LawNext

Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician, developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns.  But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha, expanding its platform to help law firms manage the new normal of hybrid offices and return to work, and it has continued to evolve to become an all-in-one platform for managing in-office needs and helping firms better plan and use their office space. Pasha, who is our guest on this episode, says that, in his view, the company’s real focus is not space, but people, and helping law firms and businesses understand how to optimize their spaces for the people who work in them today, and how to plan their spaces for the years ahead.  Side note: The recording of this conversation came about somewhat serendipitously, when host Bob Ambrogi was scheduled to meet with Pasha for a briefing during the Legalweek conference in January. When Ambrogi showed up at Maptician’s booth, the company’s publicist offered to record the conversation, and this is the result. Thanks to Maptician for allowing us to share it through this podcast.    Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Neil Araujo, CEO of iManage, discusses the company's journey from acquisitions to a successful buyback in 2015. They explore the impact of generative AI on legal workflows, transitioning to cloud technology for enhanced customer experience, and future plans for AI integration and product development. Insights shared on leveraging AI for document findability, summarization, data extraction, and draft creation.

A detailed discussion on the Caselaw Access Project, a collaborative effort between Harvard Law School and Ravel Law, to digitize and provide free access to all US court decisions. The challenges, negotiations, and significance of the project, including the recent lifting of all restrictions on the data. Insights on the digitization process, historical trends in case law language, and the future impact on legal research and generative AI technology.

CEO Ed Watts of InfoTrack discusses revolutionizing litigation services through acquisitions like LawToolBox and One Legal, expanding to the US from Australia, integrating with practice management platforms, enhancing court filing systems, and implementing generative AI for problem-solving and court filings.

The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company. With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them -- legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance.  One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality.  On today’s episode, we’ll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer: Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation. Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US. Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America.  One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules.    Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry’s first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product. At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr’s cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections. Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.   Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount. Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Thomson Reuters' AI strategy in legal research, discussing generative AI's impact. Acquisitions, integration in Westlaw Precision, and Practical Law. Executives talk about AI development, protecting against hallucinations, ensuring security, and the future of AI at Thomson Reuters.

In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035.  In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebecca Sandefur, one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice (who was on LawNext in 2020); Matthew Burnett, senior program officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF); Jim Sandman, president emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (on LawNext in 2019); and other notable names.  On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nikole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice. Before starting there in November, Nelson had been executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation, where she was instrumental in launching a statewide community justice worker project that won the 2019 World Justice Challenge. She was also instrumental in bringing about an Alaska Supreme Court rule change in 2022 allowing justice workers supervised by Alaska Legal Services to provide limited scope legal help in certain situations.  Nelson describes how justice workers helped Alaska Legal Services better serve the legal problems of people across the state’s remotest regions, and how new models of justice workers in other states could similarly help reach those who are not now receiving adequate help for their legal problems. She also recognizes that Frontline Justice faces obstacles in achieving its mission, and she shares her thoughts on how it can overcome them.  Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap.  Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC’s first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab’s advisory board.  Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today’s episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab.    Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice, and since joining the AAA, she is credited with having “supercharged” its innovation efforts – particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI.  Also critical to those innovation efforts has been Diana Didia, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at the AAA, who had helped ignite the association’s innovation efforts well before McCormack arrived and whose work not only set the stage for continued innovation but has been critical in helping the organization drive forward into embracing generative AI.  Our guests on today’s LawNext, McCormack and Didia – along with many others on their team – have been working full bore over the past year to drive further innovation at the AAA and to integrate AI into its own work and into the broader field of dispute resolution. They recently launched the AAAi Lab, a website supporting AAA users, arbitrators, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI, and also ClauseBuilder, a generative AI tool for writing clear and effective ADR clauses.  When we spoke, they were preparing to present this week on the AAA’s innovation efforts and its adoption of AI as part of a panel at Legalweek in New York.  Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”    If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.