LawNext

In October 2020, legal industry veterans Joe Borstein and Paul Stroka set out to change the legal tech sales paradigm by founding LexFusion as a go-to-market representative of a curated collection of companies across major categories of legal technology. As the company nears its third anniversary, Borstein joins LawNext to reflect on its successes and failures and to share where it is today. In addition, Borstein shares his perspective on the recent acquisition of Casetext by legal tech behemoth Thomson Reuters for $650 million in cash. As it happens, not only was Casetext one of the companies that LexFusion represented, but Borstein is a former executive of Thomson Reuters, where he worked as global director of Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services (the former Pangea3).  Given that the Casetext deal was driven by its development of CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant powered by GPT-4 and developed in cooperation with GPT’s developer OpenAI, Borstein also offers his views on the impact he sees generative AI having on the legal industry broadly and on the conversations he is having with law firm and corporate legal leaders.   This is Borstein’s fourth appearance on LawNext. His previous episodes were: On LawNext Podcast: LexFusion’s Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty on the 2022 Legal Market in Review. On LawNext: Joe Borstein and Basha Rubin on the Launch of LexFusion. LawNext Episode 38: EY’s Purchase of Pangea3, with Pangea3’s Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn.   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.    Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Every great trial lawyer will tell you that the key to success in litigation is finding the story in a case. But when a case involves mountains of digital evidence, finding that story isn’t always easy or economical. That’s the problem the global legal services firm Novus Law aims to address.  Marking its 20th anniversary this year, Novus Law uses an award-winning process, derived from lean manufacturing principles, to find and document the story in litigation and investigations, and to do it more accurately, more efficiently, and more quickly than can be done through traditional legal processes. It is the only company to have twice won an InnovAction Award from the College of Law Practice Management.  Today’s guest is Ray Bayley, the cofounder, president and CEO of Novus Law. He founded the firm in 2003, after having been managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ North American business process outsourcing organization and a member of its 15-member management committee, responsible for overseeing its $9 billion, 70,000-person U.S. operations. He is also the former CEO of a business process outsourcing company with large-scale operations in India. In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Bayley discusses what makes the Novus process unique and shares some case studies of how the process has benefitted law firms and corporations.  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.  Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

One of the hottest sectors of the legal tech market these days is contract lifecycle management, or CLM. But Evan Wong believes that, for many inhouse legal teams, CLM is not necessarily the best route for them to streamline workflows. Rather, he believes workflow automation is often the better way for legal teams to transform their operations.  Wong is the founder and CEO of the low-code/no-code workflow automation company Checkbox. He says that law department technology needs to be more focused on workflow automation processes than on CLM. In fact, he says that CLM can actually be counterproductive for legal teams, depending on their size and maturity.  At the same time, workflow automation platforms address the same benefits of CLM — such as efficiency, accelerating contract turnaround times and reducing administrative burdens — but without the pressure of high initial costs, long implementation times and change management.   Wong was just 17 when he founded his first company, and he founded Checkbox shortly after he graduated from college, earning him and his cofounder James Han a place in the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30. Shortly before this episode came out, Wong turned 30.    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.  Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Noella Sudbury became interested in the issue of criminal records expungement soon after law school, while working as a criminal defense lawyer. Over and over again, she saw clients put in the hard work to get out of the criminal justice system and rebuild their lives, only to have doors slammed in their faces because of their records. That set her down a path that led her last year to found Rasa Legal, an innovative justice tech company, licensed under Utah’s legal services sandbox, that is making the process of expunging a criminal record simple and affordable.  Last month, Inc. named Sudbury to its Female Founders 200 list, a selection of women founders who have moved the needle in business and in their communities. Last year, Rasa was selected as the 2022 Access to Justice winner at the American Legal Technology Awards. Also last year, the Utah State Bar honored Sudbury with its 2022 Distinguished Service Award and, in 2019, Utah Business Magazine named her its 2019 Woman of the Year. In 2016, after practicing criminal law in private practice and as a public defender, Sudbury was appointed director of the Salt Lake County, Utah, Criminal Justice Advisory Council. She later joined the cabinet of then Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams as a senior policy advisor on criminal justice. In 2019, she led the successful effort that resulted in the unanimous passage of Utah’s Clean Slate law, which made Utah only the second U.S. state to automate the criminal record expungement process for misdemeanor offenses. It was over the course of that career that she came to see that technology could play a critical role in automating and simplifying the process of expungement, and it was that realization that led her to found Rasa Legal. 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.  Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

On this episode of LawNext, we’re taking you to the conference floor of the CLOC Global Institute, the annual conference of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium that was held May 15-18 in Las Vegas, for a series of brief interviews with 22 of the legal tech companies that exhibited there.  Since the first CLOC Global Institute in 2016, this conference has become a leading event for legal operations professionals and for anybody who works in corporate legal. For that reason, its exhibit hall draws many of the leading legal tech companies that cater to corporate legal, including an abundance of companies offering some flavor of contracts tech, as well as legal services providers, e-discovery providers, and others.  LawNext’s producer Ben Ambrogi attended the conference, where he ventured into the exhibit hall, mic in hand, and interviewed a cross-section of the companies he met there, garnering brief introductions to what they do and any news they were announcing. Together, the interviews offer a snapshot of what you might have seen had you attended CLOC, or maybe of what you missed even if you were there.  Companies interviewed in this episode are: AO Docs, Axiom, Bigfork Tech, Casepoint, Cobblestone, ContractPodAI, ContractSafe, eBrevia, ECFX, Epiq, Exigent, Hanzo, Icertis, Ironclad, LexCheck, LinkSquares, Paragon, Robin AI, SimpliContract, SpotDraft, WeLocalize, and Zycus.  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.  Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Logikcull, the company that CEO Andy Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang founded with the goal of automating and democratizing e-discovery. But the company actually evolved out of an earlier company the pair founded in 2004, Logik Systems, to digitize archaic paper-based discovery workflows where lawyers would print emails to paper to review them. While that first company saw rapid growth and even made the Inc 500 in 2009 at number 181, the Great Recession took the wind out of its sails and caused the two founders to reassess their business model.  Aiming to automate what they had previously done manually, they eventually launched Logikcull as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. Not only did they aim to automate the process, but also to democratize it by making that automation affordable and accessible for anyone. Ten years after launching Logikcull, Wilson joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the growth of the company and the evolution of its platform, which Wilson says is seeing record usage. Among other things, Wilson discusses the challenges the company faced in getting lawyers to trust their documents to a cloud-based platform, how lawyers’ perspective on the cloud has changed in recent years, and how a new generation of AI could impact e-discovery in the future.  This is Wilson’s second time on LawNext. In April 2019, Ambrogi interviewed him in-person at Logikcull’s headquarters in San Francisco. Among the many changes for the company since then is that it has shut down those offices and one 100 percent virtual.  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.  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. Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

As vice president, Data Analytics and Operational Excellence, at Wolters Kluwer, Abhishek Mittal is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision making in core operational processes. He leads a large global team of process engineers, design thinkers, data scientists and domain experts to develop expert solutions for both internal processes and new products.  In 2021, Wolters Kluwer’s Business Intelligence Group named him a Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award winner for his leadership in developing and advancing the AI technology that drives Wolters Kluwer's products such as LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer, for which he helped the company receive a patent; LegalVIEW Predictive Insights; Intelligent Invoice Conversion; and CLM Matrix contract lifecycle management. Mittal joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how he combines data analytics and operational excellence in developing new products. He also discusses how he leads and manages a diverse global team of professionals that includes both data and technology professionals alongside legal subject matter experts — groups that may talk about problems in different ways and have divergent ideas about how to resolve 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.  Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Over the past year, the sibling legal technology companies MyCase and LawPay have published a series of reports on law practice, including benchmark reports based on anonymized data from the two companies’ customers, as well as an in-depth 2022 year-end legal industry report, based on a survey of over 2,300 legal professionals. Together, they provide an in-depth look at the state of legal practice in the wake of the pandemic.  All of the reports were written by Nicole Black, who joins host Bob Ambrogi on this episode to share the findings from these reports and the picture they paint of how the pandemic has transformed the practice of law, particularly for solo and smaller firm lawyers. Black is head of SME and external education at MyCase, as well as an author and legal tech journalist, who writes regular columns for Above the Law, The ABA Journal, and The Daily Record.  Among the topics they discuss are the overall state of solo and small firm practices, the pandemic’s impact on firm’s financial health, the pandemic’s impact on legal tech adoption, the types of software lawyers find most important, the remote-working tools most used by lawyers, the significant increase in the use of online payments, lawyer productivity rates, the advantages of “passive” timekeeping, and much 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.  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. Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.  Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Sage Timeslips, trusted by solo and small firms for nearly four decades, offers robust functionality, customizable reports, and the ability to capture time and expenses on the go.   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Lexion is an AI-powered contract management system with a unique pedigree, having emerged out of the Allen Institute for AI, the AI research institute created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and having received backing from investors such as Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm whose portfolio includes companies such as OpenAi; Madrona Venture Group, which helped launch Amazon; and Wilson Sonsini, the law firm known not only for representing tech pioneers, but also for its own tech initiatives. Now Lexion has just raised another $20 million in a Series B round led by Point72 Ventures, with those prior investors again participating.  The company, says its cofounder and CEO Gaurav Oberoi, is on a mission to use AI to help corporate operations teams and legal departments close deals faster by accelerating business contracting across sales, procurement, legal, HR, security, and more. His resume includes having been a product manager, engineer, and founder for over a decade, and, before Lexion, he started and sold two software startups, BillMonk and Precision Polling, and founded a large business unit at SurveyMonkey.  Gaurav joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company’s founding and growth, its latest fundraising round, and his thoughts on the contracts market overall and the impact that new generations of AI will have on its future development.  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.  

It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world’s largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.  It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and potentially even threaten the longstanding legal research duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis. So what does it mean for the companies? What does it mean for their customers? And what does it mean for the legal market more broadly? To explore these questions and more, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the four founders of the two companies:  Lluis Faus, cofounder and CEO of vLex and now global CEO of the combined entity, known as the vLex Group.  Angel Faus, cofounder and chief technology officer of vLex. Ed Walters, cofounder and former CEO of Fastcase and now chief strategy officer of vLex. Phil Rosenthal, cofounder and former president of Fastcase and now chief growth officer of vLex. 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.