LawNext

Over the course of 2022, the principals of LexFusion conferred with 435 law departments and 250 law firms. Why? Simply put, because that is what the company does. It is a go-to-market company that defines its purpose as “to grease the gears of commerce and rapidly increase the adoption of legal innovation.” On behalf of a group of curated legal innovation companies, it works with legal departments and law firms to help them understand how innovative products can benefit them.  As a result of those conversations, they came out of 2022 with a unique perspective on the legal market. In a recent post at the Legal Evolution blog, they discussed their take-aways from those conversations and shared some of what they have been telling law departments and lawyers.  “We executed NDAs with multiple law departments and law firms so we could dig beneath surface-level discussions of practical innovation into the painful realities of budgets and politics,” they wrote. “We uncovered far more chronic pain than even we anticipated.” What was the source of that chronic pain and what advice did LexFusion offer? In this episode of LawNext, two of the cofounders of LexFusion, Joseph Borstein, CEO, and Casey Flaherty, chief strategy officer, join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the year that just ended and what it portends for the year ahead.    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, 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 the December release of Open AI’s GPT-3.5 model, and the related ChatGPT, speculation has been rampant about how this next generation of artificial intelligence might upend the legal profession. But as others have been speculating, two legal scholars and scientists, Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito, put GPT 3.5 to the task, having it perform that most anxiety-inducing of tests along the path to becoming a lawyer – taking the bar exam.  How did it do? Katz and Bommarito recently published the results in their article, GPT Takes the Bar Exam, and on this episode of LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why they did this experiment, how it turned out, and what it all means for the future of AI in law.  Katz is professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and academic director of both The Law Lab at Illinois Tech, Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology & Data Science in Hamburg, Germany. He is cofounder and CSO of 273 Ventures, and formerly cofounded the legal AI company LexPredict, which was acquired by Elevate in 2018.  Bommarito is cofounder and CEO of 273 Ventures and a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 20 years of experience in the financial, legal, and technology industries. A cofounder with Katz of LexPredict, he also co-founded Telly, an open source telemetry platform, and licens.io, an information security and compliance data company. He is an adjunct professor at Michigan State University College of Law. 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, 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 Nov. 7, 2022, at the NetDocuments Inspire 2022 conference for its customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi moderated a fireside chat with four legal innovation leaders on the trends driving their organizations and legal teams and how they are addressing current challenges to set up their organizations for the next decade of success. NetDocuments and the four panelists have graciously consented to sharing the recording of that chat with the listeners of LawNext.  The four panelists were: John Hunter, Chief Information Officer, Council of Europe.  Mike Lucas, Chief Information Officer, Wilson Sonsini. Maurice Tunney, Director of Technology and Innovation, Keystone Law. Craig Umbaugh, Denver Office Managing Partner, Hogan Lovells, and also Global Head of the firm’s Sports, Media, and Entertainment Group The theme of the conference focused on patterns of work, patterns of knowledge, and patterns of success, and so the fireside chat was organized around those themes. The panelists discuss major challenges they have addressed with regard to the evolving nature of the workplace, how they capture their organizations’ internal knowledge and use it strategically, and how, in a time of such volatility, their organizations are preparing for continued success in the future.    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, 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.

Brianna Joaseus and Edrius Stagg are two law students at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, La., who spent nine months earlier this year tackling systemic racism in the legal system. On the latest LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their projects and how their work impacted their goals for their legal careers.  Joaseus and Stagg were two of 18 law students from six law schools who participated this year in the second year of a fellowship program sponsored by the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation and the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network, in partnership with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium. (Two students from the program’s first year were featured on this podcast in July 2021.) The project Joaseus designed focused on the problem of racial bias in real estate appraisals. Her proposal would reduce appraisal bias by creating a digital checklist for appraisal professionals, developed using LexisNexis resources, that would help identify “red flag” situations in which the appraisal process may be unfair or biased.  Stagg’s project focused on the problem of jury pools that are not racially diverse or representative of their communities. His proposal was to create a “Jury Wheel 2.0” data visualization dashboard that would leverage available technology to ensure that a jury-duty summons is sent to the correct address and represents the demographic make-up of the community.  Both students stand as inspiring examples of those who are shaping the future of the legal profession and their schools are examples of how law schools can do more to drive change in their communities. Of course, credit also goes to LexisNexis, which organized this program and committed $180,000 in funds plus the time and mentorship of numerous employees.  In addition Southern University Law Center, the schools that participated this year were: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law, Howard University School of Law, North Carolina Central University School of Law, Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, and the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.   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, 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.

Factor, the managed services company that spun off in 2019 from alternative legal services provider Axiom, describes itself as providing “complex legal work at scale” for the corporate legal market it serves. But more recently, it has begun to position itself as falling within a new category of alternative legal services. It calls this new category “integrated law,” and describes it as bringing together the expertise of traditional law, the efficiency of new law, and the business alignment of in-house law. On this episode of LawNext, Varun Mehta, CEO of Factor since 2020, joins host Bob Ambrogi to take a deeper dive into this concept of integrated law. They also discuss how the managed services market is evolving in the post-pandemic market, how the current labor market is impacting corporate legal departments and managed services providers, and how Factor is evolving in the face of these issues.  Mehta, a veteran of the legal tech industry, was named Factor’s CEO in 2020, just before the global pandemic. Several months later, the company received an investment it characterized as one of the largest in the global legal solutions market. Earlier this year, the company appointed Jonathan Pedersen, a former Skadden partner and co-general counsel of of investment banking at Credit Suisse, as executive vice president and global practice lead to oversee all of Factor’s engagements.  This is a return visit to LawNext for Mehta, who was previously on this podcast in February 2021.  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, 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.

Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, one of the speakers was Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis for Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. He was there to speak about a unique partnership between LexisNexis and NetDocuments called Highlights, which embeds LexisNexis case analysis and intelligence technology directly into the NetDocuments platform, enriching legal documents and making them easier to find and retrieve. A broader theme of both Pfeifer and the conference was that of patterns of knowledge and of how enriching legal documents not only makes them easier to find and retrieve, but also enables law firms and legal departments to better see the patterns in their data and use those insights to better serve their clients. For Pfeifer, it is all part of the vision he and LexisNexis have long espoused of data-driven law practice.  After Pfeifer spoke at the conference, he sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the LexisNexis partnership with NetDocuments and his broader thoughts on the future of data-driven law. This is the last of three LawNext episodes recorded at the Inspire conference. The first featured an interview with NetDocuments’ two top executives, CEO Josh Baxter and CTO and cofounder Alvin Tedjamulia. The second featured Dan Hauck, the company’s chief product officer. Pfeifer was previously on LawNext in 2018, where he spoke in greater depth about his concept of data-driven law practice.   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, 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.

Over seven years as a litigator of complex commercial and antitrust cases, Dan Hauck had become frustrated over how difficult it was for legal teams to collaborate around matters. In 2014, he left his law firm, Bryan Cave, to start ThreadKM, a matter-centric legal collaboration platform. As the product evolved, it developed integrations with the document management platform NetDocuments, and in 2017, NetDocuments acquired ThreadKM, resulting in the NetDocuments product ndThread.  Now, Hauck is chief product officer at NetDocuments, where he is responsible for the company’s strategic vision, partnerships, products, user interface and roadmap. Over the past year, he was instrumental in the company’s launch of PatternBuilder, a product for building applications and automating legal documents, and its acquisition of Worldox.  Earlier this month, at the NetDocuments three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Hauck for a live conversation about the company’s product strategy and roadmap. Spoiler alert: His vision for the platform spans automating and linking every stage of the legal document workflow.    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, the cloud-based content management company NetDocuments was in Denver for its annual three-day Inspire 2022 conference for customers and partners. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was there also, where he sat down for an exclusive live interview with the company’s two top executives, Josh Baxter, who has been CEO since 2018, and Alvin Tedjamulia, one of the company’s original three founders and its CTO since 1999. Just before Bob flipped-on the record button, Josh and Alvin revealed that, the next morning, Alvin would be announcing his retirement – a major announcement not just for the company, but for the legal tech industry more broadly, as Alvin is a veteran of 40 years in the industry and has been a visionary leader in bringing legal to the cloud.  Josh, Alvin and Bob talk about that news, and also about the company’s history, where it is today, and where it is heading over the next 5-10 years. Also, Josh and Alvin reveal who will succeed Alvin as the company’s next CTO.    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.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Ronnie Gurion, chief operating officer  With 20 years of experience leading marketplace, e-commerce, and SaaS businesses to achieve rapid global expansion and growth, Gurion plays a pivotal role in shaping Clio’s next chapter. As the previous GM and global head of Uber for Business (U4B), Gurion brings a wealth of global market activation experience, having grown the business rapidly during his tenure. When he’s not developing high-performing, collaborative global teams, Gurion can be found skiing with his wife and two kids.

Service of process and other documents is an essential function of law practice – one most lawyers deal with on a regular basis. But for Colorado lawyer Eric Voogt, he saw service of process as a broken system, one in which it could be difficult for an attorney to line up a process server or know the status of the service, and one that he believed was long overdue for a technological upgrade. So Voogt decided to do something about it. In 2016, he founded Proof, an on-demand process serving platform that provides legal professionals with instant access to experienced process servers and real-time tracking from a phone or laptop. Earlier this year, Proof raised $7 million in a Series A funding round, and it says its platform is now used by more than 3,500 law firms and government agencies. In early October, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Voogt live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, where it had just been announced that Proof would be one of three third-party products to be the first to be fully embedded within the Clio law practice management platform. They discuss why Voogt founded the company and how it is disrupting service of process.  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.