Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

We talk to Nicole Clark, Co-Founder of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. Like many entrepreneurs before her, Nicole came up with the idea for Trellis to “scratch her own itch”. She was burning the midnight oil on a pleading she needed to get on file for a client (prior to launching Trellis, she was a litigator). She was unfamiliar with the judge that would hear the motion so, that night, she sent an email to colleagues at her firm to find out if any of them had been in front of the judge. In a stroke of luck, another lawyer in the office had been in front of the judge and with the very same legal issue. Needless to say, she was now armed with important background information about the judge that would help her notch a win for her client. It was that night that Nicole, said to herself, “there has to be a better way.” Why isn’t there a database of background information on state court judges she wondered. It was then and there that the idea for Trellis came to be. Eventually, Nicole hired a developer to create a bare bones app and used her law firm colleagues as testing guinea pigs. And it worked…Trellis became a reality and started attracting users outside of Nicole’s law firm. Nicole and the Trellis team got into Tech Stars LA and started raising money, and the rest…as they say is history…well…history in the making. Nicole and the trellis team have a lot of big plans they have yet to execute.

Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks. A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery. Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu. But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on. Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting. As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.

Zach Abramowitz makes a repeat appearance on Technically Legal to talk generative AI (like OpenAI) and its impact on legal technology adoption. Zach is a keen observer of legal tech and its trends. If you want to keep tabs on up and coming tech geared for legal, Zach is a good person to follow. He started is career at a large New York law firm where he worked on mergers and acquisitions. From there he launched his own tech company called Reply All and his latest venture, Killer Whale Strategies, is a consultancy that works with law firms and legal departments to find and utilize technology to disrupt the way traditional legal work is done. Zach has always been a strong proponent of using artificial intelligence in the legal industry, but after the release of ChatGPT and the growth of other generative AI platforms, he believes it might be the catalyst that finally expedites legal tech adoption. Zach explains why he thinks generative AI could make legal services cheaper, less profitable for service providers and on a timeline that is faster than most might think. Oh…and he also has a great music video.

IP lawyer Len Hickey joins the show to discuss Litigaze, the legal tech start up he founded that helps legal teams evaluate litigation risk, make smarter settlement decisions, figure out which claims to pursue and budget for litigation. Len has worked both in-house and at law firms. Over the course of his practice, to answer questions posed by his clients about the value of their cases, he developed sophisticated spreadsheets to analyze his clients’ odds and determine what expected outcomes might be worth. After awhile, as many tech founders do, he said to himself, “there should be a better way to do this.” So he taught himself to code and put together a beta version of Litigaze–software that enables users to build graphical decision trees of stages in a legal claim. Using Litigaze, lawyers and their clients can estimate chances of success and determine potential monetary values for outcomes. After he built the beta version, Len tested it out on friends, they liked it so he took the next step and hired developers to make a real app. In January 2021, Litigaze went live. Using Litigaze, lawyers and clients can make better decisions about litigation and determine the best courses of legal action to take.

Joshua Schwadron Founder and CEO of Mighty visits  the podcast to discuss how his company and law firm are disrupting personal injury law. Even though Joshua has a law degree, he knew he did not want to practice law in the traditional sense. Instead, in 2010 the entrepreneur in him founded Betterfly, a marketplace where consumers found service providers to help with projects like home remodels, yardwork or wedding plans. Betterfly was acquired by a company ultimately purchased by Microsoft and Joshua found himself with time to move on to a new venture, and that would be legal related. After Betterfly, he launched a litigation finance company and worked on it for a few years, until 2015 when he launched Mighty. At first, Mighty also had a litigation funding component and tried to pair plaintiffs with funders by having them compete for cases. Gaining traction with that model turned out to be a little harder than Johsua expected, so Mighty started building tech to help plaintiffs and their lawyers track liens against recoveries in their cases held by medical providers and other attorneys. As you will hear from Joshua, Mighty is a purpose driven company and its goal is to make the practice of personal injury law more efficient so plaintiffs can take home better settlements. That’s why he decided to found Mighty the law firm. A firm that requires lawyers to abide by a code of conduct and work to put the most money in plaintiff’s pockets.

Looking for an in-house counsel job? Wondering what companies look for when hiring legal professionals? Well, this episode is for you. Bruce Byrd, General Counsel for cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, talks about what he looks for when he is hiring for his legal team. Like many in-house attorneys, Bruce worked a few years at a law firm and then moved in-house when he took his first corporate legal job with the AT&T legal team. He climbed the ladder and ultimately ended up with the top job as Chief Legal Officer. Earlier this year, he moved to Palo Alto Networks and took his current role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel.  Bruce’s 20+ years as corporate counsel has afforded him great insight about landing an in-house job. Bruce says that he looks for a few attributes when interviewing attorneys for his company: Curiosity An understanding of what drives the company's business (especially financial aspects) Business Development Skills (which is really understanding what the clients/business people need) Being a good listener Adaptability and Flexibility

Ethics attorney Jim Doppke makes his fourth appearance on the show to discuss the pros and cons of liberalizing legal ethics rules like Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4 that prohibit people who are not lawyers from owning an interest in legal services companies and preventing them from sharing in legal fees. In recent years, states like Utah and Arizona that are testing the waters and permitting lawyers to team up with others to provide legal services and share legal fees. Jim discusses the ethical implications of these programs and explores preliminary statistics from the programs that trac the number of people served and the number of complaints raised about the services. Jim is an ethics attorney with the Chicago firm of Robinson, Stewart, Montgomery & Doppke. Before that, he spent most of his career as a prosecutor with the Illinois ARDC (the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commission). He also has a legal ethics focused podcast called Legal Ethics Now and Next.

Sonja Ebron found herself in a couple legal tangles over the years. From disputes with landlords to dust-ups with shady creditors, she represented herself in court a couple times and quickly figured out litigation without a lawyer can be very difficult. So, what did she do about it? She founded Courtroom5, an app that helps civil pro se litigants with legal research, provides education about court procedures and also helps them draft and file pleadings. A “do-it-yourself” litigation support tool. In 2019 when Courtroom5 participated in the Duke Law Tech Lab incubator program, Sonja met Maya Markovich who joined the Courtroom5 advisory board. Together with the Courtroom5 team, they are trying to bridge the access to justice gap and make it a little easier on litigants who head to court without a lawyer.

Noah Waisberg literally wrote the book on Lawyers and Artificial Intelligence. Now he is building his second company that offers AI to analyze contracts. As many do, Noah went to a top notch law school and then to BigLaw. He ended up doing deal work at the firm and had to review of ton of contracts. What Noah learned is that even moderately sized companies have a ton of contracts, but because lawyers are expensive, to get a deal done, they would review only the most important contracts. This often left an incomplete picture of the liabilities and risks a company might be taking on by buying another. This got Noah thinking. After taking some off from the legal grind, he and a co-founder launched Kira Systems to build an artificial intelligence tool that would help lawyers analyze contracts. If it worked, Noah figured, the AI would give the lawyers a head start permitting them to review more contracts with the same amount of work they were putting in without AI. Because more contracts could be reviewed, companies involved in M&A deals could have a better picture of the risks and liabilities in a deal. Kira’s AI did work, and in fact, was a smashing success. Last year, another legal tech company, Litera, bought it. Before the Litera acquisition, Kira started working on a tool that would help in-house legal teams use AI to analyze contracts to help out with contract management. After the Litera deal, this project became a new company that Noah now runs, Zuva. Zuva’s technology permits users to embed AI into into their own applications via APIs to extract information from their contracts. In this episode, Noah explains how he and his team grew Kira systems and why he is excited to do the same with Zuva.

Richard Mabey, CEO and co-founder of contract automation platform Juro, visits the podcast to talk about building a legal tech start up that helps in-house legal teams deal with contracts from drafting to execution (and reduce the number of software products they use while doing it.) Richard founded Juro in 2016 with a technical co-founder he met in business school. Prior to getting a business degree, Richard received a few others that run the gamut from music to philosophy and to (of course) law. Richard started his professional career at one of the UK’s premier law firms and while there, he was seconded to a client. During his time at that company is when the seeds were sown for Juro. As Richard explains, the legal team he worked with team included very smart people but they spent a lot of time comparing versions of high volume, low risk contracts in Word. And that was only one out of five pieces of software the company used to run an agreement through its lifecycle. Richard, like many that have come before, said to himself, “there has to be a better way” and went on to found Juro, an end to end contract automation platform that helps legal teams manage contract lifecycles. But Richard didn’t launch Juro right away. Before he and his co-founder started the company, he did a stint at Legal Zoom.