Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world’s first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s just-released latest version of its GPT model.  “GPT-4 leaps past the power of earlier language models,” said Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer for Casetext. “The model’s ability not just to generate text, but to interpret it, heralds nothing short of a new age in the practice of law.” Not only that, but Casetext played a central role in a study to have GPT-4 take the bar exam. Just two months ago, I had legal scientists Dan Katz and Michael Bommarito on this show to talk about their experiment having GPT-3.5 take the bar exam. Spoiler alert: It failed. With the release of the more powerful GPT-4, Katz and Bommarito collaborated with Casetext to conduct the study again. This time, GPT not only passed all three components of the exam, including the essay portion, but it scored in the top 10th percentile.  So what does GPT-4 mean for legal professionals? How might it change law practice? To discuss all of this, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the three top executives of Casetext: Jake Heller, CEO. Laura Safdie, COO & general counsel.  Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer.  They discuss what makes CoCounsel different than other AI products in the legal market, how they avoid the problem of “hallucinations,” how products such as CoCounsel may change law practice, and how they can help close the justice gap.    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.

Two years after D. Gordon Smith was appointed dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2016, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.” Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean in the school’s history.  So how did he do in pursuit of that goal? During his tenure, he drove a number of innovations around innovation and technology, including the launch of LawX, a legal design lab committed to tackling access-to-justice issues with solutions that address pressing legal problems such as debt collection, eviction and asylum. He also served on two Utah Supreme Court task forces that led to the creation of the Utah Sandbox.  Also during his tenure as dean, he more than tripled the amount of scholarships available to students, saw the law school’s ranking rise from 46th to 23rd, pioneered a law and corpus linguistics program, and launched a global leadership program.  Recently, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the school’s Provo, Utah, campus, and sat down with Smith in his office to reflect on his nearly seven years as dean.    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. Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software. Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

On this episode of LawNext, we take a closer look at Smokeball, the law practice management company whose roots are in Australia but that is firmly entrenched in the United States. In fact, after Smokeball was founded in 2010, its very first customer was a law firm in Chicago.  Appropriately, then, it was in Chicago last week, during ABA TECHSHOW, that host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a face-to-face conversation with two of Smokeball’s top executives, Jane Oxley, chief revenue officer for Smokeball internationally, and Ruchie Chadha, president of Smokeball in the U.S.  On the day that they spoke, Smokeball had just announced the expansion of its practice management platform with the addition of Smokeball Intake, an intake workflow system that the company says is designed to enable law firms to provide their clients with the kind of digital experience they expect from a modern law firm.  In this interview, Oxley and Chadha say this announcement is just the start of a period of major global acceleration and innovation for the product throughout the next year. They describe some of features that they believe distinguishes Smokeball from other practice management platforms. They also talk about what’s ahead for Smokeball and share their thoughts on the broader law practice management market.   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. Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software. Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Kathryn Tewson was a little-known paralegal when, on Jan. 24, she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. That day, she published a scathing series of tweets recounting her investigation of DoNotPay, the company that describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” She concluded that the company’s supposed AI-driven products were little more than smoke and mirrors and that its representations about its products constituted consumer fraud.  Her findings stirred intense interest both on social media and in the traditional media. Soon after she published her findings, DoNotPay’s founder Joshua Browder announced he was taking down the products she tested. Now, Tewson has filed a legal action against DoNotPay and Browder in New York state that is the first step in a potential consumer class action.  Last week on this podcast, Browder was our guest to respond to Tewson’s allegations and other criticisms of him and his company that have come out over the past month. In the interview, he dismissed much of the controversy as “a bit of a nothingburger.” Today, Tewson joins LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to share her story of how she came to investigate DoNotPay, what she uncovered, and why she has now taken the first steps towards a potential class action. She also responds directly to some of what Browder said in last week’s show.    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. Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software. Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

On this episode of LawNext: Joshua Browder, founder of DoNotPay. Browder achieved international recognition when, at just 17 years old in 2015, he founded DoNotPay, touted as the world’s first robot lawyer, to help people appeal parking tickets. The company claims the app has saved motorists in the U.S. and UK many millions of dollars. DoNotPay went on to release a series of apps designed to help consumers – and, more recently, small businesses – solve common legal problems, all without the need for a lawyer, and, along the way, it has raised some $28 million in venture funding. In recent weeks, however, Browder has been the subject of harsh criticism, both on social media and in the news media. The criticism came on two principal fronts. One was what many viewed as a pair of ill-conceived publicity stunts – first when Browder offered to pay a lawyer $1 million to argue a case in the Supreme Court guided via AirPods by DoNotPay’s artificial intelligence, and the other when Browder said he would send a pro se litigant into traffic court guided by DoNotPay’s AI whispering in his ear. He canceled that plan after claiming that state bar officials threatened him with prosecution.  Then came a scathing series of tweets by Kathryn Tewson, a paralegal in Washington state who tried out several of DoNotPay’s self-help legal tools, only to conclude that they were effectively smoke and mirrors, in some cases getting the law wrong, in others failing even to deliver the promised product. Following all that, Browder announced that he was taking down the legal tools from DoNotPay and would henceforth focus only on consumer rights.  What does Browder say about all this? In this exclusive LawNext interview, he describes it all as “a bit of a nothingburger.”    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. Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Last week, Documate, the no-code document automation platform, rebranded as Gavel, a move designed to better reflect the company’s mission to become the platform of choice for legal professionals and legal organizations wanting to “productize” the delivery of legal services by packaging services as online legal products. Gavel founder and CEO Dorna Moini joins LawNext this week to discuss how her company has evolved from document automation to come to support law firms, courts, legal aid organizations, and even legal tech companies such as Hello Divorce, as they build tools to automate legal services. She also discusses how a law firm can get started on productizing its own services, why a firm would want to to this, and whether some practices are better suited for productization than others. Moini was an associate at the law firm Sidley Austin in San Francisco when she left in 2017 to found what was originally called HelpSelf Legal and focused on automating legal help to domestic violence victims. Interest from others within the legal industry in her automation platform led her to pivot the next year as Documate and focus on building automation. Over the years, as more and more of her customers built out full legal products using Documate, she decided to rebrand again as Gavel, a name that Moini believes invokes a trusted process.   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.

When this podcast launched in July 2018, the very first guest on the very first episode was Nicole Bradick, who six months earlier had launched the legal technology design and development company Theory and Principle. As the company marks its fifth anniversary, Bradick returns to LawNext with news that the company is branching off in a new direction, launching T&P Studio, an arm of the business devoted to co-developing legal tech products in partnership with others.  The new business will work with partners in the legal industry who have ideas for products but who may not have the product team, budget or other elements needed to bring a product to market.T&P will validate partner ideas and then manage all areas of product strategy, design, development, and launch. Depending on the terms of the partnership, the T&P team will also participate in ownership, go-to-market strategy, sales and marketing.  After five years, how has Theory and Principle evolved and what has Bradick learned about building SaaS products for the legal market? Why is the company branching off in this new direction and what kinds of products is it looking to co-develop? What makes good design for a legal tech product? On this episode of LawNext, we discuss those questions and more.    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.

Catherine Kemnitz, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer at Axiom, discusses the launch of Axiom Advice & Counsel, a corporate-owned law firm in Arizona. They explore the reasons behind this move, the types of legal services they offer, and how they aim to deliver affordable and predictable services. The podcast also addresses the impact of Arizona's groundbreaking decision to allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms and the importance of addressing misconceptions about alternative business structures (ABSs).

Over the course of 2022, the principals of LexFusion conferred with 435 law departments and 250 law firms. Why? Simply put, because that is what the company does. It is a go-to-market company that defines its purpose as “to grease the gears of commerce and rapidly increase the adoption of legal innovation.” On behalf of a group of curated legal innovation companies, it works with legal departments and law firms to help them understand how innovative products can benefit them.  As a result of those conversations, they came out of 2022 with a unique perspective on the legal market. In a recent post at the Legal Evolution blog, they discussed their take-aways from those conversations and shared some of what they have been telling law departments and lawyers.  “We executed NDAs with multiple law departments and law firms so we could dig beneath surface-level discussions of practical innovation into the painful realities of budgets and politics,” they wrote. “We uncovered far more chronic pain than even we anticipated.” What was the source of that chronic pain and what advice did LexFusion offer? In this episode of LawNext, two of the cofounders of LexFusion, Joseph Borstein, CEO, and Casey Flaherty, chief strategy officer, join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the year that just ended and what it portends for the year ahead.    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.

Since the December release of Open AI’s GPT-3.5 model, and the related ChatGPT, speculation has been rampant about how this next generation of artificial intelligence might upend the legal profession. But as others have been speculating, two legal scholars and scientists, Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito, put GPT 3.5 to the task, having it perform that most anxiety-inducing of tests along the path to becoming a lawyer – taking the bar exam.  How did it do? Katz and Bommarito recently published the results in their article, GPT Takes the Bar Exam, and on this episode of LawNext, they join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why they did this experiment, how it turned out, and what it all means for the future of AI in law.  Katz is professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and academic director of both The Law Lab at Illinois Tech, Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology & Data Science in Hamburg, Germany. He is cofounder and CSO of 273 Ventures, and formerly cofounded the legal AI company LexPredict, which was acquired by Elevate in 2018.  Bommarito is cofounder and CEO of 273 Ventures and a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 20 years of experience in the financial, legal, and technology industries. A cofounder with Katz of LexPredict, he also co-founded Telly, an open source telemetry platform, and licens.io, an information security and compliance data company. He is an adjunct professor at Michigan State University College of Law. 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.