Episodios

  • InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.

    Our guest today, Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company is on a mission to innovate and even revolutionize litigation services and the litigation workflow. Already, its products are used every day by lawyers throughout the United States to file court cases, track court dockets, search court records, and arrange service of process, and it integrates with most major law practice management platforms.

    InfoTrack in the U.S. actually grew out of a company founded in Australia in 2012, when it was spun out of the LEAP law practice management platform. InfoTrack expanded first to the U.K. and then in 2016 to the U.S.

    Since coming to this country, it has expanded both organically and through acquisitions, including in 2020, when it acquired two legal tech companies, LawToolBox, the court calendaring company, and One Legal, a California provider of litigation support services such as court filing, service of process, and document retrieval, and in 2021, when it acquired Lawgical, the parent company of ServeNow, Serve Manager, and the Legal Talk Network.

    Watts has been with the company since before it spun out from LEAP, and says he was employee number one when it expanded to the U.S. He and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the company’s history, where it is today, and its plans for future growth.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

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  • The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.

    With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them -- legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance.

    One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality.

    On today’s episode, we’ll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer:

    Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation.

    Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.

    Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America.

    One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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  • Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry’s first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product.

    At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr’s cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections.

    Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

    Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • On this episode of LawNext: A conversation about Thomson Reuters’ strategy around generative artificial intelligence with two of the executives most directly responsible for its development and implementation.

    In a year dominated by discussion of generative AI and its potential impact on the legal profession, Thomson Reuters has played a leading role. It started in June, when the company announced its $650 million acquisition of the legal research and AI company Casetext and the CoCounsel generative AI tool Casetext had developed in collaboration with OpenAI.

    Then, in November, Thomson Reuters made good on its promise to integrate generative AI within its flagship legal research platform, introducing AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision. Soon after that, it rolled out generative AI within Practical Law, its legal know-how product.

    What does this all mean for legal research and legal software, now and into the future? Today we go deep into TR’s AI development with two of the company’s leaders in this area:

    Mike Dahn, senior vice president and head of Westlaw product management.

    Joel Hron, head of artificial intelligence and TR Labs.

    We talk about the development of AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision, the company’s broader AI product strategy, its acquisition of CoCounsel and where that fits in its AI strategy, how the company is protecting against hallucinations and ensuring security, and the future of AI at Thomson Reuters and more broadly.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

    Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035.

    In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebecca Sandefur, one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice (who was on LawNext in 2020); Matthew Burnett, senior program officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF); Jim Sandman, president emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (on LawNext in 2019); and other notable names.

    On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nikole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice. Before starting there in November, Nelson had been executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation, where she was instrumental in launching a statewide community justice worker project that won the 2019 World Justice Challenge. She was also instrumental in bringing about an Alaska Supreme Court rule change in 2022 allowing justice workers supervised by Alaska Legal Services to provide limited scope legal help in certain situations.

    Nelson describes how justice workers helped Alaska Legal Services better serve the legal problems of people across the state’s remotest regions, and how new models of justice workers in other states could similarly help reach those who are not now receiving adequate help for their legal problems. She also recognizes that Frontline Justice faces obstacles in achieving its mission, and she shares her thoughts on how it can overcome them.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap.

    Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC’s first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab’s advisory board.

    Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today’s episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice, and since joining the AAA, she is credited with having “supercharged” its innovation efforts – particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI.

    Also critical to those innovation efforts has been Diana Didia, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at the AAA, who had helped ignite the association’s innovation efforts well before McCormack arrived and whose work not only set the stage for continued innovation but has been critical in helping the organization drive forward into embracing generative AI.

    Our guests on today’s LawNext, McCormack and Didia – along with many others on their team – have been working full bore over the past year to drive further innovation at the AAA and to integrate AI into its own work and into the broader field of dispute resolution. They recently launched the AAAi Lab, a website supporting AAA users, arbitrators, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI, and also ClauseBuilder, a generative AI tool for writing clear and effective ADR clauses.

    When we spoke, they were preparing to present this week on the AAA’s innovation efforts and its adoption of AI as part of a panel at Legalweek in New York.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?

    This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district from using third-party service providers such as PacerPro, RECAP or DocketBird. That order came on the heels of a memorandum from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that – while it didn’t outright ban the use of such service providers – it did urge courts to warn filers to be cautious about using third-party services and software.

    Were these actions justified? Is there reason to be concerned about third-party providers? And what exactly is the best way to protect sealed documents?

    To answer these questions, the legal tech company PacerPro brought together a panel of experts for a live program presented during the annual meeting of the National Docketing Association in Boston in October. On the panel were:

    Josh Blandi, CEO and cofounder of UniCourt.

    Sara Collins, vice president of product management, File & ServeXpress.

    Gavin McGrane, cofounder of PacerPro.

    Snorri Ogata, chief technology officer at Tech Unicorn and formerly chief information officer at the Los Angeles Superior court and, before that, at the Orange County Superior Court, two of the largest court systems in the United States..

    I moderated the panel and recorded it for this podcast. Thanks to the panelists, the NDA, and PacerPro for allowing me to do that.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he and his team decided to build the solution they needed for themselves.

    By 2018, they had dubbed the software ZenCase, and in 2021, after continuing to develop and refine it, they migrated their first 50-plus user law firm onto the platform and officially launched it commercially to the legal market at large.

    On today’s LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Fraser, who is now the CEO of ZenCase, and Olivia Mockel, its president and COO. Mockel recently moved to ZenCase after several years in leadership roles at other practice management companies, including most recently as CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis.

    So what makes ZenCase different from other practice management platforms and what types of law firms is it suited for? In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Fraser and Mockel about all that and more, including how they are incorporating generative AI and their plans for future development.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley, who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter, and Ilona Logvinova, managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.

    Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference in New York City, sharing their views and insights on innovation from their unique perspectives. Shortly after they spoke, they sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record this conversation about innovation in legal.

    Note that since we recorded this conversation, Dooley has left Goodwin Procter.

    This is the third LawNext episode featuring conversations recorded at the conference. To listen to the prior two, check out:

    Two KM Keynotes – Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in Legal, in which we spoke with the conference’s two keynote speakers.

    The Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of Centari, featuring interviews with two of the startups that attended the conference.

    The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents

    Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City.

    First up is Nicole Clark, cofounder and CEO of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in January 2002.) Then, in the second part of the show, we speak with the cofounders of Centari, an AI-powered knowledge management and dealmaking platform, Kevin Walker, the company’s CEO, and Bryan Gilbert Davis, its CTO.

    LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and recorded both of these interviews live there, where both of these companies were sponsors and exhibitors. The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.

    For more from the conference, check out the last episode of LawNext, which featured interviews with the two keynote speakers from that conference: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the "one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking"

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • Today’s episode features two interviews on disruption and innovation in legal, with the two keynote speakers from the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL Supply Chain Americas.

    This conference, held in New York in October, was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. This was the first year of this conference, which was organized to fill the gap left when another KM conference – one that had long been held in New York – moved to Chicago.

    The two-day conference featured two keynote speakers. Andrea Alliston kicked off the first day with a talk on leading through change, complexity and disruption. Mark Smolik gave the second-day keynote, speaking on the topic of winning strategies for new business: insights on innovation from a chief legal officer.

    LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and sat down live with each of the speakers after their keynotes for the interviews in today’s episode.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    TrialPad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • Dru Armstrong was named CEO of AffiniPay, the parent company of LawPay, in July 2021. Less than a year later, AffiniPay shook up the legal tech landscape by acquiring MyCase, one of the leading law practice management platforms, in a deal that also included four other practice management products: CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, Soluno for billing and accounting (which it recently sold), and Woodpecker for document automation.

    One reason that deal was so notable was that, until then, LawPay had been the legal tech equivalent of Switzerland – a neutral integration partner with virtually every practice management platform out there. But in acquiring one of the major players in the market, that legal tech Switzerland seemed to suddenly lose its neutrality.

    Now, two and a half years into the job as Affinipay CEO, Armstrong is our guest on this episode of LawNext to discuss that acquisition, where the company is today, and why the marriage of fintech and legal tech matters to legal practitioners. She also shares her plans for the company’s future, including how it will incorporate generative AI across its various products.

    Armstrong and host Bob Ambrogi spoke live in Miami at the TLTF Summit, a conference produced by the Legal Tech Fund, a VC fund focused on legal tech, where she spoke on a panel on the intersection of fintech and legal tech. She was previously on this podcast in June 2022, at the time the MyCase acquisition was announced, and was also on our Legaltech Week podcast.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five “cluster projects” that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact.

    The students – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today’s LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work:

    Whitney Triplet, who is in her final semester at Southern University Law Center.

    Paul Campbell, a part-time student in his fourth year at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.

    Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.

    In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes:

    On LawNext Podcast: Two Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal System.

    On LawNext Podcast: The Legal Fellows Tackling Systemic Racism in Law.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts.

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • On this episode of LawNext: An interview recorded live with Erika Harold, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, an organization charged with working to enhance civility and professionalism and to eliminate bias within the legal profession.

    A former litigator, Harold was named executive director in April 2022, to succeed retiring executive director Jayne Reardon, who has also been a guest on this podcast. A nationally recognized advocate of bullying prevention efforts, Harold led the commission this summer in launching a statewide initiative to assess the prevalence and impact of bullying in the legal profession and recommend best practices for preventing it.

    Erika is also a former Miss America – the sixth Black woman ever to hold that title – and, as you’ll hear, she entered that competition to help fund her education at Harvard Law School, from which she graduated debt free. In 2014, she ran in the Republican primary for Congress to represent Illinois's 13th congressional district. In 2018, she was the Republican candidate for Illinois attorney general.

    LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down live with Harold to record this conversation during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    TrialPad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • On today’sLawNext, it’s a Clio double header, featuring two separate interviews with two of Clio’s top product-focused executives – one with Jonathan Watson, its chief technology officer, and the other with Hemant Kashyap, chief product officer – both recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.

    Even though I interviewed Watson and Kashyap separately, their roles at Clio are intertwined. As CTO, Watson was previously responsible for both technology and product. That changed last June, when Kashyap joined the company as its first chief product officer. Now, they tell me, they often work as partners on developing products and delivering them to Clio’s customers.

    At the conference, Clio introduced an array of major new products and product updates, in what it called its most expansive product update ever in its 15-year history. These included Clio Duo, a generative artificial intelligence tool that will be built natively into all Clio products starting in 2024; a personal injury add-on for Clio offering a suite of features for PI lawyers; and Clio File, an electronic court filing and service feature built directly in Clio Manage, making it the first law practice management platform to directly incorporate e-filing.

    In both of today’s interviews, we talk about those new products and others, as well as the company’s longer-term product roadmap. Both Watson and Kashyapp also share their thoughts on generative AI and its potential impact on legal technology and legal practice.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents

    CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • Did Pras Michel’s lawyer botch his defense by relying on an AI program to create his closing argument? That’s what the former Fugees rapper claims in asking a court to overturn his April conviction in an illegal foreign influence scheme.

    Michel says his lawyer, David Kenner, made a “frivolous and ineffectual” closing argument because he relied on an experimental AI program called EyeLevel.ai. Michel also alleges that Kenner and cocounsel Alon Israely had undisclosed financial interests in the AI company that motivated them to use the AI in his case as a marketing ploy.

    But Neil Katz, the cofounder and COO of EyeLevel.ai, calls those claims “creative fiction” and “total nonsense.” Katz joins LawNext today to give his version of what happened in the Michel case and to tell us more about EyeLevel.ai, a company he says helps businesses and legal professionals build hallucination-free AI applications using private data.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts

    Caret, the award winning practice management platform work or document and workflow automation.

    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

  • On Oct. 9, during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, the law practice management company Clio released the 2023 edition of its annual Legal Trends Report. Since it was first published in 2016, the report has established itself as a benchmark of the state of law practice and technology adoption among smaller law firms.

    Among the findings in this year’s report were two pieces of particularly good news: Law firms have seen a remarkable increase in productivity in the years since that first report came out in 2016, and legal professionals are actively embracing technology to boost their efficiency and performance. This year’s report also introduces a new metric for measuring a law firm’s financial health: Lockup.

    With much to unpack from this year’s Legal Trends Report, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio and one of the principal members of the team that develops the report, to get all the details. They spoke in a live interview recorded during the Clio conference.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

    Trial Pad: Organize, annotate, highlight, and callout documents; then dynamically present at trial or mediation

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  • This week, LawNext veers slightly off-topic for a conversation about wrongful convictions. But, as you’ll hear from our guests, there is a legal tech angle, even to this.

    At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Brian Banks, whose aspirations for a career in the NFL were sidetracked when, at age 16, he was falsely accused of sexual assault, resulting in his accepting a plea bargain that put him in prison for five years. It was an experience that has made Banks a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform.

    Joining Banks for that conversation was Michael Semanchik, the lawyer who helped clear Banks’ name while working as managing attorney of the California Innocence Project. Recently, Semanchik launched a new project, The Innocence Center, where he is executive director. He also hosts one of the best new podcasts of 2023, the soon-to-be-renamed California Innocence Center Podcast.

    For Banks, there was a happy ending to the story, in that he did clear his name and he even got to play in the NFL. But wrongful convictions continue to plague the criminal justice system. Today we’ll hear Banks’ story and explore what the system can do to keep other innocent people out of prison.

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  • In his keynote address at the recently concluded 2023 Clio Cloud Conference, Jack Newton, the founder and CEO of Clio, said that we are at a time in the legal industry when leveraging technology is more important for lawyers than ever before. Technology, he said, enables lawyers to amplify their impact, and when they do that, they can achieve exponential outcomes.

    This was the 11th year of the Clio Cloud Conference, and the 15th year in business for the company that produces it. In a recent post about the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote that Clio has grown over the years to become one of the largest and most influential companies in legal tech; and that Newton has become somewhat of an industry icon, whose ClioCon keynote is always a seminal event of the conference.

    A few hours after Newton delivered his keynote, Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for a wide-ranging conversation about the conference, the company, and the state of law practice and the legal profession, including findings from the just-released 2023 edition of the Clio Legal Trends Report.

    Thank You To Our Sponsors

    This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

    Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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