This year marks the 10th anniversary of Logikcull, the company that CEO Andy Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang founded with the goal of automating and democratizing e-discovery. But the company actually evolved out of an earlier company the pair founded in 2004, Logik Systems, to digitize archaic paper-based discovery workflows where lawyers would print emails to paper to review them. While that first company saw rapid growth and even made the Inc 500 in 2009 at number 181, the Great Recession took...

As vice president, Data Analytics and Operational Excellence, at Wolters Kluwer, Abhishek Mittal is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision making in core operational processes. He leads a large global team of process engineers, design thinkers, data scientists and domain experts to develop expert solutions for both internal processes and new products.  In 2021, Wolters Kluwer’s Business Intelligence Group named him a...

Over the past year, the sibling legal technology companies MyCase and LawPay have published a series of reports on law practice, including benchmark reports based on anonymized data from the two companies’ customers, as well as an in-depth 2022 year-end legal industry report, based on a survey of over 2,300 legal professionals. Together, they provide an in-depth look at the state of legal practice in the wake of the pandemic.  All of the reports were written by Nicole Black, who joins host...

Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI, the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson Sonsini, the law firm known not only for representing tech pioneers, but also for its own tech...

It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world’s largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.  It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and potentially even threaten the longstanding legal research duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis. So...

With the news last week of the merger of legal research companies Fastcase and vLex, it seemed a good time to revisit our 2019 interview with the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal. The occasion of this interview was the company’s 20th anniversary, and we recorded it live, on the exhibit hall floor, at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.  In this interview, Walters and Rosenthal recount how, as two young associates at the law firm Covington...

In the 15 years since he and Rian Gauvreau cofounded the legal practice management company Clio in 2008, Jack Newton has learned  a thing or two about what it takes to build a successful company. As its CEO since the start, Newton has overseen the growth of the company from fledgling startup to a centaur with annual recurring revenue of over $100 million, a valuation of over $1 billion, and a workforce of nearly 1,000 employees. Newton has won numerous awards for his leadership, including...

Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world’s first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s just-released latest version of its...

Two years after D. Gordon Smith was appointed dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.” Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean in the school’s history.  So how did he do in pursuit...

On this episode of LawNext, we take a closer look at Smokeball, the law practice management company whose roots are in Australia but that is firmly entrenched in the United States. In fact, after Smokeball was founded in 2010, its very first customer was a law firm in Chicago.  Appropriately, then, it was in Chicago last week, during ABA TECHSHOW, that host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a face-to-face conversation with two of Smokeball’s top executives, Jane Oxley, chief revenue officer for...

Kathryn Tewson was a little-known paralegal when, on Jan. 24, she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That day, she published a scathing series of tweets recounting her investigation of DoNotPay, the company that describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” She concluded that the company’s supposed AI-driven products were little more than smoke and mirrors and that its representations about its products constituted consumer fraud.  Her findings stirred intense interest both on...

On this episode of LawNext: Joshua Browder, founder of DoNotPay. Browder achieved international recognition when, at just 17 years old in 2015, he founded DoNotPay, touted as the world’s first robot lawyer, to help people appeal parking tickets. The company claims the app has saved motorists in the U.S. and UK many millions of dollars. DoNotPay went on to release a series of apps designed to help consumers – and, more recently, small businesses – solve common legal problems, all without the...

Last week, Documate, the no-code document automation platform, rebranded as Gavel, a move designed to better reflect the company’s mission to become the platform of choice for legal professionals and legal organizations wanting to “productize” the delivery of legal services by packaging services as online legal products. Gavel founder and CEO Dorna Moini joins LawNext this week to discuss how her company has evolved from document automation to come to support law firms, courts, legal aid...

When this podcast launched in July 2018, the very first guest on the very first episode was Nicole Bradick, who six months earlier had launched the legal technology design and development company Theory and Principle. As the company marks its fifth anniversary, Bradick returns to LawNext with news that the company is branching off in a new direction, launching T&P Studio, an arm of the business devoted to co-developing legal tech products in partnership with others.  The new business...

Axiom, a company that is one of the longest-running alternative legal services providers, this week stepped into the world of regulated legal services as it formally launched Axiom Advice & Counsel, an Arizona law firm. The move was enabled by the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision last May to grant Axiom a license as an alternative business structure.  That follows from Arizona’s historic decision in 2020 to become the first U.S. state to eliminate the ban on non-lawyer ownership of law...

Over the course of 2022, the principals of LexFusion conferred with 435 law departments and 250 law firms. Why? Simply put, because that is what the company does. It is a go-to-market company that defines its purpose as “to grease the gears of commerce and rapidly increase the adoption of legal innovation.” On behalf of a group of curated legal innovation companies, it works with legal departments and law firms to help them understand how innovative products can benefit them.  As a result of...

Since the December release of Open AI’s GPT-3.5 model, and the related ChatGPT, speculation has been rampant about how this next generation of artificial intelligence might upend the legal profession. But as others have been speculating, two legal scholars and scientists, Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito, put GPT 3.5 to the task, having it perform that most anxiety-inducing of tests along the path to becoming a lawyer – taking the bar exam.  How did it do? Katz and Bommarito recently...

On Nov. 7, 2022, at the NetDocuments Inspire 2022 conference for its customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi moderated a fireside chat with four legal innovation leaders on the trends driving their organizations and legal teams and how they are addressing current challenges to set up their organizations for the next decade of success. NetDocuments and the four panelists have graciously consented to sharing the recording of that chat with the listeners of LawNext.  The four...

Brianna Joaseus and Edrius Stagg are two law students at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, La., who spent nine months earlier this year tackling systemic racism in the legal system. On the latest LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their projects and how their work impacted their goals for their legal careers.  Joaseus and Stagg were two of 18 law students from six law schools who participated this year in the second year of a fellowship program sponsored by the...

Factor, the managed services company that spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, describes itself as providing “complex legal work at scale” for the corporate legal market it serves. But more recently, it has begun to position itself as falling within a new category of alternative legal services. It calls this new category “integrated law,” and describes it as bringing together the expertise of traditional law, the efficiency of new law, and the business alignment...

Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, one of the speakers was Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis for Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. He was there to speak about a unique partnership between LexisNexis and NetDocuments called Highlights, which embeds LexisNexis case analysis and intelligence technology directly into the NetDocuments platform, enriching legal documents and making them easier to find and retrieve. A...

Over seven years as a litigator of complex commercial and antitrust cases, Dan Hauck had become frustrated over how difficult it was for legal teams to collaborate around matters. In 2014, he left his law firm, Bryan Cave, to start ThreadKM, a matter-centric legal collaboration platform. As the product evolved, it developed integrations with the document management platform NetDocuments, and in 2017, NetDocuments acquired ThreadKM, resulting in the NetDocuments product ndThread.  Now, Hauck...

Last week, the cloud-based content management company NetDocuments was in Denver for its annual three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was there also, where he sat down for an exclusive live interview with the company’s two top executives, Josh Baxter, who has been CEO since 2018, and Alvin Tedjamulia, one of the company’s original three founders and its CTO since 1999. Just before Bob flipped-on the record button, Josh and Alvin revealed...

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Ronnie Gurion, chief operating officer  With 20 years of experience leading marketplace, e-commerce, and SaaS businesses to achieve rapid global expansion and growth, Gurion plays a pivotal role in shaping Clio’s next chapter. As the previous GM and global head of Uber for Business (U4B), Gurion brings a...