LawNext

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.

Touting it as the next phase in its global expansion to transform the business of law, Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has launched its Legal Business Services practice in the United States, which it describes as “a comprehensive suite of legal management consulting and technologically-enabled legal managed services for corporate legal departments designed to accelerate the transformation of the business of law.” A 2017 Harvard study of the Big Four in law found that their legal service lines have grown significantly in recent years in size, scope and importance, and their growth is not confined to tax or tax-related services, but spans a variety of practice areas. Yet in the U.S., the Big Four have been throttled in their ability to provide legal services by legal and financial regulatory constraints. At the same time, recent years have seen a surge in the use of managed services firms and other forms of alternative legal services providers.  All of which leads to the question of what Deloitte’s new practice means, not just for corporate legal departments, but for the U.S. and global legal industry. To learn more, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with a principal of the new practice, Mark Ross, who joined Deloitte in January after serving as executive vice president and global head of contracts, compliance and commercial services at the global ALSP Integreon. 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.

Here’s one that gets a bit meta. Back in November 2017, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi spoke at BYU Law School about a lawyer’s ethical duty to be technologically competent. The talk prompted the school to explore ways it could help students improve their technological abilities. What resulted was the school’s Legal Technology Initiative, a multi-pronged program to provide law students with technology training and assessment.  Initially overseen by Shawn Nevers, deputy director of the law library, BYU this year brought on Tina Wilder, a former practicing lawyer, as an assistant law librarian to assist Nevers and take the lead in running tech training. On March 12, 2020, Ambrogi was at BYU and sat down with Nevers and Wilder to discuss the initiative and learn more about how the school teaches technology.  But what no one anticipated when the interview was scheduled was that March 12 would be the very day that the coronavirus crisis would force the school to shut down its physical classrooms and put its lessons online. So Ambrogi recently connected with Nevers and Wilder for a follow-up on how going virtual has impacted the initiative. This episode of LawNext begins with the original interview with Nevers and Wilder recorded March 12. Then, in a postscript recorded in July, Ambrogi catches up with the two guests for an update.  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.

In 2015, the husband-and-wife team of James Jones Jr. and Kristina Jones founded Court Buddy, a service that matches consumers with vetted lawyers at affordable prices. Last November, the couple stepped aside from the business to pursue other interests. In their time running the company, they had raised $7.1 million and won numerous awards and honors.  Achieving success as a legal tech startup is notable in itself, but James and Kristina Jones also were among the few Black founders in an industry with a striking diversity problem. One survey of the legal tech industry found that only 2.3% of founders were Black and 3.1% were Latinx.  Among the milestones they achieved, Court Buddy was named the winner of the American Bar Association’s Brown Select Award for Legal Access in 2017, a winner of the inaugural American Entrepreneurship Award in 2016, and a winner of a Webby Award in 2018. When they raised their first financing round in 2017, Kristina was recognized as only the 14th African-American woman ever to raise $1 million or more. Last year, Black Enterprise named the couple as its Techpreneurs of the Year.  In this episode of LawNext, James Jones, a former practicing lawyer, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share their story of starting, building and ultimately stepping away from Court Buddy, and of how being a Black entrepreneur in legal tech presented certain obstacles he otherwise would not have encountered.  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.

Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur is one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice. Professor at the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, she is also a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative. In 2018, she was named a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work promoting an evidence-based approach to increasing access to justice for low-income communities.  In the wake of Washington state’s decision to sunset its pioneering Limited License Legal Technicians program, host Bob Ambrogi asks Sandefur about that program, which she evaluated in a 2017 report, and about other programs in which those other than lawyers provide legal assistance.  They also discuss access to justice more broadly, including the scope and causes of the justice gap, the obstacles to bridging it, the impact of race and class on access to justice, what works and what does not to close the gap, and why regulatory reform and technology are essential to enhancing access to justice.  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.

At BYU Law in Provo, Utah, a first-of-its-kind technology platform is enabling legal researchers to explore the meanings of legal words and phrases by examining the contexts in which they historically were used. The Law and Corpus Linguistics platform enables users to examine large collections of historical texts to help determine, for example, what early drafters meant by a phrase such as “bear arms.”  In this episode of LawNext, my guest is David Armond, head of infrastructure and technology and senior law librarian at BYU Law, who was instrumental in helping create and launch the platform. We discuss this emerging field of corpus linguistics and how it is being used by lawyers, judges and legal scholars.  The BYU Law collection is now home to seven collections of historical text, or corpora, including founding-era American English (1760-1799), early modern English (1475-1800), Supreme Court opinions, U.S. caselaw, records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and more.  As it happened, host Bob Ambrogi interviewed Armond live at BYU Law on the very day that the school decided to close down due to the coronavirus crisis. Before discussing their scheduled topic of corpus linguistics, Armond and Ambrogi had a conversation about how a law school prepares to shut down and go online. That conversation was posted as LawNext Episode 66: How One Law School Prepared for Coronavirus Shutdown.    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.

LinkSquares, the Boston-based provider of AI-powered contract management and analysis technology for corporate legal departments, announced a major new product this week. Called LinkSquares Finalize, it extends the company’s technology into the pre-signature stage, helping its customers create and approve contracts more quickly and efficiently.  This news comes just three months after LinkSquares raised $14.5 million in a Series A financing round, bringing its total financing to $21 million. And it comes after a year in which the company saw 300% year-over-year growth.  On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Vishal Sunak, who cofounded LinkSquares in 2015 and has been its CEO ever since. He and cofounder Chris Combs started the company after participating in the acquisition of the company where they formerly worked, Backupify, and witnessing the need for a better way to manage enterprise contracts.  Hear how they bootstrapped and built the company from scratch, why Sunak sees contract management as so vital to corporations, and where he sees the industry heading.  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.

Today on LawNext: A coronavirus success story – how a state bar, anticipating a tidal wave of unemployment claims, partnered with two legaltech companies to launch a pro bono portal in barely more than a week.  On April 27, 2020, the New York State Bar Association launched a website devoted to helping those who need unemployment assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The site provides assistance with filing an unemployment claim and access to pro bono attorneys for those whose claims are denied.  The launch came less than two weeks after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reached out to the bar, asking for its help in preparing for the anticipated onslaught of claims. The bar, realizing it would need help from a technology developer, reached out to practice management company Clio, which in turn reached out to the pro bono portal company Paladin.  In barely a week, the three teams got the site up and running. On this episode, we hear the story of how they did that from three who were directly involved: Henry M. (Hank) Greenberg, president of the NYSBA and shareholder in the law firm Greenberg Traurig. Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of Clio. Kristen Sonday, cofounder of Paladin.  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.

Mark Harris is sounding an alarm – or, as he puts it, staging an intervention – for corporate counsel.  Harris and Alec Guettel, the original founders 20 years ago of alternative legal services provider Axiom and, since last year, the CEO and CFO of contract management company Knowable, have taken the unusual step of posting an open letter that they describe as an unsolicited intervention for general counsel.  Businesses are about to confront a tidal wave of urgent questions from suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and others, they warn, the answers to which are buried in thousands or hundreds of thousands of commercial contracts. Unfortunately, they say, most companies don’t know what’s in their contracts or even, in many cases, where those contracts are.  “We woke up a couple weeks ago and realized, there is no time,” Harris and Guettel wrote. “Our clients, you, are drifting through these pandemic rapids, focused on more important issues like the immediate safety and sanity of your employees, heading right for a cliff.” What has led to this situation and what can corporate counsel do about it? In this episode of LawNext, Harris, who we previously interviewed in Episode 56, returns to LawNext to share his analysis and advice.  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.