LawNext

Dru Armstrong was named CEO of AffiniPay, the parent company of LawPay, in July 2021. Less than a year later, AffiniPay shook up the legal tech landscape by acquiring MyCase, one of the leading law practice management platforms, in a deal that also included four other practice management products: CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, Soluno for billing and accounting (which it recently sold), and Woodpecker for document automation.  One reason that deal was so notable was that, until then, LawPay had been the legal tech equivalent of Switzerland – a neutral integration partner with virtually every practice management platform out there. But in acquiring one of the major players in the market, that legal tech Switzerland seemed to suddenly lose its neutrality.  Now, two and a half years into the job as Affinipay CEO, Armstrong is our guest on this episode of LawNext to discuss that acquisition, where the company is today, and why the marriage of fintech and legal tech matters to legal practitioners. She also shares her plans for the company’s future, including how it will incorporate generative AI across its various products.  Armstrong and host Bob Ambrogi spoke live in Miami at the TLTF Summit, a conference produced by the Legal Tech Fund, a VC fund focused on legal tech, where she spoke on a panel on the intersection of fintech and legal tech. She was previously on this podcast in June 2022, at the time the MyCase acquisition was announced, and was also on our Legaltech Week 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. DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five “cluster projects” that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact.  The students  – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today’s LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work:  Whitney Triplet, who is in her final semester at Southern University Law Center.  Paul Campbell, a part-time student in his fourth year at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.  Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.   In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes: On LawNext Podcast: Two Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal System.  On LawNext Podcast: The Legal Fellows Tackling Systemic Racism in 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. TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts. CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

On this episode of LawNext: An interview recorded live with Erika Harold, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, an organization charged with working to enhance civility and professionalism and to eliminate bias within the legal profession.  A former litigator, Harold was named executive director in April 2022, to succeed retiring executive director Jayne Reardon, who has also been a guest on this podcast. A nationally recognized advocate of bullying prevention efforts, Harold led the commission this summer in launching a statewide initiative to assess the prevalence and impact of bullying in the legal profession and recommend best practices for preventing it.  Erika is also a former Miss America – the sixth Black woman ever to hold that title – and, as you’ll hear, she entered that competition to help fund her education at Harvard Law School, from which she graduated debt free. In 2014, she ran in the Republican primary for Congress to represent Illinois's 13th congressional district. In 2018, she was the Republican candidate for Illinois attorney general.  LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down live with Harold to record this conversation during the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.    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. TrialPad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

On today’sLawNext, it’s a Clio double header, featuring two separate interviews with two of Clio’s top product-focused executives – one with Jonathan Watson, its chief technology officer, and the other with Hemant Kashyap, chief product officer  – both recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville in October.  Even though I interviewed Watson and Kashyap separately, their roles at Clio are intertwined. As CTO, Watson was previously responsible for both technology and product. That changed last June, when Kashyap joined the company as its first chief product officer. Now, they tell me, they often work as partners on developing products and delivering them to Clio’s customers.  At the conference, Clio introduced an array of major new products and product updates, in what it called its most expansive product update ever in its 15-year history. These included Clio Duo, a generative artificial intelligence tool that will be built natively into all Clio products starting in 2024; a personal injury add-on for Clio offering a suite of features for PI lawyers; and Clio File, an electronic court filing and service feature built directly in Clio Manage, making it the first law practice management platform to directly incorporate e-filing. In both of today’s interviews, we talk about those new products and others, as well as the company’s longer-term product roadmap. Both Watson and Kashyapp also share their thoughts on generative AI and its potential impact on legal technology and legal practice.  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. DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents  CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Did Pras Michel’s lawyer botch his defense by relying on an AI program to create his closing argument? That’s what the former Fugees rapper claims in asking a court to overturn his April conviction in an illegal foreign influence scheme.  Michel says his lawyer, David Kenner, made a “frivolous and ineffectual” closing argument because he relied on an experimental AI program called EyeLevel.ai. Michel also alleges that Kenner and cocounsel Alon Israely had undisclosed financial interests in the AI company that motivated them to use the AI in his case as a marketing ploy.  But Neil Katz, the cofounder and COO of EyeLevel.ai, calls those claims “creative fiction” and “total nonsense.” Katz joins LawNext today to give his version of what happened in the Michel case and to tell us more about EyeLevel.ai, a company he says helps businesses and legal professionals build hallucination-free AI applications using private data.    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. TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts Caret, the award winning practice management platform work or document and workflow automation.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Joshua Lenon, Clio's Lawyer in Residence, unpacks the 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report. Highlights include increased productivity and technology adoption in law firms. The report introduces a new metric, 'lock up,' for measuring financial health. Discussion on revenue trapped in un-billed or un-collected state and the use of AI tools in the legal profession.

This week, LawNext veers slightly off-topic for a conversation about wrongful convictions. But, as you’ll hear from our guests, there is a legal tech angle, even to this.  At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Brian Banks, whose aspirations for a career in the NFL were sidetracked when, at age 16, he was falsely accused of sexual assault, resulting in his accepting a plea bargain that put him in prison for five years. It was an experience that has made Banks a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform.  Joining Banks for that conversation was Michael Semanchik, the lawyer who helped clear Banks’ name while working as managing attorney of the California Innocence Project. Recently, Semanchik launched a new project, The Innocence Center, where he is executive director. He also hosts one of the best new podcasts of 2023, the soon-to-be-renamed California Innocence Center Podcast.  For Banks, there was a happy ending to the story, in that he did clear his name and he even got to play in the NFL. But wrongful convictions continue to plague the criminal justice system. Today we’ll hear Banks’ story and explore what the system can do to keep other innocent people out of prison.    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. Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another. DocReviewPad: Review, organize, issue code, and bates stamp documents; then create production sets with detailed reports   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Jack Newton, Founder and CEO of Clio, discusses the importance of leveraging technology in the legal industry. He highlights how technology can amplify lawyers' impact and achieve exponential outcomes. The podcast also covers topics such as the role of AI in the legal profession, the challenge of accessing legal data, the launch of AI-powered assistant Clio Duo, and the trends and productivity in the industry. Additionally, they discuss the launch of two new products, including a PI-focused add-on and an electronic filing feature within Clio Manage.

Soon after starting her own law practice, Kimberly Bennett decided there had to be a better way than the billable hour to charge for her services. She wanted predictable pricing for her intellectual property clients and predictable income for herself. That led her to subscription-based legal services, charging her clients a flat monthly fee, and it worked so well for her that she became not just an adopter of the model, but an evangelist – a frequent speaker and writer on starting and scaling a subscription-based law practice.  In 2021, Bennett took that passion for subscription services beyond law practice and into legal technology. She became cofounder, together with Blaine Korte, of Fidu, a cloud platform designed to provide lawyers with everything they need to build a scalable subscription or flat-fee based law practice. Just a few weeks ago, Fidu won the Clio Integration Award for Best Practice of Law App.  Bennett was previously on this podcast in August 2020, before she cofounded Fidu, and we talked at length then about her career, her law practice, and her adoption of the subscription model. In today’s interview, we focus on Fidu and discuss how it can help a lawyer convert an hourly practice to a subscription or flat-fee one. We also talk about Bennett’s experience going from law practice to entrepreneurship, particularly as a Black woman.    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. Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another. Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

June Hsiao Liebert, President of the American Association of Law Libraries, discusses the evolving role of law librarians, addressing misconceptions about librarians, exploring the potential of GPT technology, and the role of law librarians in technology and innovation. They also highlight the power of a unified voice, enhancing diversity and inclusion within the organization, and the future of law librarians and law libraries.