Ep 273: A Deep Dive Into Washington’s Newly Approved Pilot to Allow Non-Lawyer Entities to Practice Law
Release Date: 01/06/2025
Leading Product Transformation Amid Company Transformation: 8am’s New Chief Product Officer Leslie Witt
LawNext
As took to the stage Sept. 3 to at Kaleidoscope, inaugural customer conference, it was the culmination of a whirlwind summer. It had been just four months since she had joined the company formerly known as AffiniPay as chief product officer, responsible for leading product transformation and strategy for established legal tech brands LawPay, MyCase, CASEpeer and Docketwise. In the intervening 16 weeks, the company had and finalized details of its first major conference. Now, two weeks after the rebrand and as the conference got underway, Witt stood before the keynote audience detailing the...
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Ep 301: From Law Student Startup Founder to Global CEO: Daniel Lewis's Legal Tech Journey
LawNext
has witnessed legal technology's evolution from multiple vantage points that few others can claim. As a Stanford law student in 2012, he and classmate Nik Reed co-founded the legal research startup Ravel Law with the audacious goal of taking on LexisNexis and Westlaw using machine learning and data analytics – at a time when such challengers were few and far between. Not only was Ravel Law pioneering in its own right, but it also spearheaded and funded the Caselaw Access Project, an ambitious partnership with Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab to digitize and provide free and...
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Ep 300: Reveal’s CEO and CTO On Its Launch of Gen AI for E-Discovery Review
LawNext
The e-discovery company recently announced that it will launch its new generative AI-powered document review platform, called “aji,” in late September. Notably, the company said it is offering full access to the platform at no cost through Dec. 31, in order to enable “the entire legal community to explore and master the next era in GenAI review innovation.” To discuss the launch of aji, today’s episode features Reveal’s founder and CEO Wendell Jisa, together with the company’s chief technology officer, Matthew Brothers-McGrew. This launch, Jisa says, represents the...
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Ep 299: Harbor Global CEO Matt Sunderman On Driving Digital Transformation in Legal
LawNext
This year’s ILTACON, which starts later this week, marks the second anniversary of , a global expert services company formed through the merger of three long-established legal consulting firms: HBR Consulting, LAC Group, and Wilson Allen, and that formally launched at ILTACON in 2023. The company, which counts among its clients some 80% of the 200 largest global law firms and 50% of the Fortune 500, has been making waves ever since, further expanding its services, making additional acquisitions, and scoring some notable hires to its executive team, all culminating in the news in...
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Ep 298: SpotDraft’s Shashank Bijapur: From Late-Night Due Diligence to Legal Tech Innovation
LawNext
What happens when a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer, tired of copying and pasting contract language, starts reading about self-driving cars? In case, it sparked the creation of , a contract lifecycle management company that just raised $54 million in Series B funding and that counts major companies such as Airbnb among its customers. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Bijapur, CEO and cofounder of SpotDraft, to explore his journey from White & Case associate to legal tech entrepreneur. It all began with that pivotal New Year's Eve moment – working on due...
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Ep 297: CoCounsel’s Next Generation: Emily Colbert and Rawia Ashraf on Agentic AI for Lawyers
LawNext
If generative AI was the biggest story in legal tech in 2023 and 2024, agentic AI is proving to be the most talked-about topic of 2025. Spurring this, at least in part, has been of its forthcoming release of a new agentic version of CoCounsel, its AI legal assistant, that will be able to plan, reason and execute complex multi-step workflows for legal professionals. On this episode of LawNext, we will dive deep into this next generation of AI legal assistants with two guests who are at the forefront of this field, leading the development of CoCounsel’s next generation: and . Both joined...
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Ep 296: How LexisNexis and Harvey Are Partnering to Reshape Legal AI, with LexisNexis CEO Sean Fitzpatrick
LawNext
When legal research giant LexisNexis and legal AI giant Harvey , legal tech commentator “possibly the most important legal tech move in a decade.” On today’s episode of LawNext, we go deep into the partnership and its implications with , CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland. Through the partnership, LexisNexis will integrate its primary law content, Shepard's citations, and AI technology directly into Harvey's platform, and the two companies will jointly develop agentic AI workflows. The partnership comes on the heels of Harvey's remarkable Series E funding round,...
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Ep 295: How One Mass Tort Firm Uses Supio, the AI Platform for PI Lawyers
LawNext
, an AI-driven platform developed specifically for personal injury lawyers, has been generating a lot of buzz. On the heels of reporting record growth last year and raising $25 million in Series A funding in October, last month in a Series B round. But what do the lawyers who use the platform think of it? On today’s LawNext, we hear from one of those lawyers, as well as from the company’s cofounder and CEO. Our guests today are: , managing partner of the personal injury law firm . Schneider was an early adopter of Supio. He and his firm used it to help obtain a $495 million...
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Ep 294: A Special Interview with Aderant CEO Chris Cartrett Recorded Live at Its Momentum Global Conference
LawNext
When was named CEO of legal technology company in 2022, he did so with the mission of aggressively advancing a cloud-first strategy throughout the company’s suite of business and financial software for law firms. Given that Aderant is a nearly 50-year-old company with many customers who still use the on-premises version of its software, that was not an easy mission to fulfill. So three years later, what grade does he give himself in delivering on that mission? That is one of the questions I put to him during a special live LawNext interview. We recorded the interview at Aderant’s ...
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Ep 293: Litera’s Avaneesh Marwaha: The CEO Who Left Before AI and Returned to Lead Through It
LawNext
What happens when a CEO steps away from a legal tech company just before the generative AI revolution explodes, then returns two years later amid a landscape that is being dramatically transformed? For Litera’s , that is exactly what happened. As the CEO of Litera from 2016 to 2022, Marwaha led the legal tech company through a remarkable period of expansion and diversification, including growing its global customer base by over 1,500% and its annual revenues by 1200%, and overseeing some 14 acquisitions that transformed the company’s focus from document productivity to a broad range...
info_outlineOn Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned by lawyers can practice law.
The pilot, which will last for 10 years, is designed to test whether entity regulation will increase access to justice by enhancing access to affordable and reliable legal and law-related services. Entities approved to operate under the pilot will be allowed to practice law, but only under strict conditions that limit the duration of their operations and that require active monitoring and oversight.
To discuss the development and details of this pilot, we are joined today by two guests representing the two organizations that proposed this pilot to the court and that will now be tasked with partnering to get it up and running. They are:
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Terra Nevitt, executive director of the Washington State Bar Association, and
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Craig Shank, a Washington lawyer and member of the Washington Supreme Court’s Practice of Law Board.
Their share their perspectives on how this pilot could enhance access to justice and what the development means for regulatory reform more broadly.
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.
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Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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Littler, local everywhere.
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Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach
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Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
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