LawNext

At just 17 years old, Joshua Browder made international news when he created DoNotPay, a chatbot that helped appeal parking tickets, reportedly saving motorists in the U.S. and UK millions of dollars. Now 21, he has just released a series of apps designed to help consumers solve common legal problems without the help of a lawyer -- including one to file small claims lawsuits in any U.S. jurisdiction. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi catches up with Browder during the recent Clio Cloud Conference, where they discuss the genesis of DoNotPay, the latest round of apps, and Browder’s dream of enabling robots and technology to help people with most of their common legal problems. “If you’re a normal person who’s not accused of murder, who doesn’t need to be in the Supreme Court, I don’t want you to even have to interact with a lawyer,” Browder says. “ … There’s no reason why, if your landlord keeps your security deposit, it should be so complicated to get justice. So everything that a consumer would want from the legal system, I want to provide for free.” Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Kevin O’Keefe believes that lawyers get their best work from relationships and a strong word-of-mouth reputation, and that blogging is the perfect way to build relationships and reputation. In 2003, he founded LexBlog, a company devoted to helping lawyers and law firms launch their own blogs. Today, LexBlog has grown to a network of nearly 20,000 legal professionals worldwide blogging on the platform. More recently, LexBlog launched a global legal news and commentary network based on legal blogs. The network is open to any legal blog, without cost and regardless of whether the blog is a LexBlog customer. And just last week, LexBlog announced a national campaign to help bridge the legal services gap by enabling lawyers to connect with consumers in real and authentic ways through blogs. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi -- who has worked with LexBlog since January 2018 as publisher and editor-in-chief -- talks with O’Keefe about LexBlog, blogging, and the important of building trust and relationships for lawyers to connect with clients. Before founding LexBlog, O’Keefe was a trial lawyer in Wisconsin for 17 years. In 1998, he founded a virtual law community, PrairieLaw.com. After selling PrairieLaw to LexisNexis in 2001, he became vice president of business development for its Martindale-Hubbell division. He is a graduate of University of the Pacific -- McGeorge School of Law and the University of Notre Dame.

What if a lawyer could know how a judge is likely to rule in a case or how heavy is a judge’s workload? Rick Merrill was a litigator at a large law firm who became frustrated over his inability to get meaningful information about the judges before whom he appeared. So last year, he launched Gavelytics, a California company that uses analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze docket data and provide lawyers with a range of insights about judges’ propensities, workloads and leanings. In this episode of LawNext, host Robert Ambrogi visits Gavelytics’ office in Santa Monica, where he sits down with Merrill, now the company’s CEO, and Justin Brownstone, VP of sales and litigation counsel, to talk about the product one year after its launch, how lawyers use analytics for strategic and competitive purposes, and how analytics and AI are being used more broadly in law. Before founding Gavelytics, Merrill was a litigator with the law firm Greenberg Traurig in Los Angeles, involved primarily in real estate and other commercial disputes. He received his law degree from UCLA School of Law, completed the executive program at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. Brownstone is also a former litigator with several Los Angeles firms. He is also a graduate of UCLA School of Law, where he was a managing editor of the law review. He earned his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College.

Earlier this year, Mark Britton left Avvo, the often-controversial company he founded in 2006 and led as CEO, after selling it to web behemoth Internet Brands. Explaining his departure in a memo to his staff, he wrote, “It’s time for me to go.” In this episode of LawNext, Britton reflects on his 12 years at Avvo. In a face-to-face interview with host Bob Ambrogi, he recounts why he started the company and explains why he left. He discusses what he believes his company achieved and what he achieved as CEO. He reveals his greatest disappointment and his frustration with Avvo’s ongoing battles with the organized bar. He also offers his advice to budding entrepreneurs. Before founding Seattle-based Avvo, Britton was senior vice president, general counsel and secretary for Expedia after it spun off from Microsoft. Earlier, he was an attorney with Preston, Gates & Ellis in Seattle and senior counsel with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He is a 1992 graduate of The George Washington University Law School and a 1989 graduate of Gonzaga University. Visit patreon.com/lawnext to submit questions for our guests.

  In July, Thomson Reuters unveiled Westlaw Edge, the next generation of its legal research platform that uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help legal professionals find answers and perform research more efficiently. The engineering of the AI that went into that was spearheaded by Dr. Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of research and development at Thomson Reuters and head of the company’s Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing in Toronto. Al-Kofahi joins host Bob Ambrogi to debunk some of the myths around AI in law and to discuss why building AI is harder than many lawyers realize. He says that three keys to the quality of an AI product are quality of the editorial inputs used to train the system, quality of the data that underlies the system, and subject-matter expertise by the team building the system. A 20-year veteran of Thomson Reuters, Al-Kofahi has led the development of many advanced technologies that power products across Thomson Reuters, including natural language processing applications to mine information from text, large-scale text classification, recommender systems, vertical search, named entity extraction and resolution, question answering, language generation and summarization. Al-Kofahi has a doctorate in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology in Jordan. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

Should legal ethics rules be changed to allow non-lawyer ownership of legal services providers? So controversial is the question that it was major news in July when the State Bar of California voted to appoint a task force to study and make recommendations on the issue. What spurred the bar to take this action was the Legal Market Landscape Report it commissioned from William D. Henderson, professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who is Bob Ambrogi’s guest on today’s episode to discuss his findings and recommendations. Henderson’s report makes the case that the legal profession is failing in its core mission of serving those who need legal services. The situation has brought the profession to an inflection point that requires action by regulators, Henderson says. The most effective regulatory action would be to ease rules on non-lawyer investment in order to allow lawyers to more closely collaborate with professionals from other disciplines, such as technology, process design, data analytics, accounting, marketing and finance. “By modifying the ethics rules to facilitate this close collaboration,” Henderson writes in his report, “the legal profession will accelerate the development of one-to-many productized legal solutions that will drive down overall costs; improve access for the poor, working and middle class; improve the predictability and transparency of legal services; aid the growth of new businesses; and elevate the stature and reputation of the legal profession as one serving the broader needs of society.” At Maurer, Henderson holds the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession. In 2017, he founded Legal Evolution, an online publication that chronicles successful innovation within the legal industry. A prolific author and speaker, he focuses primarily on the empirical analysis of the legal profession. Among his honors, he was named by the ABA Journal as a Legal Rebel, included on the National Law Journal’s list of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America, and in both 2015 and 2016 named the Most Influential Person in Legal Education by The National Jurist magazine. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

In September 2017, venerable Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy launched Fuse, setting aside a portion of its London office for a collaborative innovation space to develop and test new legal technologies, and it named lawyer Shruti Ajitsaria to head the project. On this episode of LawNext, Ajitsaria joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why Allen & Overy started Fuse, explain what it does, and describe its work to date. Ajitsaria says Fuse is not an incubator, per se, but a collaborative technology innovation space that gives legal technology companies the opportunity to work directly with Allen & Overy’s lawyers and clients. It’s a win-win, she says. Companies get the chance to test and refine their products, while the firm’s lawyers get to better understand how technology can help them in their own practices. Ajitsaria was a credit-derivatives lawyer dabbling in angel investing when a pitch from a legal technology startup sparked her interest in legal technology. While on maternity leave, she attended Google Campus’ Startup School, and when she returned to work, suggested and then spearheaded the development of Fuse. Fuse differs from other incubators in that it accepts companies that are beyond early stage. Participants in the current cohort include AI platforms Kira Systems and Neota Logic. Another participant, Bloomsbury AI, was acquired in July by Facebook. Allen & Overy so much liked the first company it brought into Fuse, fintech company Nivaura, that it made an equity investment in it. Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

What does it mean to practice data-driven law? On this episode, Bob speaks with Jeff Pfeifer, the LexisNexis vice president charged with driving overall product strategy for LexisNexis Legal and Professional, North America. Over the past several years, Pfeifer has spearheaded a series of acquisitions and product developments, all with the goal of establishing LexisNexis as the leader in legal analytics and enabling what he calls data-driven law. Pfeifer oversaw the company’s 2016 acquisitions of legal analytics companies Lex Machina and Intelligize and the 2017 acquisition of Ravel Law. Most recently, Pfeifer led the roll-out of Lexis Analytics, a suite of tools that organizes all of LexisNexis’s major analytics acquisitions and products (as well as a couple new products) into three categories of analytics – litigation, regulatory and transactional. Bob talks with Jeff about these acquisitions, the launch of Lexis Analytics, and his vision of the data-driven lawyer. Pfeifer is a 29-year veteran of LexisNexis. Before taking on his current role in 2015 as vice president of product management, he was vice president, primary law and Shepard’s, and president and CEO of LexisNexis Puerto Rico. Earlier, he was vice president of marketing. He was recognized this year as among the Fastcase 50, honoring the “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.” Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

It was around the world in 40 days – the legal tech world that is. Earlier this year, Dera Nevin traveled to 19 destinations in 15 countries on six continents over 40 days, meeting with legal hackers and legal entrepreneurs all over the world. The trip, in conjunction with the Global Legal Hackathon, taught her lessons about legal technology and innovation on a global scale, and even taught her something about herself.   In this episode of LawNext, Nevin – who is now writing a book (maybe two) about her trip – describes how she came to embark on this trip, her objectives starting out, where she went, what she saw, and what she learned. Perhaps her biggest takeaway was that there are universal themes to the problems legal technologists are tackling and the obstacles they face.   Nevin was most recently e-discovery counsel and director of e-discovery services at Proskauer Rose in New York. Before that, she was managing counsel, e-discovery, at the TD Bank Group, and earlier was an e-discovery attorney at several law firms. Now, in addition to writing her book, she is teaching the course, Taxonomy of Innovation, in the Global Professional LLM program at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.   Comment on this show: Record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to info@lawnext.com.

What does legal innovation look like? For all the talk about innovation in law, who are the real innovators and what are they doing? This week’s guest, Daniel W. Linna Jr., an attorney and law professor, helps us answer that question.   Linna is the creator of the Legal Services Innovation Index, where he is cataloging and indexing innovations at law firms and law schools. Through his work, he is helping us understand how law firms can better deliver legal services to their clients and how law schools can better prepare students to practice law in the 21st Century.   In addition to discussing the index, Linna, a visiting professor of law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, also discusses how he will teach his students about innovation and technology, and about the Innovation Lab he will help lead at Northwestern. Before moving to Northwestern this year, Linna was director of LegalRnD, The Center for Legal Services Innovation at Michigan State University College of Law. He is an affiliated faculty member of CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and cofounder of the Chicago Legal Innovation & Technology Group. He is a 2015 Fastcase 50 honoree, recognizing the law’s “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, & leaders.”