After 10 years as a lawyer at two leading transactional law firms, Haley Altman decided there should be a better way to structure the workflow around the many deals in which she was involved. So in 2016, she left law practice to found Doxly, a technology platform designed to transform the archaic and chaotic process of managing transactions into one that is streamlined and efficient.  Last August, Altman sold Doxly to the document technology company Litera Microsystems. That acquisition came just a month after Litera acquired U.K. company Workshare, which had its own transaction platform, Workshare Transact. Within a month, that meant, Litera went from having no transaction-management technology to owning two of the leading platforms -- platforms that spanned both the U.S. and European markets.  At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, Altman, who is now general manager of transaction management at Litera, sat down with LawNext for a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi. In their conversation, she provides updates on the acquisition and shares her thoughts on the state of legal technology more broadly.

In 2018, Mark Britton left Avvo, the often-controversial company he founded in 2006 and led as CEO until he sold it early last year to web behemoth Internet Brands. Soon after, he joined us here on LawNext in Episode 11 for an insightful conversation about why he started the company, why he sold it, and why he left.  At the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down again with Britton to record a live special edition of LawNext. Britton was attending the conference following Clio's announcement in September that he had joined its board of directors and become an investor. In this interview, Britton explains why he decided to become involved with Clio, how he sees its mission as similar to Avvo’s, and what he believes its future will hold. _________________ Become a supporter of LawNext by joining our Patreon membership!

George Psiharis was employee number six at Clio, which he joined shortly after the practice management company was founded in 2008. Now, he is COO of an enterprise with more than 400 employees and growing, responsible for customer success, business development and data operations.  Psiharis also oversees Clio’s annual Legal Trends Report, the fourth of which was released at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego. This year’s report included a unique feature, a study that Clio said was the largest nationwide assessment of client services among law firms.  Psiharis joined host Bob Ambrogi for a special edition recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, where he discussed some of the surprising and notable findings of the Legal Trends Report. He also discusses the growth he has overseen during a decade at Clio and how his role has evolved.   Support us on Patreon!

Mark Harris, co-founder of Axiom and Now Knowable CEO, discusses the founding and growth of Axiom, as well as the challenges they faced. He also talks about their partnership with Kira to translate contract data, their joint venture with LexisNexis, and the vision for Knowable in digitizing contracts.

The seventh-annual Clio Cloud Conference recently wrapped up in San Diego. In this special edition of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sat down at the conference for a conversation with Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio, to talk about the conference and the company.  With Clio having recently announced a $250 million funding round — one of the largest ever for a legal technology company — there was a lot to talk about. In addition, at the conference, Newton announced the forthcoming release of his book, The Client-Centered Law Firm: How to Succeed In An Experience-Driven World, in which he lays out his blueprint for law firm success.  Newton talks about his vision for Clio to become the “operating system of law” and to help lawyers close the gap in access to justice. He also lays out his ideas for how lawyers can achieve greater success by building a client-centered law firm.

In August, a Utah task force on access to justice issued a report that called for “profoundly reimagining the way legal services are regulated in order to harness the power of entrepreneurship, capital, and machine learning in the legal arena.”  Two days later, the Utah Supreme Court voted unanimously to approve the report’s recommendations, including substantially loosening regulatory restrictions on lawyers and creating a “regulatory sandbox” to allow a market of non-traditional legal entities to provide legal services in the state.  In this episode of LawNext, we take an in-depth look at this unprecedented experiment in enhancing access to justice through regulatory reform. Joining host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the report, Narrowing the Access-to-Justice Gap by Reimagining Regulation, and its implementation are the cochairs of the Task Force, who will now continue as cochairs to oversee the implementation of the recommendations:  Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court in February 2015 by Gov. Gary Herbert. Prior to his appointment, he served as a trial court judge for over 10 years. A 1989 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began his legal career as a litigator with the law firm of Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, where he focused on complex civil litigation. John R. Lund is past-president of the Utah State Bar and partner with Parsons Behle & Latimer in Salt Lake City, where he focuses his practice on litigation and trial work. A 1984 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, he is also chair of the Utah Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence.    Further reading: Utah Supreme Court Votes to Approve Pilot Allowing Non-Traditional Legal Services. Utah Task Force Calls for ‘Profoundly Reimagining the Way Legal Services Are Regulated’. NEW: We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

In LawNext Episode 48, host Bob Ambrogi traveled to Toronto to record a live interview with the founders of the AI-driven legal research platform ROSS Intelligence, CEO Andrew Arruda and CTO Jimoh Ovbiagele, in which they discussed the company’s rise from startup in 2014 to a more mature and established company.  In this second interview recorded in Toronto, we take a deep dive into the artificial-intelligence technology that drives the ROSS legal research platform. For this interview, CTO Ovbiagele returns, joined this time by Stergios Anastasiadis, head of engineering at ROSS. They discuss why they believe ROSS’s AI technology is unique, how they see AI changing the legal industry, and what’s ahead for ROSS and AI in law.  Ovbiagele is a computer scientist who was one of the three original founders of ROSS in 2014, when it emerged out of a cognitive-computing competition at the University of Toronto. Anastasiadis is a computer scientist who joined the company earlier this year to lead the further refinement and development of the product. Formerly, he was the director of engineering at Shopify and engineering manager at Google.  NEW: We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Ralph Baxter spent nearly a quarter century as chairman and CEO of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, leading its growth from a regional San Francisco law firm specializing in municipal finance to one of the world’s largest firms with offices worldwide and a diverse array of practices. Along the way, both Baxter and Orrick earned kudos for their many innovations in the delivery and pricing of legal services and the staffing and structure of the firm.  Now retired from Orrick, Baxter serves as an advisor and consultant devoted to inspiring positive transformation in the ways legal services are delivered globally. In particular, he believes that technology and process design enable legal services to be delivered better, faster and cheaper, and to be available at reasonable cost to all who need them, and his goal is to help make this happen.  Baxter is also an advisor to a number of legal organizations. He was chairman of the advisory board of the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, is on the board of directors of Intapp, and is on the legal advisory board of LegalZoom. He was previously on the boards of directors of both Lex Machina and Ravel Law prior to their acquisitions by LexisNexis.  He is a fellow and senior advisor to CodeX, the Stanford University Center for Law and Informatics, and is a member of the advisory boards of the Stanford Law School Center on the Legal Profession, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, and the Georgetown Law School Center for the Study of the Legal Profession.   Included in 2009 in the ABA Journal’s inaugural class of Legal Rebels, Baxter was an elementary school teacher before attending law school. Last year, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from West Virginia, losing in the primary.  NEW: We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to support the production, as well as access show transcripts and bonus content. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

On Sept. 4, 2019, the cloud practice management company Clio announced $250 million funding round -- one of the largest ever for a legal technology company. Shortly after making the announcement during an event in Clio’s Burnaby, B.C., headquarters, cofounder and CEO Jack Newton sat down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for this live recording session to discuss the news.  In this special edition of LawNext, Newton provides additional background on the investments and the investors, what this means for his company, and how he believes this serves the greater purpose of making law better and closing the justice gap. He also provides a peek at the company’s roadmap over the coming months, and discusses the news that Mark Britton, founder of Avvo, has joined Clio’s board of directors.  Make sure to listen until the end for an exclusive LawNext promo code for the Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego this September. NEW: Want to receive more bonus content and show transcripts? Help support LawNext by subscribing to our page on Patreon.

Often called the app store of law, Reynen Court has fast become one of the most talked-about companies in legal technology. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to the rapidly growing universe of vertically integrated SaaS providers. In this episode of LawNext, recorded live at the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Andrew Klein, Reynen Court’s founder and CEO. Klein started the company in 2017 after he realized how little had changed in the basic technology infrastructure underpinning even the largest practices – and as a result, how difficult it was for firms to adopt modern technology or achieve genuine business transformation.  A Harvard Law School graduate, Klein was an associate at Cravath, Swaine and Moore when he left in 1992 to start a brewery. In 1995, to raise money for the brewery, Klein applied his experience as a securities lawyer to launch the first-ever initial public offering sold through the Internet.  The success and notoriety of that IPO led Klein to launch Wit Capital, an investment bank dedicated to helping other companies raise money online. The company flourished, recording more than $350 million in annual revenues, and itself went public in 1999. Ultimately, Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab.  After Wit Capital was acquired by Charles Schwab, Klein moved to Amsterdam where, over the next 15 years, he co-founded two asset management firms, Skybridge Capital and Ultra Capital, and, in between those ventures, created and led Spotzer Media, a provider of digital advertising solutions to local businesses. NEW: We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.