LawNext

Just a few days into 2021 came news that could end up being one of the biggest legal technology stories of the year. On Jan. 5, two leading legal research companies, Casemaker and Fastcase – two companies that have been rivals for as long as they’ve been in business – announced their merger.  The combined company, which will operate under the Fastcase name, has a subscriber base estimated to be more than a million lawyers, or more than three quarters of the 1.3 million  lawyers in the United States. What does this mean for the companies, their customers, and the legal research landscape more broadly?  To discuss the merger and its implications, host Bob Ambrogi welcomes the three top executives of the two companies: Dr. Satish Sheth, president and CEO of Casemaker, and also a full-time emergency pediatrician for Kaiser Permenante in California. Ed Walters, cofounder and CEO of Fastcase. Phil Rosenthal, cofounder and president of Fastcase.  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.  ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. XIRA.com, where clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software. Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.  Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.  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.

ASG LegalTech, a portfolio company composed of four leading legal practice products — PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and Headnote — has introduced a new brand for itself, Paradigm, to better represent how the company views itself, its customers and its plans for moving forward. In this special episode of LawNext recorded in advance of the announcement, host Bob Ambrogi discusses the rebrand and the reasons for it with Soumya Nettimi, CEO of Paradigm, and Colin Li, chief growth officer of Paradigm. “When people hear the word ‘paradigm,’ they typically think of ‘paradigm shift,’” Nettimi says on the podcast, “and with that, what we want to communicate with our rebrand is that our mission is to fundamentally shift the standard for legal technology.” Listen as Nettimi and Li describe the process they went through to bring about the rebranding, what they hope to convey and achieve with it, and their plans for the future of the company and its four distinct products.

Twenty-five years ago, in the still-fledgling days of the web, the husband-and-wife team of Tim Stanley and Stacy Stern founded FindLaw and quickly developed it into the most highly trafficked legal site on the internet. In 2001, they sold FindLaw to the West Group, and two years later, they founded Justia, repeating their earlier success and then some with what is now one of the most popular legal sites in the world.  Throughout, their mission has remained the same: to make law and legal resources free for all. Whereas FindLaw started as a modest collection of links to legal resources, Justia is now one of the largest databases of cases, codes, and other legal resources, all available for free to the site’s visitors. It also supports various public interest and pro bono projects, including the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center, the LGBTQ Legal Resource Center, and the Supreme Court Center. Justia supports all this by selling law firm marketing services, including a lawyer directory, SEO, websites and blogs.  In this episode of LawNext, Stanley, CEO, and Stern, president, both lawyers by education, discuss how they came to start FindLaw, the sale to West, starting again with Justia, their future plans, and their thoughts, after 25 years, on how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go towards providing free access to 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.  ASG LegalTech, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. XIRA.com, where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys; and where attorneys get free, fully integrated practice management software. Everlaw, the cloud-based ediscovery platform for law firms, corporations, and government agencies.  Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about.  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.

Jules Miller knows what it is to be a legal tech entrepreneur. She is a three-time founder, twice of legal tech companies: Hire an Esquire in 2012 and Evolve Law in 2015. Now a partner in venture capital firm Mindset Ventures, she is leading her firm’s expansion into legal tech investing, most recently with the Series A financing of legal marketplace Priori Legal.  On this episode of LawNext, Miller joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation about venture investing – in technology generally and in legal technology specifically. She discusses what she looks for in a founder, the types of companies and technologies that excite her, and how a founder can get her ear. She also talks about what VCs can do to increase diversity among founders.  Prior to joining Mindset in June, Miller was an executive at IBM, where she co-founded IBM Blockchain Ventures, launched and ran the IBM Blockchain Accelerator, and led the IBM Blockchain Garage for North America. Earlier, she was a partner at LunaCap Ventures, a venture debt fund investing in diverse founders, and was COO of gender lens investing pioneer BRAVA Investments. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, Designing the Successful Corporate Accelerator. 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: ASG LegalTech, XIRA.com, Everlaw, and Law Insider 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.

Dan Broderick believes businesses waste billions in repetitive work reviewing and negotiating semantically similar contracts. As a former lawyer, he saw the problem first-hand. It led him to found BlackBoiler, whose AI-based technology automates the review and mark-up of inbound contracts right in Word’s Track Changes.  This week, BlackBoiler announced two new U.S. patents for its contract review software, bringing its total to seven. This comes less than two weeks after the company secured $3.2 million in funding from a group of strategic investors that included agreement cloud company DocuSign.  In this episode of LawNext, Broderick joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how BlackBoiler came to be and the problem it addresses. He also describes how BlackBoiler works to automatically mark-up contracts, and discusses his plans for the future development of the technology and the company.  Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.  ASG LegalTech is 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. Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.  TrustBooks is trust accounting made easy. The only standalone accounting product designed 100 percent for attorneys and law firms, it helps them easily manage client accounts and stay compliant with their state bar requirements.   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. Thank you to our leading Patreon member Allen Rodriguez and ONE400 for your support!

Andrew Perlman is one of the nation’s leading forces helping to establish the future of legal education and legal practice.  As a professor and now dean at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, he has helped drive the creation and development of programs for teaching about legal innovation and technology. He was founding director of Suffolk’s Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology and its related legal technology and innovation concentration for law students. He also helped establish Suffolk’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, or LIT Lab, where law students are able to work directly on legal tech and data science projects.  Perlman has also been a leading force in national initiatives to shape the future of law practice and access to justice. He was chief reporter for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Ethics 20/20, which was responsible for updating the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to reflect changes in technology and increased globalization. He also served as the vice chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which produced projects and recommendations designed to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed, and he was the inaugural chair of the governing council of the ABA’s Center for Innovation. Perlman joins host Bob Ambrogi to share thoughts on the present and future of legal education, legal practice, and legal regulatory reform.  Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.  ASG LegalTech is 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. Everlaw is a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence. XIRA.com is where potential clients find, book and meet with attorneys in one place. For attorneys, XIRA is abolishing the subscription model for tech tools, providing free, fully integrated practice management software, e-billing, online scheduling, document management and video conferencing.

After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building, sold last year to OpenText for $75 million, John Tredennick was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings — Merlin Digital Magic, a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the use of open source software to improve access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient.  Now, Tredennick’s new company is about to release a product called Sherlock that he believes will revolutionize enterprise search. Tredennick calls it “the first AI-powered digital document bloodhound.” Start with a simple search query, then refine the results with increasing precision by telling Sherlock which results do or do not match the results you seek.  A litigator before founding Catalyst in 2000, Tredennick is a true pioneer in legal technology who continues to blaze new trails. His legal and technology acumen have earned him numerous awards, including having been named by The American Lawyer as one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” named to the FastCase 50 as a legal visionary and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine. In this episode, Tredennick joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his current projects as well as his former company, his interest in open source technology, his thoughts on the current state of legal technology, and his advice for legal technology entrepreneurs who are just starting out.  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.  Thank You To Our Sponsors With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Everlaw, a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.  Thanks also 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.

To say that Stevie Ghiassi is a busy man is an understatement. In addition to founding Legaler, a secure video meeting platform for lawyers, the Australia-born entrepreneur is the founder of the recently launched Legaler Aid, a charity to support social justice legal cases worldwide, and founder of the Global Legal Tech Report, which will release its final report in December after nearly a year of surveying legal tech around the world.  As if those projects were not enough to occupy his time, Ghiassi is the founding president of the Australian Legal Technology Association and founder of the organization Blockchain for Law.  In this episode of LawNext, Ghiassi — who is now based in Los Angeles — joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his story of how he became involved in legal technology, describe how he developed and built Legaler into a platform used by lawyers worldwide, discuss his vision for how Legaler Aid will use blockchain and crowdfunding to address access to justice, and offer findings from the Global Legal Tech Report.  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.  Thank You To Our Sponsors With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Xira, a site that helps consumers by making legal advice more accessible and affordable and that helps lawyers by providing a one-stop platform for getting, booking and managing clients.  Thanks also 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!

A recent report from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation’s legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a 2018 paper published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review that documented these legal deserts and rural America’s increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis.  Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper, Lauren Sudeall, associate professor of law and founding faculty director of the Center for Access to Justice at Georgia State University College of Law. We talk about legal deserts and about Sudeall’s other research, in which she focuses on access to the courts, in both the civil and criminal contexts, and on how lower-income individuals navigate the legal system, either with or without the help of a lawyer. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Sudeall clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. She then worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, first as a Soros Justice Fellow and later as a staff attorney. At the Southern Center, she represented indigent capital clients in Georgia and Alabama and litigated civil claims regarding constitutional violations within the criminal justice system, based primarily on the right to counsel. She serves on the Southern Center’s board of directors, the Indigent Defense Committee of the State Bar of Georgia, and the board of advisors for the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School.  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.  Thank You To Our Sponsors 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!

The practice management company Clio recently released its annual Legal Trends Report, based on analysis of data from tens of thousands of legal professionals and surveys of legal professionals and legal consumers, and it showed that the coronavirus crisis has resulted in a decided shift in legal practice, away from bricks-and-mortar offices and towards cloud-based technologies and virtual delivery of legal services. So what will law practices look like going forward? And how will law practice technology adapt and evolve to meet the shifting needs of legal professionals? For their perspectives on these questions, we are joined this week by Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio, and Mik Lernout, Clio’s vice president of product.  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.  Thank You To Our Sponsors 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!