If ever there was a process ripe for disruption, notarization would seem to be it. A function that may date back to Ancient Egypt, it has changed little for centuries – still typically done in person, on hard-copy paper, using physical seals, and recorded in written ledgers.  Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Notarize, believes society has grappled for too long with how to scale this simple process of authenticating signatures. His company is striving to do that, both for consumers who need a one-time notarization and for businesses for which notarizations are part of the normal course.  Since its founding in 2015, Notarize has become the category leader in transforming this traditional paper-based process into a digital one. Along the way, it has raised $213 million, grown to nearly 500 employees, and was recently ranked 24th on the Financial Times’ list of The Fastest Growing Companies of 2022. Kinsel, who is also a partner at the venture capital firm Polaris Partners, was previously cofounder and CEO of Spindle until it was acquired by Twitter in June 2013. Earlier, he was at Microsoft incubating new concepts and bringing them to market. He serves on the board of Lob and was the lead investor in Drizly.  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.

Lawyers are largely limited to practicing law in the states in which they are licensed. But now, calling that rule anachronistic, the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers has asked the American Bar Association to amend the model rules that govern law practice to allow lawyers admitted in any U.S. jurisdiction to practice law and provide legal advice to clients anywhere in the country. “Our proposal advocates that a lawyer admitted in any United States jurisdiction should be able to practice law and represent willing clients without regard to the geographic location of the lawyer or the client, without regard to the forum where the services are to be provided, and without regard to which jurisdiction’s rules apply at a given moment in time,” APRL President Brian Faughnan said in a letter to ABA President Reginald M. Turner. On this episode of LawNext, Faughnan joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why APRL has concluded that the change is critical to a “21st Century approach to the practice of law.” They discuss the APRL study and report that called for replacement of the current Rule 5.5 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, APRL’s proposed new version of 5.5 that would allow multi-jurisdictional practice, and why Faughnan believes there is a strong likelihood that the ABA will at least give strong consideration to the change.  In his day job, Faughnan is a shareholder in the Tennessee law firm Lewis Thomason, where his practice includes representing lawyers and law firms in disciplinary matters.  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.

Carl Malamud, a champion of open government information, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his decades-long work in making government information accessible. They cover milestones such as publishing the SEC's EDGAR database online, fighting for access to PACER documents, and his recent focus on India. The conversation highlights the importance of public access to the law and the impact of Malamud's court victories.

Last week, Filevine, the Utah-based case management company, raised $108 million in a Series D funding round. Founded in 2014 with an original focus on litigation and personal injury law, the company has been steadily expanding its platform into other areas of law practice — including larger firms, insurance defense, corporate legal, and government — and it plans to use this funding to further fuel that expansion.  Filevine’s cofounder and CEO Ryan Anderson is this week’s guest on LawNext in an episode recorded the day the company announced this latest raise. Before starting Filevine, Anderson was a founding partner at a western-states law firm focused on personal injury, mass torts and employment class-actions.  In his work as an attorney, Anderson says, he was constantly bombarded with urgent tasks and problems. Rather than continue being bombarded, he decided to turn his attention to building a system that would help solve the problems. He teamed up with a group of software engineers who shared his vision for cloud-based collaboration and clean, intuitive design, and in the basement of his law firm, Filevine was born. Since then, the company has expanded to nearly 400 employees, made two major acquisitions — first of Lead Docket, a lead tracking and intake management product, and then of Outlaw, a contract and document editing platform — and, in just the last year, brought on more 700 new customers.  Listen to our interview to learn more about Filevine’s story and what Anderson believes lies 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.

For 23 years, Pro Bono Net has been working to harness the potential of technology to connect pro bono attorneys to those most in need of their services and to provide legal tools to help individuals advocate for themselves. In 2021 alone, the non-profit helped more than 8.4 million people connect to a legal resource and helped self-represented individuals create more than 900,000 legal documents and court forms.  It does this through state-level programs such as LawHelp.org, which connects people to legal aid programs and self-help tools, and TenantHelpNY.org, which helps tenants avoid eviction; national programs such as Citizenshipworks.org, which helps people apply for citizenship, and OlmsteadRights.org, which provides legal resources for people with disabilities; and tools such as LawHelp Interactive, which is used by programs across the country to help individuals create legal documents.  Our guest today, Mark O’Brien, cofounded Pro Bono Net together with Michael Hertz, and has been its executive director since 2005. They saw the potential for technology to be a “force multiplier” for solving the problems of delivering justice in the United States, O’Brien says in the interview, but it was never just about the technology, but rather about how technology could be an enabler of human capacity. 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 his day job, Jonathan Pyle is the contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, where he is responsible for compliance, reporting, and implementing new uses of technology to analyze, streamline, and expand service delivery. But in the legal tech world, Pyle is better known as the developer of Docassemble, a free and open source document assembly application that has been widely adapted for a range of applications.  Pyle developed Docassemble as a tool for automating the practice of law. It is used to create guided interviews that can be used for document assembly or for other uses, such as helping users find legal resources or obtain legal information. It has been used to power such products as Upsolve, a free service that assembles Chapter 7 bankruptcy forms, and the document-assembly platform Documate.  Pyle joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he came to develop Docassemble and why he released it as open source software. He also shares examples of how it has been used in the legal market and describes his plans for further development.  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. 

She has been called the patron saint of solo and small law firms. For two decades, Carolyn Elefant has helped solo and small firm lawyers start and build their law practices. You know her as the creator of MyShingle.com, the longest-running blog on solo and small law firm practice, and she just released the third edition of her book that is a bible for lawyers going off on their own, Solo by Choice: How to Start a Law Firm and Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be. Elefant joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her insights and advice on starting and building a practice and to talk about what is new in this latest edition of her book. They talk about the reasons a lawyer would start their own firm, the biggest mistakes lawyers make when starting out, how to decide on a practice area, how to bring in clients, and whether solo and small firm lawyers can achieve success and a good living.  In addition to writing Solo by Choice, Elefant is coauthor of the ABA book, Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, and the self-published book, The Legal ClauseIt: Plug & Play Engagement Agreements and Power Pacts for Small Law Firms. She has been listed as an Energy and Environmental Super Lawyer for Washington, D.C. since 2012, and has been named an ABA Legal Rebel (2010), a Fastcase 50 Innovator (2011) and an ABA Woman of Legal Tech honoree (2014).    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 head of managed services and analytics at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, Jeffrey Solomon oversees a database that tracks over $150 billion in legal spend data. Legal departments are able to use this data in multiple ways, including to benchmark outside firms’ billing rates and to evaluate staffing of legal matters.  In this episode of LawNext, Solomon joins host Bob Ambrogi for a deep dive into how corporate legal departments are using data and analytics to drive more strategic decision-making around setting and managing legal budgets and legal spend. They also talk about how access to this data is shaping corporate clients’ conversations with their outside firms around efficiency and use of technology.  Solomon oversees a team at Wolters Kluwer that leads innovation initiatives through ideation, market research, development, and go-to-market for a portfolio of AI-powered products and managed services. He has been with ELM Solutions since 2013. Before that, he was with TyMetrix, which Wolters Kluwer acquired in 2003.  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 Time By Ping, a company devoted to helping lawyers break free from timekeeping, announces its Series B raise of $36.5 million, cofounder and CEO Ryan Alshak joins LawNext for an exclusive interview about the financing, the company, and its mission to help lawyers break free from timekeeping and get back time in their days.  As Alshak shares in the interview, the roots of the company’s mission are very personal to him. Soon after starting the company, his mother fell ill with cancer, causing him to balance managing a startup and spending time with her. After her death in 2018, he found inspiration for the company’s mission: to give people back time in their days to be with the people who are important to their lives.  He wrote about his mother and how she inspired him in a moving 2018 essay, “Life is not waiting for the storm to pass, it’s learning how to dance in the rain.” In our LawNext interview, Alshak describes how Time By Ping’s time-automation software can free lawyers from manual timekeeping. He also discusses how this latest financing round will help the company pursue its longer-term vision, which is to rebuild the model for how lawyers work from selling time to selling outcomes, and eventually to focus their effort on creative work in ways that best leverage their most important asset.  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.  Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions. 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.

Is there a better way to train lawyers to draft and negotiate contracts? Laura Frederick thinks so. This former Tesla and BigLaw commercial contracts attorney is the founder of How to Contract, a learning platform that trains lawyers and professionals how to draft and negotiate contracts in the real world. She is also managing attorney of her own firm, Laura Frederick Law, in Austin, Texas, where she focuses on drafting and negotiating vendor supply, services, and technology agreements. As a lawyer in the technology transactions group at law firm Morison & Foerster and then as an inhouse commercial counsel at major corporations including Tesla, Frederick saw how hard it can be for younger lawyers to learn the skills they need to effectively draft and negotiate agreements.  In August 2020, she began posting daily contracting tips on LinkedIn. Her tips were so popular that she turned them into a book, ​​Practical Tips on How to Contract: Techniques and Tactics from an Ex-BigLaw and Ex-Tesla Commercial Contracts. Out of the tips and the book emerged the idea for How to Contract, where she provides practical training on contracting. In January 2022, she held her first How to Contract conference, with nearly 400 attendees. Frederick joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her innovative approach to teaching contract skills, and she shares her thoughts on the current array of contracting technology products on the 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.  Legalweek 2022, returning in person to New York City March 8-11, 2022, Legalweek will bring together thousands of legal leaders for a week-long program featuring TED-style focus talks, workshop boot camps, and panel sessions across 21 tracks and 74 sessions. 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.