Almost exactly one year ago, a new legal tech startup, The Contract Network, came out of stealth, with a mission to “radically accelerate the time for contract negotiations'' through an AI-powered contract collaboration platform where all parties to a deal engage in a secure and neutral environment.  The company’s cofounder and CEO, Jim Wagner, is a legal tech veteran with a track record of starting and leading successful companies in contracting and e-discovery, including having cofounded...

With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certified as such by the organization Fairly Trained.  To discuss how KL3M was developed and why this...

Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician, developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns.  But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha, expanding its platform to help law firms manage the new normal of hybrid offices and return to work, and it has continued to...

With the tagline “Making Knowledge Work,” the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported, it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.    But over the 30 years since its founding, it hit some speed bumps, of sorts, after it went through a series of acquisitions...

March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project, it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.  The massive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.  ...

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 –...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...