LawNext

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 selective, fully remote, data collection from smart phones and other mobile devices.

Now the company’s CEO, Rasmussen joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how ModeOne is simplifying the collection of data from mobile devices for e-discovery, legal holds, compliance, and investigations.

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.

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 innovation in law firms and legal departments, comes at a critical juncture. In recent years, KM and innovation professionals in legal have seen their roles evolve significantly, as law firms have come to better appreciate their importance. Now, with the advent of generative AI, KM and innovation professionals are more essential than ever. 

So as the second convening of the KM&I for Legal conference approaches, DiDomenico and Fireman join LawNext to share their thoughts on the state of KM and innovation in law firms and legal organizations, including the impact AI is having on the field. They also offer a preview of what’s in store at the conference. 

By the way, if you are interested in attending the conference, you can get a 15% discount off the cost of registration with the code LAWNEXT15. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi attended the inaugural version of this conference last year, and, as he wrote in his review after the event, he found it to be substantive, engaging and thought provoking. (He also had the opportunity there to record several interviews for this podcast with some of the speakers and vendors who attended the conference.)

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.

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 Spellbook, joins host Bob Ambrogi to tell us all about the new Spellbook Associate, as well as to discuss the company’s origins and future. As you will hear, the company pivoted from its original product when Stevenson and his cofounders began exploring large language models and saw their potential for streamlining law practice. 

Stevenson, a computer engineer, founded the company in 2019 together with Daniel Di Maria, a former lawyer and now chief revenue officer, and Matt Mayers, a user experience expert and now chief experience officer. When they pivoted in 2022 to launch their AI copilot for lawyers, “customers came pouring in faster than we could keep up with,” he says. 

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.

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 it a replacement for traditional TAR or a supplement? Are there other ways in which this rapidly evolving technology can be used in discovery? 

On this week’s LawNext, we are discussing the application of generative AI in e-discovery. To do so, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three computer and data scientists from Redgrave Data, a consulting firm that specializes in e-discovery and data science. Today’s guests are:

• Dave Lewis, chief scientific officer, who has over three decades of experience in AI and statistics.

• Lenora Gray, data scientist, who has worked for more than 15 years in law firm project management and matter support roles.

• Jeremy Pickens, head of applied science, a pioneer in the fields of collaborative exploratory search and technology assisted review. 

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.

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 business at Thomson Reuters. When Laughlin stepped into that role, Agiloft had been in business for 30 years, and he succeeded a predecessor who had been CEO for nearly all that time. He came aboard just as the company had raised its first-ever outside funding round, tasked with the mission of taking the company to its next level of growth. 

During his tenure, the company has earned a reputation as a leading innovator in the CLM space, including in its development of features based on artificial intelligence, and it has significantly grown both its workforce and its global customer base. Laughlin has also strengthened his own reputation as a leader who believes that employee experience is as important as customer experience. 

In March 2021, not long after he joined Agiloft, Laughlin was our guest on this show to talk about his plans for the company. On today’s episode, he returns to discuss how Agiloft has grown during his four-year tenure and to share his thoughts on the contract lifecycle management landscape, now and into the future. 

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.

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 16 years ago and has overseen its growth into a global legal tech powerhouse, with more than 1,100 employees worldwide. 

“My ambition was always to build this into something that would be a multi-decade company, a hundred-plus year company, and a company that would leave a lasting impact on the legal industry, and a company that would transform the legal industry in a really positive way,” Newton says in the interview. “And what I see this investment round as being is, number one, a huge validation of the success Clio has had in driving that transformation, but more importantly, positioning us to even have a more transformative and more impactful next chapter to our story.”

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.

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 your client’s story, that’s how you win.’”

Soon after, Schafer set to work building Clearbrief, AI-powered software that works within Microsoft Word to help lawyers find the best facts to support their legal writing. This week, the four-year-old company announced that it had raised an additional funding round of $4 million, bringing its total funding to nearly $8 million. Along the way, it has racked up numerous awards, including Legalweek’s 2023 litigation product of the year, Clio’s 2022 Launch//Code Developer Contest, Legalweek’s 2022 new law company of the year, and the American Legal Technology Awards’ 2021 legal tech startup of the year.

Schafer is our guest today on LawNext, as she shares her journey from practicing lawyer to startup founder, describes how Clearbrief helps lawyers in their legal writing, and discusses what this latest investment means for the company and its customers.  

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.

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 August, the program will wrap up its inaugural cohort, which placed three fellows in courts in Kansas, Tennessee and Utah. But even though those three fellowships were successful, our guest today, Jason Tashea, the program’s founding director and cofounder, says its future is uncertain because its continued funding is uncertain. “These programs are expensive, they are hard to fundraise for,” he says.

In today’s episode, Tashea, an entrepreneur, educator, and award-winning journalist, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the need for and genesis of the program, the fellowships it supported this year, and his assessment of the program’s success. He also shares his thoughts more broadly on the need for innovation in the courts to address the gap in access to justice. 

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.

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 executive roles in marketing, sales and product management, all to help lead it into its next stage of growth and development: Lydia Flocchini as chief marketing officer, Darren Schleicher as chief sales officer, and Kyle Bahr as product manager of AI and other new products.

Ross Guberman, the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is our guest today to discuss the company’s history, growth, recent news, and future plans – which will include the launch of a suite of AI-enabled products. A former practicing lawyer, he was a legal writing coach and speaker when he conceived of BriefCatch, which he formally launched in 2018. 

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.

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, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project’s cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master’s degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.

Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation. 

The Free Law Project’s data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices. 

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.