The Future Law Podcast

Joan Heminway brings long experience as a corporate lawyer in BigLaw to her work researching and writing about securities law and corporate finance at the University of Tennessee. Now she is assuming a key role at the head of the university’s well-known Institute for Professional Leadership, building on those experiences to help law students and new lawyers acquire leadership skills and navigate t...

Joy Heath Rush  is the CEO of the ILTA, a global volunteer-led membership organization that develops and shares information about technology in law practice, supporting lawyers and other professionals in law firms, law departments, governments, and academic organizations. In this episode, she and host Mike Madison reflect on the evolution of legal tech since the mid-1980s and bring the story up to...

Future law means understanding worlds beyond law. Lawyers spend a lot of time talking to other lawyers. This episode features a fascinating conversation with  Vikram Mansharamani , a consultant, author, and importantly, not a lawyer, about macro trends in the economy and society that will inevitably come to affect legal professionals and legal systems. Link Vikram Mansharamani,Think for Yourself:...

The future of law includes more than the future of lawyers. At Villanova University, Professor Michele Pistone has launched a pioneering online program to train non-lawyers as authorized advocates in immigration law. Professor Pistone talked about her plans on an earlier episode of the Future Law Podcast. Now she’s back, sharing stories of her surprising results, with host Mike Madison. Michele Pi...

“Future Law” is a global phenomenon with multiple local applications. What’s different about the French experience, and what does the French experience share with the future of law elsewhere? The EDHEC Business School in Lille is the home of the new Augmented Law Institute, a purposeful blending of training in law, business, and technology that builds on EDHEC’s long-standing investment in multi-p...

Does the legal profession have a place for creative and imaginative people? How does the future of law differ from its past? Hear an unusual conversation between Future Law Podcast host Mike Madison and Eimear McCann, now Director of Strategy at UK-based LegalTech firm Summize and also a former immigration and human rights lawyer, and also a teacher and writer. Links: Eimear McCann Summize [This e...

As a law student, Colin Levy saw the future of legaltech, and after graduating he set about building a career in the field. Ten years later, he’s navigated through in-house roles, developed his skill set, and made his way to a position as Director of Marketing and Business Development for  WordRake , which produces editing software for professionals, including lawyers. For the Future Law Podcast,...

How do you build and re-build collaborative and innovative cultures in a virtual environment? The future of law isn’t all face-to-face. In this reunion episode, original Future Law Podcast host Lisa Leong returns to talk with Mike Madison about pivoting her broadcasting and consulting practices in response to COVID shutdowns. [This episode was published originally on July 14, 2021.]

In this episode of the Future Law Podcast, Mike Madison talks with Marlene van Nelson, a recent law graduate who followed a classic path: she hung out a proverbial shingle and launched a solo practice. A few short but fast-paced years later, she’s expanded her practice and found her niche, delivering “people law” services to small business and individual clients while nimbly blending the personal...

Our tour of LegalTech takes The Future Law Podcast to London and this conversation with Giles Thompson and Amy Conroy. Giles and Amy are two early-career lawyers who stepped quickly off the path to a conventional law practice career and, in very different respects, onto the team at Avvoka, which offers a document automation platform. Mike Madison talks with Giles and Amy about what Avvoka is up to...

Fastcase is now 20 years in to its mission to transform legal publishing and access to legal information. Fastcase co-founder and CEO Ed Walters joins Mike Madison to talk about the origins of the company (beer and softball contributed, along with a research challenge from an unexpected source), the journey to date, and visions and implications of the future of law. Links: Ed Walters Fastcase [Thi...

Daniel W. Linna, Jr. is Senior Lecturer and Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, with an additional appointment in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. He’s also a former litigation partner in a large law firm in Detroit. He joined Mike Madison for an energetic conversation about legal system innovation and change, wh...

Thomas Aertgeerts  is the co-founder and CEO of a Belgium-based LegalTech startup offering tax law services today and on a mission to transform the legal industry tomorrow. He talks with Mike Madison about the legal entrepreneur’s life, transitioning out of a classic law practice career, and the future of legal services. He is the author of a provocative essay in the American Bar Association (ABA)...

Cat Moon leads the Program on Law and Innovation (PoLI) at Vanderbilt University’s law school, a role that she took on after practicing law for nearly 20 years in Nashville, Tennessee. At PoLI and beyond, for the last several years she has become a passionate voice for making lawyers – and law – better. Mike Madison talks with Cat about PoLI, her vision for future lawyers, and her work helping to...

Michele DeStefano is the founder and leader of Law Without Walls, or LWOW, a pioneering program for team- and project-based legal education that gathers students and partners from around the world. She is a full-time professor of law at the University of Miami who has also documented her methods and published research on their effectiveness. Mike Madison talks with Michele about the origins and im...

Elizabeth “Lizzy” Shackelford took her law degree and followed her dream to serve internationally, eventually spending more than seven years with the US Department of State in a series of posts in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Now retired from her diplomatic service and the author of a recent book on US foreign policy and diplomacy, in this podcast she reflects with Mike Madison on what it means t...

Duc Trang, former private practitioner, general counsel, and now Managing Director of Major, Lindsey & Africa Transform Advisory Services , talks with Mike Madison about the changing marketplace for legal services and legal professionals and what those changes mean for private firms, for legal technology development, and for legal education. Also featured in this episode: Michael Madison,  The...

Miguel Willis caught the innovation and entrepreneurship bug early in his law school career, and he exited with a JD and leadership of an innovative program that blends technology skills, design, law, and the public interest.  The Access to Justice Technology Fellows program  connects law students with civil justiceorganizations for an immersive, 10-week, paid project-basedfellowship experience, c...

Dean Dan Hunter chats with Tom Dreyfus, CEO and co-founder of the Melbourne-based legal technology firm Josef. Josef gives both practitioners and law students a leg up in creating bots – automated processes for legal analysis – without expecting lawyers to know how to code and without expecting that legal experts should be cut out of the professional loop. Dan and Tom talk about Tom’s path to lead...

Mike Madison talks with Dean Trish White and Andrea Sinner, the chair and director of the American Bar Association Commission on the Future of Legal Education. The Commission wrapped up two years’ worth of work in March 2020 and published a report that reads more like a manifesto for change than a conventionally sober reflection.  Find the ABA Commission Report online here . [This episode was publ...

Mike Madison sits down with  Kevin Miller, CEO of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based LegalTech firm LegalSifter . LegalSifter is powered by tech developed in Pittsburgh’s AI and robotics ecology, centered on Carnegie Mellon University. A seasoned lawyer-entrepreneur, Kevin shares his thoughts about what lawyers and law firms are doing well, and what they can do better with AI-powered tools. [This...

Dan Rodriguez, formerly Dean of Northwestern Law and president of the Association of American Law Schools , gets inside the future of legal education for the benefit of legal professionals and new law graduates. The interview is hosted by Mike Madison. [This episode was published originally on August 1, 2020.]

Eric DeChant isn’t a lawyer. He’s a recent graduate of the novel Master of Science in Law program at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, which aims to give STEM professionals (like Eric) enough grounding in law to accelerate them into careers as allied legal professionals but not so much that they qualify to become licensed lawyers. Mike Madison interviews Eric to hear how he found t...

In this, our last episode for 2019, we finally bring you our long-promised episode on Design Thinking in Law. The terrible trio talks around some spots from three guests, Margaret Hagan, Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School; Carl White, CEO of CX in Law; and Cian Heely, a grad from Manchester University who worked with the amazing gang at DWF to solve for a client’s problem. We...

Margaret Hagan, a global leader in bringing design to legal education and law practice, talks with Michael Madison about what design is and why design matters, supplying some of her own back story along the way. [This episode was published originally on December 8, 2019.]