The Geek In Review

Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer take The Geek in Review on the road to Atlanta for a conversation following the GDS AI Summit. Meeting with leaders from across industries offers a fresh perspective on familiar legal technology challenges: messy data, uncertain ownership, and the pressure to turn artificial intelligence experiments into measurable business improvements. Their shared takeaway offer...

This week we talk with Ross Guberman, founder and CEO of BriefCatch, and Heather Rodriguez, the company’s enterprise account executive. Ross built BriefCatch to put the lessons from his books and workshops in front of lawyers while they write. It started as a rules engine that flagged everything from typos to sentence flow. He admits he was never a coder, and says he would have looked for a techni...

Law firms and legal departments face pressure to adopt AI, yet buying another tool does not answer the hardest question: Which problem needs solving? Dr. Maryam Salehijam, founder and CEO of Andarzi, joins Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer to discuss how legal teams choose between existing systems, new vendors, and tools built for their own workflows. Her starting point is to observe the work, iden...

Paul Lee , co-founder and CEO of Patlytics , joins Greg Lambert to explain how an AI platform built specifically for intellectual property work is changing the patent lifecycle. Patlytics supports workflows spanning patent drafting, prior art analysis, office action responses, portfolio management, litigation readiness, and claim-chart preparation. Lee reports that the company now works with rough...

What happens when you separate elite legal talent from the traditional law firm structure? This week on The Geek in Review , we talk with Manuel Deó , co-founder and co-CEO of Ambar Partners , about a model designed around senior independent lawyers, flexible capacity, enterprise technology, and client choice. Deó explains why he and co-founder Rosa Espín did not set out to replace Big Law, but in...

For millions of people, an everyday legal dispute never justifies the cost of a lawyer or a private mediator, no matter how much the outcome matters to them. Judge Victoria Wood saw that problem over and over during her years on the Napa County Superior Court bench. This week, Wood joins Judicaid Chief Strategy Officer Valerie Clemen to explain how those years led to Judicaid, an AI-assisted media...

What happens when a 40-year-old legal data company decides its employees should start building their own software? This week on we talk with  Best Lawyers  CEO  Phillip Greer  and Senior Vice President of Research and Product Strategy Elizabeth Petit about an internal AI transformation that reaches far beyond adding ChatGPT to the corporate toolkit. Best Lawyers is experimenting with generative en...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we talk with Patrick Forquer , Chief Revenue Officer at Legora , about legal AI’s move from experimentation into daily legal work. Forquer explains why Legora has invested heavily in legal engineers, lawyers with practice experience who work alongside clients on adoption, workflow design, prompt and context engineering, and change management. The conversation...

It turns out that tech companies don’t sit outside of government as just ordinary vendors. This week on The Geek in Review podcast, we welcome back Texas A&M University School of Law professor Hannah Bloch-Wehba to talk about accountability of Big Tech, AI regulations, government surveillance, and the intertwining of public authority and private tech infrastructure. Bloch-Wehba traced the depe...

We welcome back Brad Blickstein , CEO at Blickstein Group , to discuss how private equity principles may provide law firms with an alternative approach to profitability, governance, and even long-term growth. Blickstein's new book, WWPED: What Would Private Equity Do? was written to walk firms through how treating topics like pricing, technology, talent, and client relationships as part of the...

Fresh from AALL in Cleveland, Greg reflects on a conference filled with legal information professionals who understand how technology performs under real working conditions. These librarians purchase products, train users, support law schools and courts, and often serve as internal advocates for legal technology. Their expertise makes vendor engagement especially valuable, yet major product announ...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert hosts a solo conversation with Triona Buckley , Chief Product Officer at Actionstep , about generative AI’s growing influence on mid-market law firms. Buckley challenges a common assumption about legal AI: faster task completion does not always remove friction. An associate might produce a draft within seconds, only to transfer the burden upstrea...

Predictions about artificial intelligence often focus on job losses and shrinking demand for lawyers. Filevine CEO and co-founder Ryan Anderson and product manager John Rizner offer a sharply different forecast. Drawing on the Jevons paradox, they argue greater efficiency will make legal services accessible to more people, encourage deeper legal research, and create work once excluded by cost. AI...

What does legal AI value look like once speed stops serving as the headline metric? In this episode of The Geek in Review , Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer speak with Nikki Shaver , co-founder and CEO of Legal Technology Hub and a member of the inaugural Financial Times Law 50 . Shaver argues that law firms need to move beyond time saved toward efficacy: stronger output, stronger client outcomes,...

For law firms, artificial intelligence has often arrived as a choice between speed and control. Stephen Costigan , founder of Atlas AI , argues that choice deserves a rethink. In this episode of The Geek in Review, we speak with Costigan about private legal AI infrastructure, knowledge graphs, and why a firm’s internal work product may become its most valuable long-term asset. Atlas AI focuses on...

This week we welcome American Association of Law Libraries leaders Jenny Foster , AALL President for 2025-2026, and Jessica Whytock , AALL Vice President and President-Elect. The conversation offers a preview of the 2026 AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, along with a thoughtful look at how the association is supporting legal information professionals during a period of insti...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we welcome Greg Dickason , Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis , for a wide-ranging conversation on agentic legal AI, Lexis+ AI Protégé, and the movement from AI chat toward AI work. Dickason frames the shift through a simple contrast: earlier legal AI answered questions, while agentic workflows take on multi-step assignments, conduct research, create draf...

In this episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer welcome back Joel Hron , Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters , for a timely conversation about the shifting relationship among foundation models, legal content providers, legal tech platforms, and the lawyers trying to make sense of the mess. Recent moves by Anthropic, including Claude’s legal practice area tools and M...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Abdi Shayesteh , CEO of AltaClaro , and Jeanine Conley Daves , Littler’s New York office managing shareholder, about a different question in the legal AI conversation. Instead of asking whether AI will write the brief, summarize the contract, or replace the junior associate, they focus on whether AI might help lawyers learn how to practice law. Their r...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Ryan McClead of Sente Advisors about his new book on AI agents, written in collaboration with Claude. McClead explains how a short best practices guide grew into a full book after his work with Claude Cowork revealed something larger than tool tips or prompt advice. The result is part field guide, part warning label, and part first-person report from t...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Alex Su and Andy Chagui of Latitude about the shifting economics of law firm talent, the rise of flexible legal staffing, and the pressure AI is placing on traditional leverage models. Su, known across legal circles for his sharp commentary and creative legal industry videos, brings his background as a former Sullivan & Cromwell litigator and feder...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Keith Maziarek , founder of Lucratic Method and Bodhi Solutions , about the shifting economics of legal work, AI’s impact on pricing, and why law firms and clients need better commercial conversations. Keith brings more than two decades of experience in pricing, profitability, legal project management, and business-of-law strategy from firms including...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Lennie Nuara , co-founder of Flatiron Law Grou p, about what it means to build a talent-first, AI-powered legal practice. Nuara brings a rare mix of lawyer, technologist, operator, and systems thinker to the conversation, drawing from decades of experience using technology to improve legal work, from early portable computers and databases to today’s ge...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Andrew Thompson , CTO of Orbital , about why legal AI built for a specific practice area has a strong claim in a market crowded by general-purpose models. Thompson explains how Orbital focuses on real estate law, using AI, spatial intelligence, and legal workflow design to support transactions involving property portfolios, title review, survey analysi...

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Greg Mazares Sr., CEO of Purpose Legal, about what it takes to lead through one of the most important transition periods in legal services. Drawing on decades of experience across business, litigation support, and e-discovery, Mazares brings a steady, practical view to a market flooded with AI claims and rapid change. His message is clear from the star...