LawNext

As executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, Jayne Reardon oversees programs and initiatives to increase the civility and professionalism of attorneys and judges, create inclusiveness in the profession, and promote increased service to the public. In this special edition of LawNext recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego, Reardon joined host Bob Ambrogi. They discussed Reardon’s thoughts on recent initiatives in several states to loosen professional-conduct rules. They also talk about Reardon’s work to promote civility and what it means for legal professionals.  A frequent writer and speaker on topics involving the changing practice of law, Reardon believes that embracing inclusiveness and innovation will ensure that the profession remains relevant and impactful in the future. Her prior experience includes many years of practice as a trial lawyer, committee work on diversity and recruiting issues, and handling attorney discipline cases as counsel to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission Review Board.

In one of a series of special reports recorded live at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nehal Madhani, an attorney and the founder and CEO of the cloud-based IP filing software Alt Legal. Before starting Alt Legal, Madhani practiced as an attorney at Kirkland & Ellis. He is a Python/Django developer and serves on the board of Django-NYC, a nonprofit organization with nearly 2,500 software developers as members. He is also a CodeX fellow at Stanford Law School. Madhani speaks and writes regularly about the intersection of legal practice and technology. He has also co-authored several publications about the challenges of applying antitrust law to online business models, which have appeared in the Huffington Post and in the Journal of Management and Information Systems. He was selected for the 2016 Fastcase 50 – an award that “recognizes 50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

In another of a series of special reports recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviews Ed Walters, CEO and cofounder of the online legal research company Fastcase.  Under Ed’s leadership, Fastcase has grown to become one of the world’s largest legal publishers, currently serving more than 800,000 subscribers from around the world. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and at Cornell Tech, where he teaches The Law of Robots, a class about the frontiers of law and technology. Before founding Fastcase, Ed worked at Covington & Burling, in Washington D.C. and Brussels, where he advised Microsoft, Merck, SmithKline, the Business Software Alliance, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. His practice focused on corporate advisory work for software companies and sports leagues, and intellectual property litigation. See also: LawNext Episode 45: As Fastcase Turns 20, Founders Recount Its History and Predict Its Future. Bonus Content Alert for our Patreon Supporters: Listen to Bob and Ed's conversation about skipping class in law school during our sound check on our Patreon page or using the custom RSS feed we provided!

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.