At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Shubham Datta, vice president of corporate development at Clio. Datta oversees the development and execution of Clio’s strategic growth strategy through acquisitions and investments. He brings to Clio years of M&A experience on both sides of the table as a strategic acquirer and sell-side advisor, with experiences in sourcing, deal execution and integration. Prior to Clio, Shubham was a corporate development lead at Shopify working on acquisitions and investments. In his spare time, he’s usually hosting or editing The Backbone podcast, cheering on the Raptors or thinking about what to eat next.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, about the recently released 2022 Legal Trends Report. An attorney admitted to the New York Bar, Lenon brings legal scholarship to the conversations happening both within Clio and with its customers. Lenon has worked extensively to educate lawyers on technology’s capability to enhance their practice, while also teaching tech companies about the unique needs of the legal system.

Among the most divisive issues facing the legal profession today is that of revising the rules that regulate law practice – and more specifically the questions of whether to liberalize the rules to allow those who are not licensed lawyers to own law practices or to engage in the practice of law. Two states, Arizona and Utah, have implemented regulatory schemes loosening restrictions on law practice, and other states are considering similar revisions to their rules.  Now, Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession has published a comprehensive study of the data coming out of Arizona and Utah, giving us what may be the first real evidence-based look at this issue. It finds that the reforms in those states are spurring substantial innovation, that they are critical to serving lower-income populations, and that they do not pose any substantial risk of consumer harm.  On today’s LawNext, we are joined by the two principal authors of that study: David Freeman Engstrom, co-director of the Rhode Center, and Lucy Ricca, director, policy and programs, at the Rhode Center, and formerly executive director of the Utah Office of Legal Services Innovation — the office that oversees the so-called regulatory sandbox in that state. They walk us through how they conducted the study, what they found, and what they would like to see come of the findings.  Read the report: Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change.   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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

At the 2022 Clio Cloud Conference held recently in Nashville, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down for a series of in-person interviews with Clio executives. In this episode, he speaks with Curt Sigfstead, chief financial officer. He is responsible for managing Clio’s financial affairs, including finance, accounting, capital, treasury, taxation, and corporate development. With over two decades of technology finance experience, Sigfstead has held numerous senior finance leadership roles at companies including Clearco and J.P. Morgan. He sits on multiple nonprofit boards including C100, which supports Canadian technology entrepreneurs through investment and mentorship. When he’s not disrupting the status quo through mission-driven work he can be found running the trails of Northern California, mapping out a route for his first Clio virtual 10km.

In an episode of LawNext recorded in person at the Clio Cloud Conference in Nashville, Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton discusses the “antifragile” law firm, a concept he introduced in his conference keynote — derived from the book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — that certain firms thrive in the face of stressors and adversity, as we saw so clearly during the pandemic.  So what is an antifragile law firm and how does a firm become antifragile? Newton and host Bob Ambrogi discuss the concept in greater detail. They also talk about the tenth anniversary of ClioCon, Clio’s seventh-annual Legal Trends Report, the competitive landscape for law practice management technology, and the future course of Clio, including whether an IPO is on the horizon.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

An increasing number of startups are defining themselves not as legal tech, but as justice tech. So what, exactly, is justice tech, who are some of the companies that represent it, and what is the business opportunity they present for potential investors? Our guest this week is Maya Markovich, executive director of the Justice Technology Association, an organization formed earlier this year to support companies in the justice tech sector.  She is also executive in residence for justice tech at Village Capital, the largest organization in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage startups, where she recently co-authored the report, Supporting Tech for Justice-Impacted Communities: Strategies to Supercharge Justice Tech Investing, a framework to help investors maximize the probably that a justice tech investment will have a positive impact on individuals involved with the justice system.  Until last year, Markovich was chief growth officer at Nextlaw Labs, the legal tech incubator created by Dentons, one of the world’s largest law firms. We discuss the justice tech landscape, the opportunities for investors in justice tech, and how the sector is likely to develop over the coming years.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

At a time when law firms are struggling to retain talent and wrestling to balance hybrid workplaces, the Texas-based corporate law firm Vela Wood did something unique: It sent its employees and their families to Portugal for a month. Why did it do it? How did it do it? What did clients think? And are there lessons for other firms? For the answers to those questions and more, our guests this week are the two name partners of the firm: Kevin Vela, who is the firm’s managing partner, and Radney Wood. As you will hear, theirs is not a traditional corporate firm in many respects, as they are selective in the clients they take on and committed to work-life balance among their employees.  Travel was already integral to the firm’s culture, in the belief that it helps develop more motivated and well-rounded employees. Partner Wood has traveled extensively throughout the world and founded a company to facilitate remote work for professionals. Several years ago, the firm adopted its Desk Independence program to encourage individual employees to work from other countries.  But the Portugal trip — which the firm dubbed VW Abroad — took that to a new level, offering its entire staff the opportunity to work from Portugal for a month and bring their families. It offered a $3,000 stipend for travel, arranged a co-working space, and helped with travel and other activities. About half the staff took them up on the offer.  Both Vela and Wood say the trip yielded benefits they had not even anticipated. And they are already planning next year’s trip.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

For those who have to go to court without a lawyer, navigating the justice system can be daunting. Courtroom5 is a unique justice tech company that addresses that problem by providing pro se litigants with the training, tools, documents and support they need to represent themselves. For litigants who need extra help, it also offers access to à la carte lawyer services. Our guest this week, Courtroom5’s cofounder and CEO Sonja Ebron, was motivated by her own experiences as a pro se litigant to develop a way to help others who find themselves in the same situation. With a doctorate in electrical engineering and experience as an entrepreneur, she and cofounder Debra Slone, a PhD librarian and former library school professor, launched Courtroom5 in 2017.  Courtroom5 is also a founding member of the Justice Technology Association, formed earlier this year to support technology companies that help people navigate legal matters. Ebron and Slone were both named to the 2022 Fastcase 50, which honors law’s “smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.”  Listen to learn why Ebron founded Courtroom5, how it helps those who cannot afford a lawyer, and what she sees as the future for her company and the broader landscape of justice tech.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Devshi Mehrotra was a computer science undergraduate at the University of Chicago when she and classmate Leslie Jones-Dove developed JusticeText, an platform that makes it easier for public defenders to review and analyze the massive quantities of police body cam and other video footage that is becoming increasingly common in criminal cases.  At the time, Mehrotra never envisioned it as a company or a career. But a year after graduating, as video of police misconduct brought the country to a national reckoning around racial justice and criminal justice reform, she realized that it was exactly what she was meant to do. For someone with no background in law or entrepreneurship, it was, she says, a terrifying leap of faith. Since then, JusticeText has built a solid base of public defender offices as customers and it recently raised a seed financing round of $2.2 million. Meanwhile, Mehrotra and Jones-Dove have gained  recognition and accolades  for their innovative product and their social-justice mission, including having both been named to the Fastcase 50 for 2022, having been named by Smithsonian Magazine as among Sixteen Innovators to Watch in 2022, and having been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021. In this episode of LawNext, Mehrotra joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the story of how and why she built JusticeText and of what the future holds for the still-nascent company.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Last week, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, said that it had acquired majority ownership of vLex, the international legal research platform that lays claim to having the largest collection of legal information on a single service.  On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined from London by Masoud Gerami, managing director, vLex Global Markets, who oversees vLex in the UK, Ireland, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. They talk about this latest news and what it means for vLex, and also talk more generally about the company and its research platform.  Gerami joined vLex in 2019, when it acquired Justis Publishing Ltd., a 33-year-old UK-based online legal publisher. He had been managing director at Justis since 1986. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Swansea University.    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, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.