At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal designed to enable its legal professionals to more easily access important resources and more...

Recently, the law practice management company Clio launched Clio Duo, its generative AI legal assistant. On today’s LawNext, Jonathan Watson, Clio’s chief technology officer, joins the show to discuss Duo’s development, capabilities and future direction.He also talks about some of the other products Clio recently launched, including native accounting and custom reporting.  Watson and LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, in...

When Zach Posner was last on this podcast, it was 2021 and he was less than a year into having cofounded The LegalTech Fund, the first venture capital firm to be laser-focused on law and legal technology. Since then, his firm, of which he is managing director, has gone on to build up a portfolio of more than 60 legal tech companies in which it invests.  His firm has also launched his own conference, the TLTF Summit, which will convene for the third straight year starting Dec. 4 in Key...

At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, Clio released its ninth annual Legal Trends Report, a report that uses both survey responses and anonymized data from Clio users to paint a picture of key trends in law practice and legal technology. This year’s report has some intriguing findings on lawyers’ adoption of AI and the types of tasks within a law office that could be automated using AI.The survey also looks at trends in hourly and flat fee billing, and includes the results of...

This has been a significant year for the law practice management company Clio, which in July raised a record-setting $900 million financing round – the largest ever for a legal tech company, and which recently wrapped up its 12th annual Clio Cloud Conference, its largest ever with some 2,600 attendees in person in Austin, Texas, and almost as many attending virtually from all over the globe.  At the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a live interview with a “Clio power trio”...

We’ve just returned from the Clio Cloud Conference, held this year in Austin, Texas, where, in what has become an annual tradition, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton for a live interview.  At the conference, Clio launched Clio Duo, the generative AI legal assistant integrated into Clio’s flagship product, Clio Manage. In this interview, Newton discusses what Duo does and why he believes generative AI is a game-changer for lawyers, more significant even...

One year ago, in September 2023, James Schellhase was named chief executive officer of the alternative legal services provider UnitedLex. The move was particularly significant, as he was only the second person ever to hold that title at the company, having succeeded Dan Reed, who cofounded UnitedLex in 2006 and had been its CEO ever since. Reed is now chairman of the board. A year into his tenure, Schellhase joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how UnitedLex is seeking to embrace...

At its recent customer conference in Salt Lake City, called LEX Summit, the case management company Filevine unveiled a number of product releases and updates. Among them were several products for litigators driven by generative AI, including a first-of-its-kind tool, Depo CoPilot, that helps guide a lawyer during a deposition, and another, DemandsAI, that generates settlement demand letters in the lawyer’s own voice and style.  On today’s LawNext, we do a deep dive into those new products...

In today’s episode, we feature three impromptu conversations with leaders of the case management company Filevine. Last week, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was in Salt Lake City to attend LEX Summit, the Filevine customer conference. While there, he snagged three of the company’s top executives for brief, impromptu conversations about the company, its products, and the conference.  In today’s show, you will hear from: Ryan Anderson, the company’s cofounder and CEO.  Nathan Morris, cofounder...

Matt Rasmussen had worked for some 20 years in litigation technology and support at major law firms, Fortune 500 companies, and litigation services providers, when he wondered why mobile collections had to be so time-consuming, inefficient and invasively overbroad.  As he looked into it, he realized there was a better way to manage mobile collections. Two years ago, Rasmussen and his cofounders brought ModeOne to the legal market. ModeOne’s SaaS technology offers the industry’s only...

On Oct. 17 and 18, 2024, two of the legal industry’s leading experts on knowledge management and innovation, Patrick DiDomenico, founder and CEO of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president of Fireman & Company, which is owned by Epiq, the global provider of technology-enabled legal services, will present the second-annual KM&I for Legal Conference in New York City.  The conference, which focuses on the latest developments and best practices in knowledge management and...

In what it says is the first AI agent for law, the legal technology company Spellbook just released Spellbook Associate, an application that can plan and execute complex, multi-step workflows in transactional matters, much as an associate would. This is the same company that introduced the first generative AI copilot for contract drafting and review back in 2022, even before ChatGPT was released to the public.  In today’s episode of LawNext, Scott Stevenson, the cofounder and CEO of...

For at least two decades, artificial intelligence has been used in e-discovery to help surface and prioritize review of potentially responsive documents from large document collections. But while technology-assisted review (TAR) has traditionally been driven by AI in the form of supervised machine learning, some vendors and e-discovery professionals are starting to experiment with the use of generative AI in its place.  So how effective is generative AI for document review in e-discovery? Is...

Last month, KKR, a major global investment firm, announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft, the contract lifecycle management company. As part of the deal, the growth equity firm FTV Capital, already an Agiloft investor, is making an additional investment, and another growth equity firm, JMI Equity, is joining as a new investor. The deal was a feather in the cap for Eric Laughlin, who joined Agiloft as CEO in 2020 after leading the Pangea3...

As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio’s founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview.  In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today’s announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investment and what it means for Clio, its customers, and the legal industry. Newton founded the company...

Jacqueline Schafer, the founder and CEO of Clearbrief, was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later old me, the thought crystalized for her, “If you can show the judge the evidence that really tells...

Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public’s access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a catalyst for innovation to enable courts to better serve the legal needs of the public.  In...

This has been a notable year for BriefCatch, a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company’s raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics.  All of that culminated in BriefCatch’s announcement last week of its hires of three legal tech veterans into key...

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.  But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today’s episode,...

In recent months, Epiq, a global company providing technology-enabled legal services, has announced new artificial intelligence and analytics features built using the AI capabilities of Amazon Web Services. These new features include a framework for building, training and deploying bespoke machine learning models as secure APIs for customers; integration of Amazon Bedrock for custom copilot development using a range of commercially available large language models; and other features. Joining...

As this episode is released, Aderant, a technology company that provides business and practice management software for mid- to large-sized law firms worldwide, is in the midst of its Global Momentum user conference, taking place in Nashville. At the conference, the company made a major news announcement – the launch of Stridyn, a new cloud platform that will form the foundation for all the cloud and AI applications the company offers.  That launch marks the culmination of a year in which...

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...