When former Wall Street lawyer Jonathan Petts joined forces in 2016 with Rohan Pavuluri, then a research assistant in Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, and Mark Hansen, a software engineer, to create Upsolve, they had a simple but powerful vision: make bankruptcy filing as accessible as online tax preparation for Americans crushed by debt. 

Today, their nonprofit has helped over 16,000 low-income families discharge more than $700 million in debt through Chapter 7 bankruptcy – all at no cost to users.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Petts, now Upsolve’s CEO, and Ben Jackson, an ex-Uber driver who joined Upsolve’s founding team after his first year of law school and who is now chief product officer. They share their personal journeys that led them to create Upsolve, from Petts' experience as a big firm lawyer helping pro bono clients get fresh starts to Jackson's own struggles with $60,000 in credit card debt. 

They detail how Upsolve works, who it serves, and how they maintain quality while providing free services.They also discuss how they're leveraging AI to expand their impact, their battle against unauthorized practice of law restrictions in a groundbreaking federal lawsuit in New York, and their mission to help Americans rebuild their financial futures.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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When it comes to contract negotiations, lawyers often find themselves spending countless hours haggling over standard agreements such as NDAs and SaaS contracts, with both sides often saying more or less the same thing, but in different words. What if there was a better way? 

Today’s guests believe there is. Electra Japonas, chief legal officer at Law Insider and founder of the successful oneNDA initiative, and Preston Clark, Law Insider president, are on a mission to revolutionize contract negotiations by developing and open-sourcing a suite of standard agreements.

They started with oneNDA, which has been adopted by over 6,000 organizations and used in an estimated 10 million agreements annually, and they have just launched their oneSaaS standard. Now, they are setting their sights on developing a full library of standard, open-source agreements.

Japonas shares how her experience as a lawyer at the European Space Agency initially shaped her vision for contract standardization, and she explains the methodology behind the development of oneSaaS, which involved analysis of nearly 1,000 existing agreements and incorporated feedback from hundreds of legal professionals and SaaS providers. 

Clark joins midway through the show to discuss Law Insider's plans to build a comprehensive ecosystem of standardized agreements, supported by AI-powered contract automation technology. He outlines how the company plans to transform routine contract work while maintaining its commitment to keeping these standards freely available to the legal community.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• LEX Reception, Never miss a call, with expert answering service for Lawyers.

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

In the United States, we face a staggering crisis in access to justice, with over 90% of low-income Americans' civil legal needs estimated to be going unmet. But what if there was a way to dramatically expand legal help by empowering a new category of legal helpers? 

That's exactly what today's guest, Nikole Nelson, is working to achieve as CEO of Frontline Justice. After 25 years as a legal aid lawyer in Alaska, Nelson now leads this national nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing and supporting "community justice workers" – people who are not lawyers but who are trained to provide essential legal assistance to those who cannot afford attorneys. 

Nelson was a guest on this show a year ago, shortly after Frontline Justice was founded and she was named CEO. She returns today to catch us up on what has happened since then across the country towards her ultimate goal of bringing justice workers to every U.S. state. 

She reports that five states now have laws in place that authorize justice workers and another 20 states are now in the process of adopting or considering these programs. To facilitate these developments, her organization has launched a National Taskforce on Community Justice Worker Training.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• LEX Reception, Never miss a call, with expert answering service for Lawyers.

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Earlier this month, the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States, held its annual Innovations in Technology Conference in Phoenix. This year’s conference was particularly special for two reasons. For one, it was the conference’s 25th anniversary, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Technology Initiative Grants program that was the genesis of the conference. 

For another, this year’s conference followed the official retirement in November of Glenn Rawdon, the person who got the conference started in the first place and who oversaw it all these years. As program counsel at the LSC since 1999, it was Rawdon’s job to assist legal services programs with their technology efforts, manage the LSC’s technology grants, and make this conference happen every year. 

Rawdon is our guest this week, as he sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to share the origin story and evolution of the two groundbreaking LSC initiatives he helped launch and oversee — the TIG program and the ITC conference (long known as the TIG conference). 

From the conference’s humble beginnings as a gathering of 32 people in New Orleans in 2000, Rawdon explains how it grew into what many now consider the premier global event focused on technology and access to justice, this year drawing 700 attendees and 150 presenters from around the world. He also discusses how the TIG program, which started with a $7.5 million budget funding mainly website projects, evolved to support more sophisticated technology initiatives aimed at expanding access to legal services.

Drawing from his unique background as a solo practitioner who embraced technology in the 1980s to improve his own efficiency, Rawdon shares insights about the initially tentative but gradually expanding role of technology in legal aid organizations. He discusses key milestones like the development of document assembly tools, online intake systems, and statewide legal information websites — innovations that helped transform how legal aid is delivered.

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

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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From legal aid attorney to legal tech innovator, Sateesh Nori brings a unique perspective to the intersection of artificial intelligence and access to justice. 

After spending two decades in the trenches as a housing lawyer at legal aid offices in New York City, Nori now bridges multiple worlds – continuing his legal aid work at the Legal Aid Society of NYC while also serving as an adjunct clinical professor at NYU Law School in its eviction defense clinic and working as a senior legal innovation strategist at Just-Tech LLC, a technology consulting firm that focuses on legal services providers.  

He recently partnered with Housing Court Answers, a nonprofit tenants’ rights organization in NYC, and Josef, the legal automation company, to develop and launch Roxanne, an AI-powered tool to help tenants understand their repair rights, and he believes artificial intelligence could be the key to finally making meaningful progress in closing the justice gap. 

As if all that were not enough to keep Nori busy, he recently published a memoir, Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court, and gave a TEDx talk, How A Chatbot Can Save Someone From Homelessness. 

Today, in a conversation recorded live at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology conference in Phoenix last week, Nori and host Bob Ambrogi discuss why he believes that AI is as transformative as electricity, how he is using it in his own work, and why he believes law schools are failing to prepare students for the AI revolution.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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Anastasia Boyko likes to say that she’s Goldilocks-ed her way through her career. True, it’s been a varied career, as she’s tried out different roles, but it is a career that has taken her full circle, from Yale Law School, where she graduated, and then eventually back to Yale Law to create a program in leadership for lawyers, and from Salt Lake City, where she grew up after she and her mother fled Soviet-era Ukraine, and then back to that city as chief innovation officer at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. 

Along the way, Boyko has learned a thing or two about the roles of leadership and innovation in legal education, and she has strong opinions about why law schools should do better at preparing students to be both leaders and innovators. In today’s LawNext, Boyko joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the journey of her Goldilocks-ed career and her insights on leadership and innovation, as well as ac-cess to justice. 

After graduating from Yale Law School, Boyko began her career in private practice as a tax lawyer. She went on to hold diverse professional positions, including law librarian, Supreme Court intern, banker, yoga teacher, wellness entrepreneur, and career coach. She returned to Yale Law as the inaugural dean of the school’s Tsai Leadership Program, where she developed an innovative leadership program for lawyers, and returned to the University of Utah’s law school, first as director of non-J.D. programs and then as chief innovation officer.

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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• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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On Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned by lawyers can practice law. 

The pilot, which will last for 10 years, is designed to test whether entity regulation will increase access to justice by enhancing access to affordable and reliable legal and law-related services. Entities approved to operate under the pilot will be allowed to practice law, but only under strict conditions that limit the duration of their operations and that require active monitoring and oversight. 

To discuss the development and details of this pilot, we are joined today by two guests representing the two organizations that proposed this pilot to the court and that will now be tasked with partnering to get it up and running. They are:

• Terra Nevitt, executive director of the Washington State Bar Association, and

• Craig Shank, a Washington lawyer and member of the Washington Supreme Court’s Practice of Law Board. 

Their share their perspectives on how this pilot could enhance access to justice and what the development means for regulatory reform more broadly. 

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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On today’s LawNext: we hand over the podcast to NotebookLM to discuss the state of law practice management technology. 

If you haven’t heard of NotebookLM, it is a generative AI tool from Google that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions. Its output sounds a whole lot like, well, a podcast, with two hosts chatting it up about your documents. 

To quote Google’s own description, “With one click, two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on your sources. They summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth.”

So we decided to give it a try.

Back in September, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote a four-part series on his LawSites blog called, “The Shrinking Ownership of Law Practice Management Technology.” It was a deep dive into how ownership of law practice management software for solo and small law firms has been consolidated under just six major ownership groups. 

We loaded the four parts of that series into NotebookLM and asked it to generate its audio overview. What you’ll hear today is the discussion it generated, followed by Bob’s thoughts on what it produced. The NotebookLM audio is about 15 minutes long, and Bob’s comments will come after that plays. 

It is important to keep in mind that the audio generated by NotebookLM is not simply a summary. The two speakers do summarize key points from Bob’s articles, but they also add interpretations and perspectives that are nowhere to be found in the original source material. 

Here are the articles on which the audio is based:

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 1 of 4): A Market Dominated by Just Six Ownership Groups. 

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 2 of 4): A Scorecard of Who Owns What.

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 3 of 4): Future Development and Market Opportunities.

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 4 of 4): Wrapping It All Up.

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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You cannot have innovation without adoption. That was a theme I heard repeatedly when I attended the Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal conference in New York City in October. Our guest today, Paul Henry, would take that a step further and say you do not really have adoption without engagement. 

Henry is the founder and CEO of NGAGE Intelligence, a platform that provides law firms with highly granular and comprehensive behavioral analytics to help them understand whether, how and by whom their communication, collaboration and AI tools are being used.  

NGAGE was founded on the notion of employee engagement and how analytics can be used to measure and improve it. At the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Henry to learn more about Ngage and how the analytics it provides can drive adoption, engagement and governance. 

A note that this was recorded live at the conference, as the morning keynote speech was being piped throughout the conference area, so I apologize for the background noise.

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• ShareFile, 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.

Everlaw for Good is a program run by the e-discovery company Everlaw, through which it makes its software available at no cost to legal aid organizations, nonprofit organizations, and investigative journalists. 

One beneficiary of that program is the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights nonprofit that works to seek justice on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including torture, genocide, and war crimes. At the recent Everlaw Summit, the CJA’s work using the Everlaw platform was honored with the Everlaw for Good award. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the summit, which was held in San Francisco in October, and he had the opportunity to sit down to record this conversation with two of the CJA’s lawyers, along with the director of the Everlaw for Good program. Today’s guests are:

• Claret Vargas, senior staff attorney at CJA. 

• Daniel McLaughlin, senior staff attorney at CJA.

• Joanne Sprague, director of Everlaw for Good. 

They discuss the Everlaw for Good program and the specific impact it has had on CJA’s work. 

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• ShareFile, 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.