Ep 298: SpotDraft’s Shashank Bijapur: From Late-Night Due Diligence to Legal Tech Innovation
Release Date: 07/29/2025
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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 ...
info_outline
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_outline
Ep 292: AALL President Cornell Winston on Why Law Librarians Should ‘Be Bold’
LawNext
, president of the , brings a unique perspective to law librarianship, having spent 45 years in libraries across diverse settings — from a hospital library where he started as a student worker; to the former Whittier Law School; to prominent law firms Munger, Tolles & Olson and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; and, for the last 24 years, as law librarian in the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles. Winston joined host Bob Ambrogi to record this interview just weeks before AALL's annual meeting in Portland, Ore., July 19-22, with the theme "Be Bold." It's a fitting theme for a...
info_outline
Ep 291: Serial Legal Entrepreneur Monica Zent on Building the Future of Legal Services
LawNext
Monica Zent is a true pioneer in legal innovation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of ZentLaw, an award-winning alternative legal services provider that broke the traditional law firm mold when she founded it in 2002. ZentLaw has since grown into a nationwide legal services provider, serving global brands and major corporations with a unique subscription-based model and flexible talent approach. But Monica's entrepreneurial journey extends well beyond ZentLaw. She's a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including early internet startups in the 1990s. She's a...
info_outline
Ep 290: Turning Legal Spend Into Performance: PERSUIT Founder Jim Delkousis On His Acquisition of Apperio
LawNext
On May 5, 2025, , a technology company that specializes in helping corporate legal departments select and manage outside counsel, announced that it had acquired , a spend-management platform for corporate legal, in a move designed to create an end-to-end workflow solution spanning everything from matter intake to invoice payment. “This acquisition accelerates our ability to connect every point in the outside counsel workflow with intelligence,” , cofounder and CEO of PERSUIT, said at the time. “We’re not just managing spend — we’re turning it into performance.” This...
info_outlineWhat happens when a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer, tired of copying and pasting contract language, starts reading about self-driving cars? In Shashank Bijapur's case, it sparked the creation of SpotDraft, 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 diligence while eating Chinese food and reading about Elon Musk's self-driving cars – that made him realize something fundamental: Cars were driving themselves but lawyers were still stuck copying and pasting contract language.
The conversation traces SpotDraft's evolution from its original version as an AI redlining platform to becoming a comprehensive CLM solution. Bijapur shares the hard-won lessons of pivoting when their initial AI approach proved only as accurate as a coin toss, and how co-building with early customers who believed in their vision helped shape the product into what it is today.
They also dive deep into how generative AI is transforming contract management, get a preview of SpotDraft's new AI assistant called Sidebar, launching to the public next month, and discuss practical implementation challenges based on insights from SpotDraft's recent survey on AI adoption in legal departments. Looking ahead, they discuss where the CLM market is heading in the age of generative AI.
Throughout the discussion, Bijapur reflects on the entrepreneurial journey itself – learning to sell when trained to be demure, developing an appetite for risk after being taught to be risk-averse, and discovering that every startup milestone brings new challenges that require completely different approaches. It's a candid look at both the technical and human sides of building a legal tech 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, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
-
Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
-
Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.