LawNext

When COVID-19 first swept across the United States in March 2020, it forced courts across the country to shut down, bringing trials and other legal proceedings to a screeching halt. A new study by The Pew Charitable Trusts examined how courts responded in the aftermath of that shutdown, and it concluded that they did pretty well overall, rapidly embracing technology and revolutionizing their operations. But the study, How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations, also found that courts' accelerated adoption of technology disproportionately benefited those with legal representation, while posing disadvantages for those without legal representation, particularly those whose access was limited by lack of technology, physical disabilities or limited English proficiency. We take a deep dive into the report with Qudsiya Naqui, a lawyer and officer on the Civil Legal System Modernization team at Pew that conducted this research and produced the report. Naqui is a podcaster herself, host of Down to the Struts, a podcast about disability and design that focuses on building more inclusive systems and structures that acknowledge the breadth of human diversity. 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.

In July, the e-discovery company DISCO became one of just a handful of legal technology companies ever to go public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. That made it the third legal tech company this year to go public, after no U.S. legal tech company had gone public since 2002. On this episode of LawNext, Kiwi Camara, DISCO's cofounder and CEO, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss DISCO's public offering and its implications for the company and the broader legal tech market. He also shares his thoughts on the key factors driving the explosion of interest in legal tech, and offers his predictions on where the legal market is heading. At age 16, Camara earned a bachelor's degree in computer science, and at age 19, became the youngest-ever graduate of Harvard Law School. After a clerkship with 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harris Hartz, Camara studied for a doctorate in economics at Stanford, taught corporate law at Northwestern, and was a founding partner of Camara & Sibley LLP in Houston. It was while practicing at Camara & Sibley that he saw the need for a better product to automate the work of gathering and sifting through evidence, leading to the founding of DISCO in 2013. 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.

Earlier this month, e-discovery company Everlaw became one of the few legal technology companies to join the elite ranks of unicorn status — companies valued at over $1 billion — with the announcement of a $202 million Series D funding at a valuation of over $2 billion. It had already been a big year for the company, which saw 80% year-over-year growth, the launch of several new products, and its first-ever user conference. To discuss these developments, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by AJ Shankar, Everlaw's founder and CEO, He brings us up to date on the company's latest developments and his plans for further expanding the product and its market, including expanding Everlaw's platform beyond e-discovery into broader areas of legal technology. Shankar was previously on this podcast in April 2019, where he discussed the company's founding and early development. Those interested in learning more about Everlaw may want to listen to that episode as well. Shankar was a computer scientist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, when he founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. 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.

It has been a year of notable developments for the practice management company MyCase. After starting the year with the arrival of a new CEO, Jim McGinnis, the company went on to make two significant acquisitions — of case management platform CASEpeer and document automation software Woodpecker — and this week is holding its first-ever customer conference, where McGinnis announced a third acquisition — of cloud-based legal accounting platform Soluno — and a roadmap of new features that includes native accounting. On this episode of LawNext, McGinnis joins host Bob Ambrogi to bring us up to date on everything happening at MyCase, discuss the company's recent acquisitions and what they mean for customers, and share details on the company's product roadmap and longer-term vision. Before joining MyCase in January 2021, McGinnis was EVP/GM of Wolters Kluwer's Tax and Accounting North America Professional Segment, where he helped build CCH Axcess as a leading SaaS solution in the accounting profession. Earlier, he was vice president at Intuit, where he led marketing and product management for the professional division and led the accountant segment as part of Intuit's QuickBooks business. He has also held senior leadership positions at Activision, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble. 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 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.