On her LinkedIn profile, Natalie Knowlton describes her work as “succession planning for an outdated legal industry.” It is an apt description for someone who has spent her career studying reform of the U.S. legal system — and particularly now, as she launches Access to Justice Ventures, a think tank devoted to reinventing the legal system to provide justice for all by eliminating systemic barriers.  For the past 14 years, Knowlton has been at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, most recently as director of special projects, leading the organization’s work in family justice and regulatory reform, and where she remains an advisor on regulatory innovation.  But she is now devoting the majority of her time to her new think tank, which she is launching together with Zack DeMeola, who was previously director of legal education and the legal profession at IAALS (and who was on an episode of this podcast last year discussing reregulation of legal services), where their immediate focus will be on reforming the rules that regulate legal services delivery to allow broader classes of providers.  Having spent her career studying the empirical evidence for what works and what doesn’t in the justice system, Knowlton and host Bob Ambrogin dive into some of the most pressing issues faced by the legal profession, including regulatory reform, broader licensing of paraprofessionals, court reform, and the justice gap, and we hear about her vision for what the future of legal might look like.    Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

In the world of legal technology, perhaps no company looms larger than Thomson Reuters, whose products such as Westlaw, Practical Law, HighQ, Findlaw, 3E and many others span virtually every aspect of law practice and are used by legal professionals throughout the world.  Our guest this week, Kriti Sharma, is chief product officer, legal tech, at Thomson Reuters, a role she stepped into less than a year ago, in October 2021. She is an internationally recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and was formerly the VP of artificial intelligence and ethics at UK software company Sage Group. Sharma is also the founder of AI for Good UK, a foundation that works to make AI tools more ethical and equitable, and developer of rAInbow, a digital companion for women facing domestic violence in South Africa.  She has been named in the Forbes "30 Under 30" list for advancements in AI. She was appointed a United Nations Young Leader in 2018 and is an advisor to both the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs and to the UK Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. Her TED talk on keeping bias out of AI has been viewed more than 2M times.  Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Should the legal industry have a common set of data standards for classifying the work we do? The SALI Alliance – short for Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry – believes we should, and it recently released version 2.0 of its Legal Matter Standard Specification, which sets out an ontology of some 10,000 tags.  The argument for standards, SALI says, is that they will simplify and improve the delivery of legal services by providing greater transparency and increasing the effectiveness of budgeting and resourcing, while also facilitating interoperability among clients, legal services providers, and technologies.  To discuss this, our guest on LawNext is Damien Riehl, who is part of the all-volunteer leadership team of the SALI Alliance and who has played a key role in developing and expanding the specification. In his day job, Damien works at Fastcase, where he is VP for litigation workflow and analytics content. A coder since 1985 and for the web since 1995, Riehl clerked for the chief judges of state and federal courts, practiced in complex litigation for over a decade, has led teams of cybersecurity and world-spanning digital forensics investigations, and has led teams in legal-software development.  He is also an appointee to the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, where he has helped recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies — all related to connected and autonomous vehicles.  Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Last week, on the last day of the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries, the nationwide organization of law librarians and legal information professionals, Elizabeth Adelman took office as the association’s new president. A key focus of her term will be on increasing the pipeline of those coming into the profession and working to enhance diversity within both the AALL and the profession at large.  As she comes into office, the AALL has just adopted a strategic plan that sets out five goals for 2022-2023. In addition to increasing the pipeline and enhancing diversity, the plan also calls for championing excellence among legal information professionals, providing expanded opportunities for professional growth; and advocating for issues that impact legal information professionals.  In her day job, Adelman is vice dean for legal information services and director of the Charles B. Sears Law Library at the University of Buffalo School of Law. An AALL member for 21 years, Adelman has a law degree from Albany Law School, a master’s degree in library science from the University at Buffalo.  In this conversation recorded live at the AALL annual meeting in Denver, Adelman and host Bob Ambrogi talk about her plans for her year in office and her thoughts on the state and future of the profession.   Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

For 28 years, John Mayer has been executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, or CALI, a non-profit consortium of some 200 law schools that describes itself as “the innovative force pushing legal education toward change for the better.” Along the way, CALI’s mission expanded to include addressing access to justice, primarily through its development, in partnership with Chicago-Kent College of Law, of A2J Author, an expert system designed to help self-represented litigants complete court forms and navigate legal processes. In this episode of LawNext, Mayer joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the history and mission of CALI and to share his thoughts on the use of technology to enhance legal education. They also talk about how and why A2J Author was developed and how it is used by courts and legal services organizations to help those who are without legal representation. Mayer also shares his thoughts on the future of innovation in law and on the future of CALI.    Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. 

It was a mighty bold move for the legal technology company Mighty. After seven years in business serving personal injury lawyers, the company recently pivoted to launch Mighty Law, a law firm that directly competes against those PI firms by offering lower fees, greater transparency, and tech-driven efficiencies.  For founder and CEO Joshua Schwadron, the move was motivated by what he sees as the misaligned incentives of PI lawyers. Rather than pass along to their clients the savings that they realize from using technology, he believes, the fee and cost structure for PI firms incentivizes them to inflate settlements and drive up costs.  Seeking to provide PI plaintiffs with lower fees and greater transparency, Schwadron, who is also a lawyer, has converted his tech company into a dual-entity structure. The law firm, Mighty Law, will represent the clients, while a separate tech and services company, Mighty, will support the law firm’s operations and also provide services and support to clients to assist them in what Schwadron calls their post-accident journey. On this week’s LawNext, Schwadron joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about why he made this pivot and what he believes it means for consumers and the PI industry.    Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sang Lee believes that algorithm-based assessments can help law firms make better, more ethical and less-biased decisions when hiring associates and laterals. The SaaS company she founded in 2019, Thine, leverages custom hiring algorithms and industrial and organizational (IO) psychology to create assessments that it says can reduce inconsistencies in how law firms evaluate candidates, promote equity, and create pathways to greater diversity. A research report commissioned by Thine last year found that there is a widely held belief among legal professionals that traditional recruiting processes are stale and limiting. Having spent more than 20 years working in legal recruiting and coaching, Lee has clear ideas about why that is so, how assessments can help reimagine the recruiting process, and what else law firms should do to improve their hiring and retention and achieve a more diverse workforce.  Lee was an associate at LeBoeuf Lamb in 1998 when she pivoted into recruiting. In 2004, she founded her own attorney search firm, and then in 2013, founded Volta Talent Strategies, where she continues to provide talent-related coaching, training, and consulting to law firms. A first-generation Korean-American, Lee was named to the Fastcase 50 in 2021 and to the Global Top 100 Leaders in Legal Strategy and Consulting by Lawdragon in 2021. In 2019, she was honored by the Girls Scouts Council of Greater New York as a Woman of Distinction.   Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

LawVu is a New Zealand company that says it is revolutionizing legal operations by waging war on a multiplicity of point solutions and providing in-house legal teams with the first truly connected platform for matter, contract and spend management.  LawVu recently conducted a survey of in-house lawyers and legal operations  professionals and found that 77% of them spend more than an hour a day just jumping between systems in order to get a complete view of their work. It also found that 90% of in-house legal teams use three or more software vendors, yet say their biggest technology pain point is the lack of integration among these platforms.  Our guest today on LawNext is Sam Kidd, who cofounded LawVu together with Tim Boyne in 2015 and is now its CEO. He recently returned home from an extended visit in the U.S., where he is preparing to open an office in Seattle. The U.S. is LawVu’s biggest market, he says.  He talks about why he believes multiple point solutions are holding back legal departments, how LawVu addresses that problem, and what is ahead for the company.     Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The law practice management platform Litify is unique in several ways. For one, it is built on top of Salesforce, the sales and marketing automation platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. For another, it was developed by a team of people who came out of Morgan & Morgan, the largest plaintiffs’ law firm in the United States.  Since its launch in 2016, Litify has raised $50 million in Series A funding, acquired the e-billing company LegalStratus, and expanded its customer base to include a range of mid-to-large sized law firms and corporate legal departments, and has even developed an off-the-shelf solution for smaller firms. It recently announced a major partnership with global legal services provider Epiq. Joining this episode of LawNext is Ari Treuhaft, chief operating officer at Litify and formerly head of product at Morgan & Morgan, where he oversaw the firm’s transition to the Litify platform. He explains why Litify considers itself a new category of legal tech, one that enables both outside counsel and in-house legal teams to operate on the same platform. He also lays out future plans for the company, and shares his thoughts on recent developments in the practice management market.    Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

As this episode is being released, news is breaking that is likely to have a profound impact on the law practice management market: AffiniPay, the parent company of the electronic payments platform LawPay, has acquired the law practice management company MyCase, along with several other practice management products that MyCase acquired over the past year.  Just ahead of today’s announcement, the CEOs of the two companies sat down for an exclusive podcast interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to answer questions about the deal. They discuss how the deal came about, what it means for each company’s customers, and what its impact might be on the broader market.  Joining Bob are:  Dru Armstrong, who became CEO of AffiniPay in July 2021. With degrees in both law and business from the University of Chicago, she was previously CEO of Grace Hill, a company that provides software for owners and operators of real estate properties. Jim McGinnis, who was named MyCase CEO in January 2021, after having most recently been EVP/GM of Wolters Kluwer’s Tax and Accounting North America Professional Segment. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.