Daniel Lewis has witnessed legal technology's evolution from multiple vantage points that few others can claim. As a Stanford law student in 2012, he and classmate Nik Reed co-founded the legal research startup Ravel Law with the audacious goal of taking on LexisNexis and Westlaw using machine learning and data analytics – at a time when such challengers were few and far between. Not only was Ravel Law pioneering in its own right, but it also spearheaded and funded the Caselaw Access Project, an ambitious partnership with Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab to digitize and provide free and open access to every official court decision ever published in the United States.

After Ravel's acquisition by LexisNexis in 2017, Lewis spent the next five years leading product teams within the legal research giant, including as vice president and general manager of its Practical Guidance and analytics products. This dual perspective – startup founder turned corporate executive – helped shape his understanding of what works and what doesn't when building technology for lawyers.

Today, as CEO and global chief executive of LegalOn Technologies, Lewis leads a 600-person company that is tackling contract review with a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying solely on tech-enabled services or raw AI that can hallucinate legal advice, LegalOn combines large language models with attorney-developed playbooks to help in-house legal teams achieve up to 85% time savings on contract review. The company just raised $50 million, for a total raise of $200 million across multiple funding rounds – which Lewis says makes it the most well-funded AI company focused on in-house contract review – and announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI agents for legal workflows.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Lewis shares hard-won insights about the realities of legal tech entrepreneurship, from the "deranged" confidence required to challenge industry giants as a law student to the leadership lessons learned managing teams through multiple business transformations. He discusses why the current moment represents the most significant opportunity for legal tech innovation in decades, how AI agents will reshape routine legal work, and what he's learned about building technology that lawyers don't just try once but actually integrate into their daily practices.

Related episodes:

• From Ravel Cofounder to Knowable CEO, Nik Reed Has Learned that Building Quality AI for Legal Takes A Lot of Hard Work.

• On LawNext: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen.

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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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?

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The e-discovery company Reveal Data recently announced that it will launch its new generative AI-powered document review platform, called "aji," in late September. Notably, the company said it is offering full access to the platform at no cost through Dec. 31, in order to enable "the entire legal community to explore and master the next era in GenAI review innovation."

To discuss the launch of aji, today's episode features Reveal's founder and CEO Wendell Jisa, together with the company's chief technology officer, Matthew Brothers-McGrew. This launch, Jisa says, represents the culmination of a deeply personal 30-year journey in legal tech from delivering photocopies in Chicago during blizzards to leading what he believes is one of the most significant technology companies in the legal industry.

In their conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Jisa and Brothers-McGrew make the case that generative AI presents the legal profession with the opportunity to become technology trailblazers rather than laggards. Their goal, they say, is to support the profession by democratizing access to AI across firms of all sizes and types.

They also discuss Reveal's recent launch of Reveal Private Deployment, an initiative to support customers in whatever way they want to deploy Reveal's software, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. At a time when other companies are pushing their customers away from on-premises deployments and into the cloud, Jisa and Brothers-McGrew say this is yet another way in which Reveal is seeking to democratize access by accommodating the interests of all its customers.

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This year's ILTACON, which starts later this week, marks the second anniversary of Harbor, a global expert services company formed through the merger of three long-established legal consulting firms: HBR Consulting, LAC Group, and Wilson Allen, and that formally launched at ILTACON in 2023.

The company, which counts among its clients some 80% of the 200 largest global law firms and 50% of the Fortune 500, has been making waves ever since, further expanding its services, making additional acquisitions, and scoring some notable hires to its executive team, all culminating in the news in June that it had received a majority investment from BayPine LP, a private investment firm devoted to driving digital transformation in market-leading businesses.

Part of what makes Harbor particularly interesting is that it sits at the intersection of corporate law departments, law firms, and technology providers – helping all three get more value from their partnerships. A key focus of the company's consulting services has been artificial intelligence and on helping organizations prepare their data and infrastructures to support the use of AI.

Our guest today is the CEO of Harbor, Matt Sunderman, who before the merger was CEO of HBR Consulting and, earlier, president of its advisory services. In their conversation, Matt and host Bob Ambrogi explore Harbor's mission to provide legal departments with end-to-end solutions that span strategy, legal technology, operations, and intelligence.

They also discuss the current state of digital transformation in legal – from the opportunities and obstacles around generative AI adoption to the surprising reality that many firms are still only 10 to 40 percent cloud-enabled, and Sunderman offers his perspective on what law firms and corporate legal departments should be doing today to prepare for the next decade.

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What happens when a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer, tired of copying and pasting contract language, starts reading about self-driving cars? In Shashank Bijapur's case, it sparked the creation of SpotDraft, a contract lifecycle management company that just raised $54 million in Series B funding and that counts major companies such as Airbnb among its customers.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Bijapur, CEO and cofounder of SpotDraft, to explore his journey from White & Case associate to legal tech entrepreneur. It all began with that pivotal New Year's Eve moment – working on due diligence while eating Chinese food and reading about Elon Musk's self-driving cars – that made him realize something fundamental: Cars were driving themselves but lawyers were still stuck copying and pasting contract language.

The conversation traces SpotDraft's evolution from its original version as an AI redlining platform to becoming a comprehensive CLM solution. Bijapur shares the hard-won lessons of pivoting when their initial AI approach proved only as accurate as a coin toss, and how co-building with early customers who believed in their vision helped shape the product into what it is today.

They also dive deep into how generative AI is transforming contract management, get a preview of SpotDraft's new AI assistant called Sidebar, launching to the public next month, and discuss practical implementation challenges based on insights from SpotDraft's recent survey on AI adoption in legal departments. Looking ahead, they discuss where the CLM market is heading in the age of generative AI.

Throughout the discussion, Bijapur reflects on the entrepreneurial journey itself – learning to sell when trained to be demure, developing an appetite for risk after being taught to be risk-averse, and discovering that every startup milestone brings new challenges that require completely different approaches. It's a candid look at both the technical and human sides of building a legal tech company.

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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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If generative AI was the biggest story in legal tech in 2023 and 2024, agentic AI is proving to be the most talked-about topic of 2025. Spurring this, at least in part, has been Thomson Reuters' announcement of its forthcoming release of a new agentic version of CoCounsel, its AI legal assistant, that will be able to plan, reason and execute complex multi-step workflows for legal professionals.

On this episode of LawNext, we will dive deep into this next generation of AI legal assistants with two guests who are at the forefront of this field, leading the development of CoCounsel's next generation: Emily Colbert and Rawia Ashraf. Both joined Thomson Reuters back in 2013 through its acquisition of Practical Law, where they cut their teeth building practice-focused products for lawyers. Now, they are leading the charge on the evolution of CoCounsel into a new generation of agentic workflows, with Colbert overseeing CoCounsel's litigation portfolio, while Rawia heading up product development for the transactional and corporate side.

In today's conversation, we'll explore how AI is moving beyond simple question-and-answer chatbots to become something more like a smart associate that can chain together multiple tasks, research cases, draft documents, and walk through complex legal workflows step by step. We'll also talk about the challenges of bringing cutting-edge technology to a profession that values precision and trust, learn more about what's coming this summer in CoCounsel's next major release for legal professionals, and get Colbert's and Ashraf's thoughts on how all of this will reshape the practice of law.

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).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?,

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When legal research giant LexisNexis and legal AI giant Harvey announced a strategic alliance last month, legal tech commentator Richard Tromans called it "possibly the most important legal tech move in a decade." On today's episode of LawNext, we go deep into the partnership and its implications with Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland.

Through the partnership, LexisNexis will integrate its primary law content, Shepard's citations, and AI technology directly into Harvey's platform, and the two companies will jointly develop agentic AI workflows. The partnership comes on the heels of Harvey's remarkable Series E funding round, raising $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, in which RELX, LexisNexis's parent company, was a participating investor.

So what drove this alliance? In his interview with host Bob Ambrogi, Fitzpatrick reveals it wasn't a boardroom strategy session that sparked this partnership, but rather customer demand from large law firms seeking the combined power of LexisNexis's authoritative legal content and Harvey's AI capabilities.

Fitzpatrick talks about what this means for the future of legal AI, how it addresses the persistent challenge of hallucinations in AI-generated legal content, and whether we're witnessing the emergence of a new model for legal tech partnerships. He also shares insights from recent ROI studies showing dramatic productivity gains for both law firms and corporate legal departments using AI tools.

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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Supio, an AI-driven platform developed specifically for personal injury lawyers, has been generating a lot of buzz. On the heels of reporting record growth last year and raising $25 million in Series A funding in October, last month it raised another $60 million in a Series B round. But what do the lawyers who use the platform think of it? On today's LawNext, we hear from one of those lawyers, as well as from the company's cofounder and CEO.

Our guests today are:

• Tyler Schneider, managing partner of the personal injury law firm TorHoerman Law. Schneider was an early adopter of Supio. He and his firm used it to help obtain a $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs in a case involving allegations that cow's milk-based infant formula caused intestinal inflammation in premature babies.

• Jerry Zhou, the CEO of Supio who cofounded it in 2021 together with his childhood friend and coworker Kyle Lam after having held product management and engineering roles at Microsoft and Avalara.

In their conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Zhou and Schneider talk about the development of Supio, its real-world impact on plaintiffs' lawyers, and their wish lists for further development of the product. They also share their thoughts on how AI is likely to reshape PI practice 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.

• 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 Chris Cartrett was named CEO of legal technology company Aderant in 2022, he did so with the mission of aggressively advancing a cloud-first strategy throughout the company's suite of business and financial software for law firms. Given that Aderant is a nearly 50-year-old company with many customers who still use the on-premises version of its software, that was not an easy mission to fulfill.

So three years later, what grade does he give himself in delivering on that mission? That is one of the questions I put to him during a special live LawNext interview. We recorded the interview at Aderant's Momentum Global 2025 user conference in Dallas last month, where Aderant graciously allowed me to use its Studio A recording equipment it had set up at the conference for its own podcast.

In a wide-ranging interview, Cartrett talks about his focus on the cloud, generative AI, and customer service, and why he believes all three are so important right now. He also talks about the company's growth, reflected in the fact that 2024 was a record-breaking year for Aderant and 2025 is on track to be even stronger. We talk about the future of Aderant, the future of law practice, and the likely impact of generative AI, and I ask him how he uses gen AI in his own daily work.

Cartrett first came to Aderant in 2014 from Thomson Reuters as senior vice president of strategy and growth and was promoted to executive vice president in 2017 before becoming president in 2021 and CEO in 2022..

A big thanks to Aderant for letting me use its recording studio and for providing me with the final recording.

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What happens when a CEO steps away from a legal tech company just before the generative AI revolution explodes, then returns two years later amid a landscape that is being dramatically transformed? For Litera's Avaneesh Marwaha, that is exactly what happened.

As the CEO of Litera from 2016 to 2022, Marwaha led the legal tech company through a remarkable period of expansion and diversification, including growing its global customer base by over 1,500% and its annual revenues by 1200%, and overseeing some 14 acquisitions that transformed the company's focus from document productivity to a broad range of legal workflows, ranging from transaction management and due diligence to litigation, firm intelligence, and more.

Marwaha stepped down as CEO in 2022 to become Litera's chairman, just before the tidal wave of gen AI swept over legal technology, and then, in a surprising move last October, he returned to the CEO role. On today's LawNext, Marwaha shares how he was drawn to return as the company's leader by the "perfect storm" of forces reshaping the legal industry of AI adoption, unprecedented legal tech investment, and evolving client expectations.

In today's conversation, Marwaha reveals how AI has fundamentally rewired Litera's internal operations – enabling his 1,000-person company to complete quarters' worth of development work in mere weeks and transforming everything from code generation to meeting management. He also shares his personal AI workflow, including how he uses Microsoft Copilot to review up to 20 meeting transcripts nightly, and explains why he requires every Litera employee to be using AI every day – and why he believes this mandate is reshaping the company's competitive edge.

In addition, Marwaha unpacks Litera's strategic shift from acquiring dozens of companies during his first tenure to now favoring internal development – a change driven largely by AI's ability to rapidly accelerate innovation cycle, and he discusses Litera's evolution into what he calls "the experience company" for law firms, and how this transformation reflects broader shifts in legal technology, where success increasingly depends on workflow integration rather than standalone solutions.

Marwaha was formerly on this podcast in 2020: LawNext Episode 68: Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha on Growth During A Crisis.

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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Cornell Winston, president of the American Association of Law Libraries, brings a unique perspective to law librarianship, having spent 45 years in libraries across diverse settings — from a hospital library where he started as a student worker; to the former Whittier Law School; to prominent law firms Munger, Tolles & Olson and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; and, for the last 24 years, as law librarian in the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles.

Winston joined host Bob Ambrogi to record this interview just weeks before AALL's annual meeting in Portland, Ore., July 19-22, with the theme "Be Bold." It's a fitting theme for a profession that's undergone dramatic transformation, evolving from traditional book-focused roles to becoming essential gatekeepers and evaluators of legal technology and information.

In their conversation, Winston discusses the evolving challenges facing law librarians — from safeguarding disappearing government information to testing AI-driven legal research tools. They explore why he considers it critical for law librarians to have "a seat at the table" in their organizations, the opportunities for newcomers to the profession, and why Winston believes the profession's future remains bright despite predictions of its demise.

Winston also shares insights on AI adoption, the importance of law librarians as strategic partners rather than just support staff, and how the profession continues to prove that while Google may find you a million answers, a librarian will find you the best one.

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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