LawNext

On Sept. 4, 2019, the cloud practice management company Clio announced $250 million funding round -- one of the largest ever for a legal technology company. Shortly after making the announcement during an event in Clio's Burnaby, B.C., headquarters, cofounder and CEO Jack Newton sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for this live recording session to discuss the news.

In this special edition of LawNext, Newton provides additional background on the investments and the investors, what this means for his company, and how he believes this serves the greater purpose of making law better and closing the justice gap. He also provides a peek at the company's roadmap over the coming months, and discusses the news that Mark Britton, founder of Avvo, has joined Clio's board of directors.

Make sure to listen until the end for an exclusive LawNext promo code for the Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego this September.

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Often called the app store of law, Reynen Court has fast become one of the most talked-about companies in legal technology. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to the rapidly growing universe of vertically integrated SaaS providers.

In this episode of LawNext, recorded live at the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Andrew Klein, Reynen Court's founder and CEO. Klein started the company in 2017 after he realized how little had changed in the basic technology infrastructure underpinning even the largest practices – and as a result, how difficult it was for firms to adopt modern technology or achieve genuine business transformation.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Klein was an associate at Cravath, Swaine and Moore when he left in 1992 to start a brewery. In 1995, to raise money for the brewery, Klein applied his experience as a securities lawyer to launch the first-ever initial public offering sold through the Internet.

The success and notoriety of that IPO led Klein to launch Wit Capital, an investment bank dedicated to helping other companies raise money online. The company flourished, recording more than $350 million in annual revenues, and itself went public in 1999. Ultimately, Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab.

After Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab, Klein moved to Amsterdam where, over the next 15 years, he co-founded two asset management firms, Skybridge Capital and Ultra Capital, and, in between those ventures, created and led Spotzer Media, a provider of digital advertising solutions to local businesses.

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For the 50th episode of LawNext, we could think of no more appropriate topic than the state of podcasting in the legal industry. And we could think of no one better suited to the topic than Adam Camras, CEO of the Legal Talk Network, and Laurence Colletti, its executive producer.

Camras is a longtime entrepreneur in the legal industry whose company Lawgical acquired the Legal Talk Network in 2013. Since then, he has launched an array of law-related podcasts and made the Legal Talk Network's recording booth a ubiquitous presence at legal conferences throughout the United States.

Colletti, with both a law degree and a master's in business administration, was a solo practitioner in Colorado before joining the Legal Talk Network in 2014. He had long had a passion for web-based media and a particular interest in podcasting and video, so moving to the Legal Talk Network was a natural fit. As executive producer, he helps plan existing shows and conceive new ones, and is a regular host of the network's On the Road series.

In this episode, Camras and Colletti speak with host Bob Ambrogi about the state of podcasting in the legal industry, its rapidly growing popularity, and how it is likely to evolve into the future.

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Which firms are best prepared to keep pace with changes in the legal market? That was the question explored in a recent survey of U.S. and European law firms, the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, conducted by Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory. Among the findings: The firms that are best prepared for the future are those that already leverage technology.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the survey with Dean Sonderegger, who was recently named to lead Wolters Kluwer Legal and Regulatory U.S., the division of the global publishing giant that serves legal, corporate and compliance professionals in the United States. In a conversation recorded live at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, they also discuss innovation in the legal industry and the future of Wolters Kluwer.

At Wolters Kluwer, Sonderegger -- whose formal title is senior vice president and general manager -- is responsible for accelerating the vision and strategy for the business. He has a particular focus on rapid development of advanced digital products and services to enhance customers' efficiencies and workflows.

Sonderegger is also a well-known speaker and thought leader on topics including artificial intelligence, blockchain, the evolution of the legal profession, and business transformation. He writes a regular column for Above the Law on the intersection of technology and the practice of law, and his commentary has appeared in several publications including Forbes, CFO Magazine and the ABA Journal.

A veteran of the information and software industries, Sonderegger joined Wolters Kluwer in 2015 as the head of legal markets and innovation. In that role, he is credited with spearheading customer-focused innovation. Earlier in his career, he was executive director of product management and marketing at Bloomberg BNA.

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On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi travels to Toronto to sit down for a live recording with the founders of the AI-driven legal research platform ROSS Intelligence, CEO Andrew Arruda and CTO Jimoh Ovbiagele. Along with a third founder, Pargles Dall'Oglio, Arruda and Ovbiagele first developed ROSS at the University of Toronto in 2014, rapidly gaining international attention for what the news media dubbed the robot lawyer of the future.

In short order, the founders were invited to Silicon Valley to participate in the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator. Denton's NextLaw Labs made ROSS one of its earliest investments. In 2015, they secured $4.3 million in seed funding and then, two years later, another $8.7 million in Series A funding. In 2017, Forbes named the three founders to its "30 Under 30."

So where is ROSS today? On today's episode, Arruda and Ovbiagele recount the founding of their company, its rapid rise, controversy over its marketing, major developments over the past year, and what lies ahead. They also share their thoughts about AI in legal more broadly and its potential impact on the practice of law.

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E-discovery company Casepoint is unusual among legal technology companies in that it has achieved significant growth in recent years, without taking on outside funding. Since 2015, the company has grown from 45 employees to 370, and in just the last year has seen its install base grow by more than 70 percent.

In this episode of LawNext, Haresh Bhungalia, the chief executive officer of Casepoint, joins host Bob Ambrogi, to discuss the company's history, growth and current position in the market. They also discuss Bhungalia's thoughts about whether and when to take outside funding, the benefits of avoiding outside funding, and scaling a company based on organic growth.

Bhungalia was just 25 when he launched his first company, 2020 Company LLC, a government services business that provided technology systems integration, development and support to federal government entities including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After growing that company to 650 employees, he and cofounder Paresh Ghelani sold it in 2012.

While still at 2020, Bhungalia had been an angel investor in and advisor to a new startup, then called Legal Discovery, that had developed one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. After selling 2020, he joined Casepoint as CEO, where he has been instrumental in its growth.

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Judy Perry Martinez is a lawyer who has made public service a part of her career from the start. She continues that legacy in August as she assumes the presidency of the 400,000-member American Bar Association during its annual meeting in San Francisco. On this episode of LawNext, Martinez joins host Bob Ambrogi for a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing the ABA and the profession at large.

Over more than 30 years, Martinez has held various leadership positions at the ABA, including as chair of the ABA Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which three years ago released it seminal study on access to legal services, Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States. Martinez also chaired the ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which evaluates all prospective nominees to the federal bench.

Other roles in which she has served include as the ABA's lead representative to the United Nations, a member of the ABA Task Force on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System, a member of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, a member of the Council of the ABA Center on Diversity, and a member of the ABA Commission on Domestic Violence.

She spent much of her career at the law firm Simon, Peragine, Smith & Redfearn in New Orleans, where she is of counsel. In 2003, she joined Northrop Grumman Corporation as assistant general counsel-litigation, eventually rising to become vice president and chief compliance officer before leaving in 2015 to spend a year at the Advanced Leadership Institute at Harvard University.

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It was 20 years ago that two Covington & Burling associates, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, made the audacious move of quitting their jobs and launching the legal research company Fastcase. Their goal was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology. Two decades later, that once-scrappy company is now a major player in the legal research market.

At the recent annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries, Walters and Rosenthal — now CEO and president respectively — sat down for a live interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. They recount the beginnings of their company, its growth over the intervening 20 years, and their successes and mistakes over the years. They also offer predictions for where Fastcase and legal research will be in another 20 years.

This episode of LawNext was produced and recorded in collaboration with the Legal Talk Network. A big thanks to them for partnering with us on this podcast.

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By any measure, the London-based legal AI startup Luminance has had spectacular success. Not yet three years old, it has raised $23 million in funding, has achieved a valuation of $100 million, is used by more than 150 organizations on six continents, and has won numerous technology awards, including the prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise in the innovation category.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi interviews Emily Foges, who joined Luminance as CEO in 2016 when the company was a small team of technologists and lawyers. She took the product to market and led the growth of the business, which doubled in size every quarter through 2017.

Foges, who had never before worked in the legal industry, discusses the company's trajectory from its start at Cambridge University to where it is today and explains what she believes distinguishes it from other AI companies. She shares her insights on how AI is changing legal practice, explains why she believes AI has reached a tipping point in law, and offers her projections for how AI will shape the future of the legal industry.

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As director of applied innovation at UC Hastings College of the Law, Alice Armitage oversees two innovation-focused projects at the law school: LexLab, a multifaceted innovation program for students, startups and the broader legal tech community; and Startup Legal Garage, a program offering free legal assistance to early-stage technology and biotech companies.

LexLab has three areas of focus: building a concentration in law and technology for students; setting up an incubator for legal tech startups on campus, a space where students and alumni can interact with entrepreneurs; and hosting regular large and small-scale community events. The incubator recently graduated its first cohort of startups.

In this episode of LawNext, Armitage joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these programs and her thoughts more broadly about teaching innovation and mentoring startups. She also talks about the challenges startups face, the importance of promoting diversity among startup founders, and the role of technology in enhancing access to justice.

Armitage was the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal before becoming a tax attorney in Washington, D.C., first with Arnold & Porter and then as international chief counsel at the Internal Revenue Service, where she worked on developing tax policy for complex cross-border financial transactions. She left law for a period to start two companies of her own, before coming to Hastings, where she is also a professor of law.

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