On Feb. 27, 2019, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition, moderated by LawNext host Bob Ambrogi. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite. In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording of the live event. Listen as the 15 startups present their pitches, and then hear the final results and the announcement of the winner. The 15 startups that participated were: Lawble. dealWIP. DocStyle LLC. Connective Counsel. WarRoom. JurisBytes. OurChildInfo.com. TrialLine. Kinnami Software Corporation. Fixi Subscription Plans. Documate. dtour.life. EffortlessLegal. Your Firm App. Contract.one. A huge thanks to the Legal Talk Network and Executive Producer Laurence Colletti for recording the competition and sharing the recording with us. NEW: We are now 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 January, the world’s largest law firm, Baker McKenzie, announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty, to help the firm “enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients.” They join a team led by David Cambria, who last year left Fortune 50 company Archer Daniels Midland to become the firm’s global director of legal operations. On this episode of LawNext, Um and Flaherty join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their new roles and share their thoughts on innovation at Baker McKenzie and in the delivery of legal services.   Um, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of pricing strategy, has more than 12 years of cross-functional experience in legal business. Most recently, she was founder and executive director of Six Parsecs, a company that applied research rigor, business analytics and storytelling to help legal businesses achieve success. Before that, she was at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, where she was director of strategic planning and analysis and, earlier, director of special projects. She is a regular contributor to the publication Legal Evolution. Flaherty, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of legal project management, first rose to prominence while corporate counsel at Kia Motors for creating the Legal Tech Audit, a competency-based learning platform focused on the core technology tools of legal practice, and later the Service Delivery Review, using metrics and benchmarking to drive structured dialogue and continuous improvement between law departments and outside counsel. Based on these concepts, he founded Procertas, providing technology training and benchmarking to law firms, law schools, and other organizations. 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.

For some two decades, Mark Chandler has been a leading voice for innovation and technology in the operation of legal departments and the delivery of legal services. Executive vice president and chief legal officer at technology giant Cisco, he has been the company’s top lawyer since 2001 and a member of its legal department since 1996, when Cisco acquired Stratacom, where he had been general counsel. In 2010, The National Law Journal named Chandler one of the 40 most influential lawyers of the decade, and in 2013, American Lawyer numbered him among the Top 50 Big Law Innovators of the Last 50 Years. In 2017, the Forum on Legal Evolution honored Chandler with its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, writing that he “has been at the forefront of legal department innovation and thought leadership, challenging the industry to consider new and better ways to serve internal and external clients.” Chandler joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about innovation at Cisco, whose legal department is often cited as a model for others, as well as in legal departments generally and in the delivery of legal services. Other topics they discuss include privacy, the rise of legal operations, alternative legal services providers, and current technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. NEW - Q&A with our listeners: We are now on Patreon! Subscribe to our page to access show transcripts, as well as to be notified of upcoming guests. Then, submit questions before recording date for our guests to answer on the air. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

We thought 2018 was a banner year for investment in legal technology companies. But then, less than two weeks into 2019, the year got off to a roaring start with news of a $200 million strategic investment in Onit, a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process automation. To discuss one of the largest investments ever in a legal technology company, cofounder and CEO Eric M. Elfman is our guest this week on LawNext. Elfman cofounded Onit nine years ago, together with Eric Smith, now Onit’s chief technology officer. The two had previously founded DataCert, a provider of matter management and legal and IP spend management for corporate legal departments that was eventually acquired by Wolters Kluwer. A self-described serial entrepreneur, Elfman and host Bob Ambrogi discuss why he created the company and how its products, after some early pivots, matured to where they are today. He also discusses the investment by K1 Investment Management, a Los Angeles private equity firm that specializes in investments in high-growth enterprise software companies. In addition, Elfman talks about how the legal industry and legal technology have changed over the course of his career. This episode was recorded live at the Legalweek conference in New York City on Jan. 30, 2019. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Mark A. Cohen has long been ahead of the curve. After 25 years as an accomplished trial lawyer, he founded one of the first legal process outsourcing companies and then cofounded Clearspire, the groundbreaking two-company law firm and service provider that became the blueprint for a new generation of innovative legal services providers. Now, Cohen puts his experience to work as a legal business consultant, providing services and training to law firms, legal departments and other organizations through his consulting firm LegalMosaic. He is also a widely read thought leader for his column at Forbes, where he writes about the business of law, now and into the future. Cohen is also Distinguished Fellow at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and was recently appointed by the Singapore Academy of Law to serve as its inaugural LIFTED Catalyst-in-Residence. On this episode of LawNext, Cohen joins host Bob Ambrogi to talk about a range of topics. They discuss Clearspire and the lessons Cohen learned from that. They also talk about what Cohen sees as the “skills gap” in law and why it is that law schools and law firms are failing to address it. In the fact of a rapidly changing global legal economy, Cohen offers insights on how law firms should adapt.     Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.   Subscribe to our Patreon page to submit questions for our quests: www.patreon.com/LawNext

What do you get if you combine a virtual receptionist service with artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert: The answer is not robots answering the phone. Rather, the folks at Smith.ai say the combination results in a superior receptionist service for both live calls and website chat. By incorporating AI, they say, their service continually gets smarter as it comes to know your practice and your clients. On this episode of LawNext, we speak with Smith.ai’s Justin Maxwell, cofounder and chief design officer, and Maddy Martin, head of growth and education. Among the topics discuss are the features that distinguish Smith.ai from its competitors, the types of law practices that are a good fit for a service such as this, and key questions a lawyer should ask when selecting a virtual receptionist service. Justin Maxwell, cofounder and chief design officer. Before founding Smith.ai, Maxwell was a design lead in Google’s Android group. He has designed products and led teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and a number of startups. Maddy Martin, head of growth and education. Martin has held roles in marketing, content management and audience development at a number of Silicon Valley technology companies. Most recently, she was general manager, content and community, and director of marketing at YourMechanic.com.   Special discount code: During the episode, Martin announced a special discount code that entitles you to $50 off your first month of live receptionist services (phone or web chat). The code is lawnext50. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

With Judicata, Itai Gurari believes he has built a better legal research platform. A lawyer and computer scientist, his approach to designing a legal research engine was to first “map the legal genome” -- that is, map the law with extreme accuracy and granularity. The result is a research engine that returns the best results the fastest, he says. Gurari and his company also built Clerk, a tool that analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of legal briefs -- like moneyball for motions, he says. “Just as different batters have different on-base percentages, different motions have different probabilities of being granted or denied,” Gurari explains. After a stint as an associate at Jones Day a decade ago, Gurari started his first legal research company, TraceLaw.com. When that closed in 2010, he joined Google as a software engineer working on Google Scholar. In 2011, he left Google to start Judicata. With $8 million in financing from some big-name investors, including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, Judicata was released to the public in May 2017. In this episode of LawNext, Gurari speaks with host Bob Ambrogi about his thoughts on legal research, artificial intelligence, and what his tool Clerk has revealed about the quality of legal briefs.   Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Our guest this week on LawNext is Daniel B. Rodriguez, who recently stepped down as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he gained wide recognition for his work to innovate legal education, and recently stepped up to become chair of the governing council of the ABA Center for Innovation, which focuses on improving the affordability, effectiveness, efficiency, and accessibility of legal services. Rodriguez was dean at Northwestern Law from 2012-2018 and now serves on the school’s faculty as Harold Washington professor of law. Before joining Northwestern, Rodriguez was Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas-Austin; a research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy; dean and Warren Distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law; and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Widely recognized as a thought leader on innovation in law and legal education, Rodriguez was the 2014 president of the Association of American Law Schools and was a member of the 2014-2016 ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and, in the spring semester of 2019, will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.   In a wide-ranging interview, Rodriguez and host Bob Ambrogi talk about the meaning of innovation in law and at law schools and the obstacles to achieving innovation. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

In major legal industry news, global law company Elevate announced its acquisition of the legal AI technology and consulting firm LexPredict. The move combines the comprehensive legal services offering of Elevate with the data science team and AI engine of LexPredict. With Elevate’s alternative services model and LexPredict’s cutting-edge technology, does this acquisition foreshadow the future of legal practice? In this episode of LawNext, we take a deep dive into the acquisition and what it means for the legal industry. Joining host Bob Ambrogi are two of the deal’s principles: Pratik Patel, vice president of innovation at Elevate. Patel oined Elevate as part of the acquisition of RFx LEGAL Analytics in 2012, prior to which he served as a founding member and partner at RFx LEGAL. Earlier, he was a senior managing consultant at Huron Legal, where he played a key role in the rapid growth of Huron’s Legal consulting practice. Daniel Martin Katz, cofounder and chief strategy officer of LexPredict, as well as professor of law at Chicago Kent College of Law and director of Chicago Kent’s Law Lab, a research center focused on legal innovation and technology. Katz has been named to the Fastcase 50, which "recognizes 50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law."  He was also named to the ABA Journal's "Legal Rebels," a prestigious group of change leaders in the legal profession. Patel and Katz describe what each of their companies brings to the table, how the two companies align, and why they believe the sum of the two makes both companies even greater.   Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman, CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements. Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the launch of the Agreements Network, which he describes as the “legal layer for a networked world.” The Agreements Network provides a base blockchain layer and other tools to serve as an ecosystem to create, distribute, and operate legal agreements. Kuhlman envisions that lawyers will be able to generate new revenue by converting agreements they’ve created into products that can be sold through these networks. These “archetypes,” as Kuhlman calls them, would combine legal text with smart-contract workflows to allow commercial clients to create their own active agreements. Now based in Scotland, Kuhlman is a U.S.-trained lawyer who went to work in Somaliland in eastern Africa and started a law firm there. His work representing companies in transactional matters helped convince him that there had to be a better way to manage agreements. That led him to launch Monax and the Agreements Network. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.