This week on LawNext: A look at the innovative Tech Edge J.D. program at Santa Clara University School of Law. As law schools come under fire for failing to teach the practical skills students need to succeed in the real world, this program does the opposite. It aims to change the return on investment in legal education by providing law students with the essential legal, technology and business skills that will prepare them to hit the ground running as tech lawyers in Silicon Valley.  To discuss the program, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the program’s founding director, Laura Norris, who also created and directs the school’s Entrepreneurs’ Law Clinic, and who also teaches courses for engineering students on IP and startup law. In June, the Silicon Valley Business Journal named Norris to its list of 100 Women of Influence, an annual list of women leaders who are “doing extraordinary things in an extraordinary time.”  Prior to joining the Santa Clara Law faculty, Norris was in private practice representing technology startups and entrepreneurs. She was also the first vice president of legal affairs at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. In 2014, she was one of only two academics named by The Recorder as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Tech 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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

This marks the 20th year in business for Nextpoint, and it is shaping up to be a momentous one for the Chicago-based e-discovery and case preparation company. Having been bootstrapped since its founding, Nextpoint recently closed its first round of outside financing. Having never made an acquisition, it recently acquired deposition software company WarRoom. And this week, Nextpoint is holding a virtual user conference, On Point 2021, where it will lay out its roadmap for the future of the product.  On this episode of LawNext, Nextpoint’s founder and CEO Rakesh Madhava joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these recent developments and to share the story of how he founded and built the company. As you will hear, Madhava’s path to becoming a founder was not a typical one, and the path the company has taken since he founded it as one of the first cloud-based e-discovery platforms also was not typical.  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.  Agiloft, a trusted provider of agile software for contract and commerce lifecycle management. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

This week, the College of Law Practice Management named Digitory Legal winner of its 2021 Innovation Award for a unique partnership with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to drive diversity, equity and inclusion among its outside counsel by applying analytics to billing data to get a deeper understanding of the type and quality of work firms are assigning to diverse lawyers.  As our guest Catherine Krow, Digitory Legal’s founder and CEO, explains, the company’s primary mission is to bring predictability and transparency to legal billing and pricing. But the company also has a strong commitment to driving DEI in the legal industry. It has been using its analytics to help firms gain insights into whether diverse lawyers are getting the same career-advancing opportunities as the non-diverse lawyers, and to then apply those insights through what Krow calls “mindful staffing.” Krow left a partnership at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, one of the world’s largest law firms, to start Digitory Legal, and has never looked back. In addition to this week’s COLPM award, the company last year was named disruptor of the year by Litera’s Changing Lawyer awards. Krow joins us today to share the story of her company and to talk about using data to drive DEI. 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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

You would be hard-pressed to find two people in legal technology more experienced in user interface and user experience design than Nicole Bradick and Andy Wishart. Bradick is founder and CEO of the legal tech design and development firm Theory and Principle. Wishart is chief product officer at contract lifecycle management company Agiloft and formerly was co-founder and chief technology officer of Contract Express, the contract automation software that Thomson Reuters acquired in 2015.  While both individually have years of experience designing legal tech products, Bradick and Wishart also recently worked together on a project to redesign Agiloft’s UI and UX. That collaboration offers a case study in product design and of why good design matters in a legal technology product.  In today’s episode, they share the story of why Agiloft initiated the redesign, the process by which Bradick and her team went about making recommendations, and how Agiloft is incorporating those recommendations into its product roadmap.  This is a return appearance on LawNext for Bradick, who was the guest for our very first episode.  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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

The ABA Journal dubbed Fred Rooney the father of legal incubators. He developed the first incubator in 2007 at City University of New York Law School, spawning the launch of some 70 incubators in the years since, many with Fred’s guidance or based on his model. While most are in the U.S., Rooney is now helping create incubators worldwide, in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Bulgaria and Pakistan. In fact, as we recorded this episode, Rooney was just back from the Gaza Strip, where he was developing an incubator for young Palestinian lawyers funded by the United Nations. The legal incubator model that Rooney created serves dual missions. It helps young lawyers develop the business and practice skills they need to launch their own community-based legal practices, providing them space, mentoring and training. It also helps lawyers build practices that address the needs of low- and moderate-income individuals by offering affordable, community-based services. A recent ABA survey concluded that incubators are effective at supporting the career development of lawyers interested in starting solo and small-firm practices.  Rooney believes that for lawyers to do good in their communities, they first need to do well -- to be sufficiently successful to be able to offer low- and pro-bono services. Incubators, he believes, give young lawyers the leg up they need to both do well and do good. On this episode of LawNext, he tells how he came to build the first incubator, explains how they operate, and relates how he began to build them outside the U.S.  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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms, Conga acquired Contract Wrangler. For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Neil Peretz, it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to simply identify key clauses, but that would actually be able to provide answers to what was in those contracts.  What is it like to start, build and then sell a legal tech company? What were the challenges Peretz faced in developing the product and building a market? How did he see his product as distinct from other CLM platforms in the market? What was it like to see the company he started get acquired? On this episode of LawNext, we discuss those questions and others.  Peretz learned firsthand about the challenges of managing too many contracts as general counsel for multiple venture-backed financial services companies, including Aliya Financial Technologies and Better Finance. Even before becoming a lawyer, he was developing software to solve real-world problems, first as co-founder and CEO of PocketMail Group, which launched the first affordable mobile email service, and then as COO and CFO of Libraria/Sertanty, which used computer models to predict novel chemistries.   Peretz  holds law degrees from the UCLA School of Law and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), bachelors and masters degrees from Tufts University, and a specialization certificate from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.   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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

Gavin McGrane was a litigation attorney in San Francisco when he saw an opportunity to improve how legal professionals interface with the federal courts electronic records system, PACER, and to enable them to better tap into the data and knowledge contained within that system.  In 2012, he founded PacerPro, originally focusing on providing an enhanced interface to the PACER system, but, in the years since, developing it beyond that, into a system that also enables law firms to automate the process of collecting and distributing court documents and properly filing them within a DMS or knowledge system. Now, with a recent Series C investment, PacerPro is working to further develop its product and expand its coverage from federal courts into state courts.  On this episode of LawNext, McGrane joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the history and evolution of the company and discuss where he sees it going next.    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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services.  So critical is the issue that GPSolo, the magazine of the American Bar Association’s Solo, Small Firm and General Practice Division, has devoted its most recent issue to the topic, assembling a roster of contributors who are among the nation’s leading experts on regulatory reform.  In this special LawNext episode in conjunction with GPSolo, five of those contributors come together to share and discuss their views on reregulation: Zachariah DeMeola, director of legal education and the legal profession at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. Joseph Gartner, director and counsel, ABA Center for Innovation. Judy Perry Martinez, past president of the ABA and former chair of the ABA’s Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, whose 2016 Report on the Future of Legal Services influenced many of the reform initiatives now underway.  Patrick Palace, the past president of the Washington State Bar Association and current member of the executive council of the National Conference of Bar Presidents and the board of the ABA Center for Innovation, who served as editor of the GPSolo issue.  Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer of the Arizona Supreme Court, who chaired the Arizona Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, which recommended rules ultimately adopted by the court that created a new tier of legal services provider and eliminated the ban on non-lawyer ownership.   Note: For previous LawNext episodes featuring some of these panelists, see: Supreme Court Justice Ann Timmer on Arizona’s Sweeping Regulatory Reforms (2021). Incoming ABA President Judy Perry Martinez (July 29, 2019).  LawNext Episode 34: Alternative Legal Models – A Panel Discussion (with Patrick Palace and others)(April 9, 2019). 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.

On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission is to lead the school’s next chapter of innovation.    But she also arrives as a profound moment of social change in our society and in the legal profession, a moment that has raised new questions about the nature of legal education and the role of law schools in helping to shape the profession. As she steps into this role, where does she start and what challenges does she face?    On this episode of LawNext, Osofsky joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her new role and to share her thoughts on legal education, bar admission, legal innovation, and legal regulatory reform.    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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

Zach Posner cofounded The Legaltech Fund in 2020 as the first venture capital firm laser-focused on law and legal technology. But even with that industry focus, he takes a broad view when it comes to what he considers legal tech, looking for startups that have “legal in the middle,” but that may also span fintech, govtech, or consumer tech.    Posner, a three-time entrepreneur before becoming an investor and now managing director of The Legaltech Fund, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why he created a fund devoted to legal tech, the opportunities he sees there, and the kinds of companies in which he is interested in investing.    He also shares his advice for entrepreneurs pitching a VC firm and offers his views on the broader investment and innovation landscape in legal tech.  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. Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.   A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.