A solo serving the Hispanic community in St. Paul, Minn., Inti Martinez-Alemán knew from the day he opened his Ceiba Forte Law Firm that he wanted to take a creative approach to client service.  It starts from the moment clients first arrive for a consultation, when he offers a drink menu and then asks them to pick a story card that best depicts how they are feeling. It continues through his use of visuals to explain the legal process, his use of virtual reality to familiarize clients with the courtroom, and his flexible approach to setting fees.  These and other innovations earned Martinez-Alemán and his firm the 2020 Reisman Award for Excellence in Client Service, presented during the recent Clio Cloud Conference.  In this episode of LawNext, Martinez-Alemán shares his approach to customer service as well as his journey from an abogado in Honduras to solo in St. Paul.  Support for this show: A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.  A reminder that we are now on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

In September, Rocket Lawyer became the first national company approved to participate in Utah’s regulatory sandbox, a pilot program for licensing new and alternative forms of legal providers and services. For Charley Moore, who founded Rocket Lawyer in 2008, it was yet another step in his quest to deliver high-value legal services at an affordable price.  A former U.S. Naval officer who served in the Gulf War before becoming a lawyer, Moore started his legal career as an internet and business lawyer with Venture Law Group in Menlo Park, Calif., where his clients included the-then fledgling startup Yahoo! He went on to start and sell another company before founding Rocket Lawyer, with the goal of providing small businesses and individuals with an alternative to the high cost of obtaining legal help.  In this episode of LawNext, Moore recounts the founding and development of Rocket Lawyer and its expansion into Europe starting in 2012. He also explains why he wanted the company to participate in the Utah sandbox and what he expects to happen there. Finally, as one of the few Black CEOs in legal tech, Moore discusses his thoughts on expanding diversity in the industry.  If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.  Support for This Show Comes From: A huge thanks to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform, Headnote. We appreciate their support.  A reminder that we are now on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

After much speculation about the future of Legalweek – one of the world’s largest and most-anticipated legal technology and legal business conferences – the conference’s organizers announced on Oct. 1 that it will be virtual in 2021.  ALM Media, which produces Legalweek, said the conference will be rebranded as Legalweek(year) and will be extended into a full year of events, leading up to a resumption of the in-person event in February 2022.  On this special edition of LawNext, Mark Fried, CFO and president of events at ALM Media and the man in charge of legalweek, joins host Bob Ambrogi to provide more details about the conference and discuss what it means for attendees and exhibitors.  Support for this episode comes from: A huge thank you to our new partner ASG Legaltech for sponsoring today's episode! Thank you, as well, to our listeners for supporting LawNext on Patreon. An extra special thank you to our leading Patreon member, Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support! If you'd like to help support LawNext, and you can subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

Sept. 30, 2020, was Josh Becker’s last day in legal tech, at least for the time being, as he pursues his campaign for election to the California state Senate in the district that encompasses Silicon Valley cities such as Palo Alto, Mountain View and Menlo Park.    Most recently, Becker was chairman of the trailblazing legal analytics company Lex Machina and head of legal analytics at LexisNexis, which acquired Lex Machina in 2015. Previously, he was Lex Machina’s CEO, a role he stepped into shortly after Stanford Law School spun it off into a private company.       Becker also heads the LexisNexis Legal Tech Accelerator program, which recently announced its fifth cohort of startup participants, and which he will continue to stay involved with on a reduced basis.     On Becker’s last day in legal tech, he sat down for an interview with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, to recount his career, share his observations about the industry, and offer advice for startups in the field.   If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We will play it in a future episode.  Announcement Starting with this episode, we are honored to announce that we are welcoming a new sponsor to LawNext. It is ASG LegalTech, the company that is home to four leading products in law practice management, the practice-management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and the e-payments platform Headnote. We are thankful to them for supporting us in continuing to bring great content to our listeners, and we hope you will check out their full portfolio of products. A reminder that we are now on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the Oct. 1, 2020, launch of LexFusion, we get a first look at the new company from guests Joe Borstein, a legal industry veteran and one of LexFusion’s two cofounders, and Basha Rubin, the cofounder and CEO of Priori Legal, the legal talent company that is one of the initial participants in the LexFusion collaborative.  LexFusion’s mission is to turbocharge the adoption and use of technology within corporate legal departments and large law firms by changing the paradigm for how technology is purchased. The company will serve as the go-to-market representative of a collaborative, hand-picked group of best-in-breed legal technology companies, each providing a distinct category of technology.  The overarching goal is to rescue general counsel and firm partners from the endless and overwhelming stream of cold calls they receive and offer an alternative based on trusted relationships and trusted products.  In this episode of LawNext, Borstein describes the purpose and vision of LexFusion, and Rubin explains why her company chose to participate.  NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. Support us on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

In this exclusive LawNext interview recorded in advance of the announcement of ASG LegalTech’s acquisition of electronic payments company Headnote, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with the two companies’ CEOs: Soumya Nettimi of ASG LegalTech and Sarah Schaaf of Headnote, on the reasons for the deal and the significance for customers.  On Sept. 22, 2020, ASG LegalTech, the company that owns cloud practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time and MerusCase, announced that it had acquired Headnote, the online payments platform that provides e-payments and accounts-receivable management for law firms. The acquisition is the fourth in three years for ASG LegalTech and the 27th for its parent company Alpine SG (ASG), a portfolio company of the San Francisco private equity firm Alpine Investors.  No sooner did ASG announce the acquisition than it revealed the first product to result from it — PantherPayments, an all-in-one payment system that is fully integrated within the PracticePanther platform.  In this interview, Nettimi and Schaaf go into depth on the reasons for the acquisition, their plans for future development, and what this means for both companies’ customers.  NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

Nicola Shaver, managing director, innovation and knowledge, at the law firm Paul Hastings, was recently named 2020 Innovative Leader of the Year in the International Legal Technology Association’s Distinguished Peer Awards. Not only that, but the law firm where she oversees innovation initiatives was named Innovator of the Year.  While a major honor for anyone in the field of law firm innovation, it is even more remarkable given that until just seven years ago, Shaver was a lawyer practicing media law in Australia with no connection to the field of law firm innovation. When she moved to Toronto for family reasons in 2014, she could find no work in her legal speciality, so took a job at Cassels Brock & Blackwell leading the firm’s innovation initiatives. She was immediately hooked.   After a stint at another Toronto firm, Stikeman Elliott, as director of knowledge management, she moved to Paul Hastings in New York in 2018, where she describes herself as “Dedicated to future-proofing law firms and accelerating the pace of positive change in the legal industry.” She is also founder of Legal Innovation and Design, a global membership group for anyone driving innovation initiatives in the commercial legal space, and publisher of the blog Tower of Babel.  In a year that has presented so many challenges for law firms, Shaver joins LawNext to discuss the innovation initiatives that helped her and her firm earn these awards. She also shares her career journey, her thoughts on innovation, and her perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on the legal profession.  NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

In 2006, inspired by the success of business process outsourcing company Office Tiger, which RR Donnelley acquired that year for $250 million, Ajay Agrawal and Daniel Reed founded UnitedLex, one of the earliest legal process outsourcing companies. Within months, it was providing legal services to clients such as HP, IBM and Microsoft. Within four years, the company had achieved a valuation of $100 million.    But Agrawal was becoming increasingly intrigued by a problem a client had described to him as one of “contract education” — the gap between the promises made in an organization’s contracts and the promises ultimately delivered. It is a problem, he estimates, into losses for businesses of $2-3 trillion a year. So in 2011, he sold his stake in UnitedLex to begin working on a solution.  That led him to found SirionLabs in 2012, where he is using artificial intelligence technology to disrupt the field of enterprise contract lifecycle management. In May, the company raised $44 million in a Series C round, bringing its total raise to $66 million. Just this month, it announced several patent-pending upgrades to its AI technology.  Based in New York City, Agrawal recently joined me from New Delhi, India, where he is awaiting travel restrictions to lift so he can return home.     NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

Kimberly Y. Bennett describes herself as an innovator, entrepreneur, legal industry disruptor, and business coach who happens to be a lawyer. Nowhere are all those facets more evident than in the way she has structured her law practice, K Bennett Law, where she focuses on brand protection and growth strategy. Soon after starting her own practice, which is entirely virtual, she decided there had to be a better way to charge legal fees, one that would provide predictable pricing for her business clients and predictable income for her. The model she developed is to provide her services via a monthly, flat-fee subscription.  Another way she has distinguished her practice is through the relationships she has with her clients. She sees herself as not only a legal advisor to her clients, but also as a business coach and strategy consultant. She functions much like an outside general counsel, working with businesses until they scale to the point of hiring their own in-house attorney.  Today, Bennett is also a coach and consultant to other lawyers looking to establish their own subscription-based practices, and she is a frequent speaker on innovation and entrepreneurship in law and business.  On this episode of LawNext, Bennett joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her journey, discuss her practice model, and provide her insights on innovation, race, gender and more in the legal industry.   NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

It should have come as no surprise when California attorney Erin Levine recently announced her plan to go nationwide with her do-it-yourself divorce platform Hello Divorce. After all, the site has been seeing rapid growth and has earned Levine broad accolades, including the 2020 James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering from the American Bar Association and the 2019 Reisman Award for legal innovation from practice management company Clio.  But why did Levine, who has a successful family law practice in Oakland, Calif., first decide to create Hello Divorce three years ago and then spin it off as a standalone company last year? And what does she now see as the opportunities and challenges in bringing it to all 50 states?    On this episode of LawNext, Levine joins host Bob Ambrogi to share her story as well as that of Hello Divorce, starting from why she went to law school, how she came to establish her own practice, her reasons for launching Hello Divorce, and the site’s growth and future.   NEW: Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com. We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.