As chair of the Specialty Treatment Courts in Jefferson Parish, La., Judge Scott U. Schlegel manages what may be one of the most advanced courts in the country for delivering justice online, and he does it almost entirely with off-the-shelf software he cobbled together himself.  Even before the coronavirus crisis caused courts to shut down, Judge Schlegel was conducting hearings via Zoom, scheduling sessions via Calendly, and communicating with staff and counsel via Slack.  But when courthouses in Jefferson Parish closed last month, it presented an even-greater challenge for the programs Judge Schlegel oversees, which focus on treatment and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol offenders.  With help from legal technology companies, he rallied to further innovate, working with LawDroid to create a text-based chatbot to check in on probationers and with Documate to develop an online system for defendants to enter guilty pleas from prison.  In this episode of LawNext, Judge Schlegel joins host Bob Ambrogi to describe the systems he has built and how they are being used to keep the wheels of justice turning even with courthouses shut down.    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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced legal professionals to work remotely, many are scrambling to find the best tools and technology to help them manage their legal matters and continue to closely collaborate with their colleagues. While many law firms already use Microsoft Office 365, fewer are as familiar with its core collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams.   Our guests for this episode of LawNext believe that Teams is a powerful tool for lawyers working from home and one that can effectively serve as a full matter-management platform for law firms and legal departments, entirely within Office 365. They are: Mike Ammerlaan, director, M365 Ecosystem Marketing. Carol Lynn Grow, vice president of marketing and sales, LawToolBox.    Ammerlaan and Grow will explain why they see Teams as a powerful tool and discuss how lawyers can use Teams for collaboration, conferencing and case management.  As a supplement to this episode, Ammerlaan and Grow recorded a video demonstrating the features and capabilities of Teams for legal professionals.  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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

Ever since the publication of his seminal 1996 book, The Future of Law, Richard Susskind has remained the world’s most-recognized and most-respected speaker and author on the future of legal services. But even he could not have foreseen the sudden relevance of his latest book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice.  On this episode of LawNext, Susskind joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about the legal profession and the judicial system in a time of global pandemic. Will the pandemic fast-forward law’s leap into the future? Will there be fundamental change in legal services delivery? Will courts move online more quickly than even he had thought? Susskind shares his thoughts on these questions and more. Susskind is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to major professional firms and national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of professional service and, in particular, the ways in which technology and the Internet are changing the work of lawyers. He has worked on legal technology for over 30 years.  Susskind has, since 1998, been IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is president of the Society for Computers and Law, chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council, and chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, where he is also a visiting professor. He also holds professorships at UCL, Gresham College, London, and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. 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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

David Lat defied the popular conception of who should be hit with a serious case of COVID-19. Just 44 years old, a two-time marathoner, with a young family and a successful career as a legal recruiter and journalist, and best known as the founder of the blog Above the Law, he did not fit the mold of a person at high risk.  But what started early in March as fever and chills eventually led to 17 days in a New York City hospital, six of them spent intubated and on a respirator in ICU. As two major news organizations began preparing his obituary, his family, friends and thousands of social media followers prayed for his recovery.  Over half of COVID-19 patients who go on a respirator do not survive. Lat was one of the fortunate ones. After six days, he recovered enough to be extubated and moved out of ICU. Then, on April 1, he sent out a Tweet announcing that he was about to be discharged.  Now recovering with his husband and son at his parents’ home in New Jersey, Lat -- still hoarse from the intubation -- joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his ordeal and share his thoughts on what he learned going through it.  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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

In Australia, as elsewhere, COVID-19 is creating a surge in the demand for legal help, especially among low-income individuals, as people face job losses, evictions, bankruptcy, domestic violence, and end-of-life issues. Further complicating the situation there is that parts of the country are still recovering from the bush fires that only recently were extinguished. With face-to-face legal help not possible, technology is a critical tool and effective tool in meeting the demand for help, as Justice Connect, an Australian legal services charitable organization, is demonstrating. In recent years, it has developed a number of innovative tools to help people get legal help and understand their legal rights.  Our guest this week is Kate Fazio, head of innovation and engagement at Justice Connect. A former corporate lawyer, she leads the organization’s development of online and technology tools to increase access to justice and legal empowerment.    In addition to its COVID-19 resource center, Justice Connect’s technology includes an online intake and referral tool, a cloud-based case management system, a Pro Bono Portal matter distribution system that they are working to expand globally, and the newly launched Justice Connect Answers, which allows people to ask discrete legal questions and receive quick, confidential answers from attorneys.  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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled any sense of business as usual last week, the document-automation company Litera seemed to stay a step ahead, becoming one of the first major legal technology companies to take steps to continue operations, quickly pivoting to develop a lite version of its deal-management platform to offer for free, and completing the notable acquisition of Best Authority.  Litera has been a company on the move since 2016, when a $100 million investment from K1 Investment Management led to the combination of four document-technology companies – Litera, Microsystems, XRef and The Sackett Group – into a single business. After K1 sold the company to Hg Capital Trust last year, two more major acquisitions followed, of U.K. company Workshare in July 2019 and deal-management platform Doxly in August 2019.  Leading the company through these changes since 2016 has been CEO Avaneesh Marwaha, a former intellectual property lawyer who transitioned his career into a series of business-executive roles, including as chief operating officer of Keno Kozie Associates, a major provider of outsourced IT for global law firms.  In this episode of LawNext, Marwaha joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the recent news involving his company, how his company is continuing to serve customers in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of Litera into the company it is today, and the company’s future plans.  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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

On Monday, March 23, the practice management company Clio announced that it was committing $1 million to a disaster relief fund to help the legal community successfully navigate the challenges and hurdles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We want to ensure lawyers are set up to succeed as well as ensuring their their clients can continue to get the legal help they need,” Jack Newton, the company’s cofounder and CEO, explained. In this episode of LawNext, Newton joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why his company created the fund and how it will be deployed. He also shares his thoughts on how the coronavirus crisis will reshape the legal profession and the practice of law, both over the short term and well into the 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. Thank you to our sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

On Thursday, March 12, facing the escalating threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Brigham Young University Law School made the decision to close down live classes, send students home, and teach the remainder of the semester online.  As it happened, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the law school that day, where he was scheduled to interview the school’s head of infrastructure and technology, David Armond, about its law and corpus linguistics initiative.  But as they sat down to record, Armond had just come from a meeting with the school’s deans and others in which the school had finalized the decision to close down for the remainder of the semester and put its classes online, so he graciously agreed to discuss how the school reached that decision and how it would be implemented.  In this brief episode, Armond discussed how a law school prepares to shut down and then executes on that decision. We’ll post the remainder of the interview – the part about law and corpus linguistics – later as a separate episode.  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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2020, Vicki Huff Eckert, U.S. and global new ventures and innovation leader at PwC, was the featured speaker at the Rebels Riot Luncheon, an event honoring the Legal Technology Resource Center’s 2020 Women of Legal Tech and the ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels.  Shortly after the luncheon, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Eckert for a live conversation to discuss innovation in professional services, the parallels between the accounting profession and the legal profession, and PwC’s recent launch of PwC InsightsOfficer, an automated bookkeeping product designed for small and medium law firms.  As PwC’s new ventures and innovation leader since 20176 Eckert is responsible for streamlining the firm’s approach to the marketplace by elevating its strengths in new and creative ways to unlock business value. Previously, she served in a range of roles for PwC, having led its global technology industry and co-founding its Silicon Valley Advisory practice.  In 2016, Eckert was named one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. In 2008, she was recognized by Consulting magazine as a leader in client service within the consulting industry. In 2007, she was recognized by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a member of the 40-under-40 emerging leaders within Silicon Valley. 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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Professionals LLC for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.

When Jerry Levine became general counsel of IPsoft in December 2015, the artificial intelligence company had been in business since 1998, but it had never had an inhouse lawyer. That meant Levine had the daunting task of creating a legal department from scratch, within an established company that had customers worldwide.  More than four years later, Levine has built an international team of inhouse legal professionals, implemented governance standards, put in place compliance policies, set up processes for contract management and legal operations, and much more.  He is also a tech- and business-savvy lawyer who has relied heavily on technology to help build the department and accomplish its goals.  In a special episode of LawNext recorded live during Legalweek 2020 in New York City, host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Levine to talk about the challenges of building a legal department and the role technology played -- and continues to play -- in helping him meet those challenges.  Special thanks to Valerie Chan, founder of Plat4orm PR, for her assiduous assistance in organizing this panel. 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 sponsor, MyCase, and to John E. Grant and Agile Attorney Consulting for being a lead Patreon supporter of our show.