tech. So how, exactly, should law schools teach tech? And what topics should such teaching cover?  April G. Dawson has given a lot of thought to those questions. A former...

Last August, Arizona became the first state to eliminate the ban on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. In ordering that change, as well as a package of additional reforms, the Arizona Supreme Court acted on the recommendations of a task force that had called for fundamental changes in the regulation of legal services, all with the goal of enhancing access to justice,  On today's episode of LawNext...

LexLab , the legal innovation hub at UC Hastings Law School, recently wrapped up the fourth cohort of its legal tech accelerator program with a demo day at which the seven startup participants got to pitch their products to potential investors.  But this demo day, in fact this entire cohort, was noticeably different than prior ones, in that it was the first to take place 100% virtually, without th...

A new $110 million Series E financing round for legal technology company Clio puts its valuation at $1.6 billion, making it the first law practice management company to achieve unicorn status and one of just a few legal tech companies to pass that milestone.  In an exclusive LawNext interview, Jack Newton, Clio's cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss this news and what it means for...

Possibly the hottest market in legal tech today is contract lifecycle management, and one of the most talked-about companies in that market is Ironclad , a six-year-old startup that recently raised a $100 million Series D – at a reported valuation of $1 billion – and that just made its first acquisition, of the clickwrap transaction platform PactSafe.  What makes Ironclad different than other CLM...

Throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, Holger Zscheyge is widely regarded as a leading authority on legal technology and innovation. President of the European Legal Technology Association , he is also founder and managing director of Infotropic Media , a Moscow-based legal publisher and producer of legal technology conferences, and a cofounder of Moscow Legal Hackers.  Zscheyge was a guest on LawNe...

It was recently announced that Andrew Ballheimer , who retired last October as global managing partner at Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy , one of the largest law firms in the world, has joined the board of directors of the managed services company Factor , which spun off in 2019 from the alternative legal services provider Axiom.   Some are saying the move represents a bridge between traditio...

Jeffrey Marple , who has gained a national reputation for law department innovation in his role as director of innovation for corporate legal at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, has moved to Keesal Propulsion Labs , a company that assists Fortune 500 law departments in automating their business and legal processes, where has taken the position of director of digital transformation strategy. In an...

Gordon Smith has just been appointed to a second five-year term as dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. Two years after becoming dean 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." As we recounted when Smith was first o...

No sector of the legal technology market is hotter right now than contract lifecycle management. And while that sector is crowded with companies that are relative newcomers, one of the companies making the biggest waves is 30 years old.  Over the past year, Agiloft , the no-code CLM company, raised $45 million in growth equity funding – its first outside funding ever – named a new CEO and manageme...

You have just been named global chief innovation officer for one of the world's largest law firms. Where and how do you start? That is one of the questions we put to Amol Bargaje , whom Mayer Brown named to that position on Feb. 9, 2021. Coming into this newly created role, Bargaje has plenty of experience on which to draw. He has been at Mayer Brown since 2018 as global director of IT Practice an...

Contract lifecycle management has become one of the hottest sectors of legal tech in recent years, and within that sector, Evisort , founded in 2016, has become one of the hottest companies, experiencing four-times revenue growth in 2020 and having just completed a $35 million Series B funding round, for total funding of $55 million. But Evisort cofounder and CEO Jerry Ting sees his company's AI-d...

In January 2020, Axiom Managed Services, one of two companies spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, rebranded as Factor , a move the company characterized as a relaunch, and named a new CEO , Varun Mehta , a veteran of the legal tech industry who had previously helped found the e-discovery managed services firm The Clutch Group. It has been a year of challenges and oppor...