LawNext

A recent report from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation's legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a 2018 paper published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review that documented these legal deserts and rural America's increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis.  Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper, Lau...

The practice management company Clio recently released its annual Legal Trends Report , based on analysis of data from tens of thousands of legal professionals and surveys of legal professionals and legal consumers, and it showed that the coronavirus crisis has resulted in a decided shift in legal practice , away from bricks-and-mortar offices and towards cloud-based technologies and virtual deliv...

The legal marketplace Priori Legal today announced a $6.3 million Series A financing, with existing investors joined by several legal industry heavyweights. In this special edition of LawNext, the company's founders Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the implications of this news for their company and for the legal services market.  Rubin, Priori's CEO, and Levitt, its c...

Nicole N. Morris is a professor in practice at Emory University School of Law and director of the TI:GER program (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), an innovative partnership between Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology that brings together graduate students in law, business, science and engineering to work on ways to take innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace....

A solo serving the Hispanic community in St. Paul, Minn., Inti Martinez-Alemán knew from the day he opened his Ceiba Forte Law Firm that he wanted to take a creative approach to client service.  It starts from the moment clients first arrive for a consultation, when he offers a drink menu and then asks them to pick a story card that best depicts how they are feeling. It continues through his use o...

In September, Rocket Lawyer became the first national company approved to participate in Utah's regulatory sandbox, a pilot program for licensing new and alternative forms of legal providers and services. For Charley Moore , who founded Rocket Lawyer in 2008, it was yet another step in his quest to deliver high-value legal services at an affordable price.  A former U.S. Naval officer who served in...

After much speculation about the future of Legalweek – one of the world's largest and most-anticipated legal technology and legal business conferences – the conference's organizers announced on Oct. 1 that it will be virtual in 2021.  ALM Media, which produces Legalweek, said the conference will be rebranded as Legalweek( year ) and will be extended into a full year of events, leading up to a resu...

Sept. 30, 2020, was Josh Becker's last day in legal tech, at least for the time being, as he pursues his campaign for election to the California state Senate in the district that encompasses Silicon Valley cities such as Palo Alto, Mountain View and Menlo Park.    Most recently, Becker was chairman of the trailblazing legal analytics company Lex Machina and head of legal analytics at LexisNexis, w...

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the Oct. 1, 2020, launch of LexFusion , we get a first look at the new company from guests Joe Borstein , a legal industry veteran and one of LexFusion's two cofounders, and Basha Rubin , the cofounder and CEO of Priori Legal , the legal talent company that is one of the initial participants in the LexFusion collaborative.  LexFusion's mis...

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the announcement of ASG LegalTech's acquisition of electronic payments company Headnote, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with the two companies' CEOs: Soumya Nettimi of ASG LegalTech and Sarah Schaaf of Headnote, on the reasons for the deal and the significance for customers.  On Sept. 22, 2020, ASG LegalTech, the company that owns cloud practice...

Nicola Shaver , managing director, innovation and knowledge, at the law firm Paul Hastings , was recently named 2020 Innovative Leader of the Year in the International Legal Technology Association's Distinguished Peer Awards. Not only that, but the law firm where she oversees innovation initiatives was named Innovator of the Year.  While a major honor for anyone in the field of law firm innovation...

In 2006, inspired by the success of business process outsourcing company Office Tiger, which RR Donnelley acquired that year for $250 million, Ajay Agrawal and Daniel Reed founded UnitedLex, one of the earliest legal process outsourcing companies. Within months, it was providing legal services to clients such as HP, IBM and Microsoft. Within four years, the company had achieved a valuation of $100...

Kimberly Y. Bennett describes herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, legal industry disruptor, and business coach who happens to be a lawyer. Nowhere are all those facets more evident than in the way she has structured her law practice, K Bennett Law , where she focuses on brand protection and growth strategy. Soon after starting her own practice, which is entirely virtual, she decided there had t...

It should have come as no surprise when California attorney Erin Levine recently announced her plan to go nationwide with her do-it-yourself divorce platform Hello Divorce . After all, the site has been seeing rapid growth and has earned Levine broad accolades, including the 2020 James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering from the American Bar Association and the 2019 Reisman Award...

Touting it as the next phase in its global expansion to transform the business of law, Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has launched its Legal Business Services practice in the United States, which it describes as "a comprehensive suite of legal management consulting and technologically-enabled legal managed services for corporate legal departments designed to accelerate the transforma...

Here's one that gets a bit meta. Back in November 2017, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi spoke at BYU Law School about a lawyer's ethical duty to be technologically competent. The talk prompted the school to explore ways it could help students improve their technological abilities. What resulted was the school's Legal Technology Initiative, a multi-pronged program to provide law students with technology t...

In 2015, the husband-and-wife team of James Jones Jr. and Kristina Jones founded Court Buddy , a service that matches consumers with vetted lawyers at affordable prices. Last November, the couple stepped aside from the business to pursue other interests. In their time running the company, they had raised $7.1 million and won numerous awards and honors.  Achieving success as a legal tech startup is...

Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur is one of the world's leading scholars on access to justice. Professor at the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, she is also a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative. In 2018, she was named a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" for her work promoting...

At BYU Law in Provo, Utah, a first-of-its-kind technology platform is enabling legal researchers to explore the meanings of legal words and phrases by examining the contexts in which they historically were used. The Law and Corpus Linguistics platform enables users to examine large collections of historical texts to help determine, for example, what early drafters meant by a phrase such as "bear a...

LinkSquares , the Boston-based provider of AI-powered contract management and analysis technology for corporate legal departments, announced a major new product this week. Called LinkSquares Finalize, it extends the company's technology into the pre-signature stage, helping its customers create and approve contracts more quickly and efficiently.  This news comes just three months after LinkSquares...

Today on LawNext: A coronavirus success story – how a state bar, anticipating a tidal wave of unemployment claims, partnered with two legaltech companies to launch a pro bono portal in barely more than a week.  On April 27, 2020, the New York State Bar Association launched a website devoted to helping those who need unemployment assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The site provides assistance...

Mark Harris is sounding an alarm – or, as he puts it, staging an intervention – for corporate counsel.  Harris and Alec Guettel , the original founders 20 years ago of alternative legal services provider Axiom and, since last year, the CEO and CFO of contract management company Knowable , have taken the unusual step of posting an open letter that they describe as an unsolicited intervention for ge...

Virtually overnight, COVID-19 changed the landscape for law firms and how they serve clients. While some firms were caught unprepared – struggling to adapt to a remote work environment and lacking the technologies and procedures to ensure seamless client service and team performance – other firms made the pivot quickly. What gave these successful firms the edge?  In this episode, which was recorde...

The coronavirus crisis has created turmoil for legal education and bar admissions, as law schools have shut down their campuses and states have put off bar exams. One proposal, advocated by Jennifer L. Mnookin , dean of UCLA Law School , and Erwin Chemerinsky , dean of UC Berkeley Law School , in The National Law Journal , is for states to provisionally license law school graduates for two years,...

As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself.  Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduli...