LawNext

As director of applied innovation at UC Hastings College of the Law, Alice Armitage oversees two innovation-focused projects at the law school: LexLab, a multifaceted innovation program for students, startups and the broader legal tech community; and Startup Legal Garage, a program offering free legal assistance to early-stage technology and biotech companies. LexLab has three areas of focus: building a concentration in law and technology for students; setting up an incubator for legal tech startups on campus, a space where students and alumni can interact with entrepreneurs; and hosting regular large and small-scale community events. The incubator recently graduated its first cohort of startups. In this episode of LawNext, Armitage joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these programs and her thoughts more broadly about teaching innovation and mentoring startups. She also talks about the challenges startups face, the importance of promoting diversity among startup founders, and the role of technology in enhancing access to justice. Armitage was the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal before becoming a tax attorney in Washington, D.C., first with Arnold & Porter and then as international chief counsel at the Internal Revenue Service, where she worked on developing tax policy for complex cross-border financial transactions. She left law for a period to start two companies of her own, before coming to Hastings, where she is also a professor of law. 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.

“We are not your grandfather’s law librarian.” As president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Femi Cadmus makes that point emphatically. Her organization recently completed it first-ever AALL State of the Profession report, an in-depth look at what information professionals do and how they do it. The report’s bottom line is that technology is making the role of the law librarian more diverse and more essential than ever before. As the AALL prepares to convene in Washington, D.C., in July for its annual meeting, Cadmus shows LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the state of the law librarian profession and the evolving role of information professionals in law firms, corporations, law schools and government. Born in New York and raised in Nigeria, Cadmus is currently at Duke University School of Law, where she is the Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty research professor of law, associate dean of information services and technology, and director of the Michael J. Goodson Library. With almost three decades in law libraries, she was formerly at Cornell University, where she was Edward Cornell law librarian, associate dean for library services and professor of the practice. Her earlier experience includes positions at the law schools at Yale, George Mason University and the University of Oklahoma. Cadmus’ educational background includes an LL.B. from the University of Jos, Nigeria, B.L Nigerian Law School; an LL.M. (Law in Development) from the University of Warwick, England; and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Oklahoma. She is admitted to practice in New York. 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.

Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and territories. On this episode of LawNext, we talk with Thomas R. Bruce, who is retiring June 30 after 27 years leading the LII. In 1992, Bruce and former Cornell Law Dean Peter W. Martin founded the LII. They codirected it until Martin retired in 2003, after which Bruce continued as sole director. The LII blazed the trail of publishing law online for free, inspiring the creation of some two dozen similar organizations throughout the world, and carrying the banner for the right of citizens to have access to the laws that govern them. Bruce says he is most proud that he was able to break the monopoly on legal information held by commercial publishers. “The time was ripe for change, and we were the first to use the Web to try our hands at it.” A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Tom started his career as a stage and production manager before joining Cornell Law School as director of educational technologies. The first seeds of the LII were sowed, Bruce once wrote, with two gin-and-tonics, consumed by someone else. The rest, as they say, is history -- a history Bruce recounts in this episode. Related links: End of an Era: Tom Bruce, Trailblazing Director of LII, to Retire after 27 Years. We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When. On Law Technology Now: A Conversation With Legal Information Institute Cofounder Tom Bruce On Its 25th Anniversary. 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.

A lawyer, economist and scholar, Gillian K. Hadfield has devoted much of her career to studying how legal systems can be improved to ensure they meet the needs of the people they are meant to serve. In her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, she argues that the complexity of today’s global, digital economy has pushed law to its limits, making it too expensive, too complicated, and too far out of touch with our needs. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Hadfield about her book and her proposals for reinventing the legal system. They also discuss her ideas for addressing the access-to-justice gap, her recent research on ensuring the safety of artificial intelligence, her belief that private investment is essential to sparking innovation in law, and her work with the Utah Supreme Court to launch a regulatory sandbox to test many of her theories. With both a J.D. from Stanford Law School and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, Hadfield is currently based at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management, where she teaches courses in legal innovation and design, responsible development and governance of AI, the origins and evolution of the law, and contract law and strategy. She is a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values and Policy and Global Agenda Council on Justice and co-curates the Forum’s Transformation Map for Justice and Legal Infrastructure. She was appointed in 2017 to the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education and is a member of the World Justice Project’s Research Consortium. She serves as an advisor to The Hague Institute for the Innovation of Law, LegalZoom, and other legal tech startups. 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.

This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams, author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting.   On this episode of LawNext, Adams and Chas Rampenthal, LegalZoom’s general counsel, join host Bob Ambrogi to provide details on Adams’ new role as head of contracts and the system they are building to give small businesses a better contracting experience -- one that is driven more by expertise than by technology alone. This episode gets kind of meta for us here at LawNext. Rampenthal was our guest for a show last August. After hearing the episode, Adams reached out to Ambrogi to ask if he would make an introduction to Rampenthal. Ambrogi did, and that led eventually to Adams’ hiring and the launch of this new project. 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.

Pangea3's Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn discuss the recent acquisition of Pangea3 by Ernst & Young, exploring the impact of the Big Four accounting firms on the legal industry, the regulatory landscape for alternative legal service providers, and the vision of Pangea3 as a high-quality legal support company. They express excitement about the future, emphasizing collaboration and innovation in the industry.

“Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone,” says Andy Wilson, cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull. “We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth.” Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-processing company they had run since 2004. As the software took off, they gave up data processing to devote themselves full time to building and expanding Logikcull. In 2016, they brought in $10 million in a Series A financing, and then in 2018 they raised another $25 million.    Today, coming off what Wilson says was the company’s biggest growth year ever, Logikcull has customers all over the world, ranging in size from solo practitioners to major law firms, from Fortune 500 corporations such as Walmart to city and state governments, and it is even used by some journalists. On this episode of LawNext, recorded live in Logikcull’s San Francisco office, Wilson sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company’s founding, growth and future direction, including some of the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them. He also talks more generally about the state of the e-discovery industry. 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.

Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium’s lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even including marketing, and develops and operates software to streamline the firm’s workflows. Atrium was launched in 2017 by Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who sold the Twitch video platform he created to Amazon for $970 million, and Augie Rakow, a former partner representing startups at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to address Kan’s own frustrations as a client with how legal services are delivered. Atrium raised an initial $10.5 million in funding in 2017 and then another $65 million last September in round led by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. On this episode of LawNext, cofounder Rakow, now chair of Atrium, joins host Bob Ambrogi for a frank and informative discussion. Rakow discusses the origins and structure of Atrium, the firm’s progress so far in achieving its goals, Atrium’s blueprint for future development, and the obstacles and challenges it has faced. They also discuss how Atrium differs from Clearspire, an earlier attempt at a dual-entity model.   Rakow attended Harvard Divinity School before discovering an interest in law and attending UC Hastings College of the Law. He joined Orrick as a corporate associate, later becoming partner. He specialized in representing startups in the Bay Area, where his clients included the driverless car industry’s first “unicorn” startup, the world’s then fastest-growing SaaS company, the first venture-backed consumer drone company, the leading Sand Hill-backed consumer packaged goods company, and several of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture funds. 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.

Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin, helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice. Paladin has attracted some notable investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and host of the show Shark Tank,and also notable development partnerships, including with the law firms Dentons and Wilson Sonsini and the Chicago Bar Foundation.   On this episode of LawNext, Conrad joins host Bob Ambrogi for an in-depth discussion of the company she and cofounder Kristen Sonday launched in 2015. She explains how the platform works, describes Paladin’s partnerships with legal departments, law firms and associations to expand it capabilities, and discusses her views on how technology can play a role in expanding access to justice. Before founding Paladin, Conrad was a litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. An alumnus of NYU Law, McGill University and Sciences Po Paris, she previously worked at the United Nations on International Criminal Court issues, and has worked in international law around the world. In 2017, she was named both an ABA Journal Legal Rebel and a Fastcase 50 legal innovation honoree. In 2019, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center named her to its roster of Women of Legal Tech. 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.

Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting. This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings’ legal innovation hub, LexLab. The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some of the factors and considerations driving change in the law firm model. Panelists speaking in this week’s episode are: Augie Rakow of Atrium LLP; Sameena Kluck, previously of Thomson Reuters; Nick Long, Director of Gravity Stack at Reed Smith LLP; and Patrick Palace, of Palace Law. The discussion is moderated by Alice Armitage, professor and Director of Applied Innovation at UC Hastings, and CEP of LexLab. The panel was recorded as part of the LexLab Lunch-and-Learn speaker series. LexLab is an innovation hub within UC Hastings, which is building a concentration in law and technology for students, and an accelerator for legal tech startups.