An AI Arbitrator? The Latest Innovations from the American Arbitration Association, with CEO Bridget McCormack and CTO Diana Didia
Release Date: 09/30/2025
LexisNexis CTO Greg Dickason On Building Legal AI In Real Time with Customers in Its New Innovation Lab
LawNext
This week, LexisNexis of its in New York City — a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Amazon Web Services sit in the same room and build legal AI together, in real time. The company is calling it a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped: Instead of developing products internally and asking customers to validate them afterward, customers bring their pain points into the lab, engineers code against them on the spot, and prototypes that pass muster can move into Lexis+ with Protégé in a matter of weeks. ...
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SurePoint’s New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change
LawNext
, a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating , who had led the company since 2023, to executive chairman. Two weeks into the job, Steinberg joins LawNext to speak with host Bob Ambrogi about what his appointment means for the company's customers. His answer to that question is direct: This is a mandate for change, not business as usual. Steinberg is candid that SurePoint still has integration work ahead of it after acquiring four companies in four years — Coyote...
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From Product to Practice: Why Casetext’s Former CTO Has Started An AI Native Law Firm
LawNext
As chief technology officer at Casetext, helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's . But Walker came away unsatisfied. Although the legal tech tools kept getting better, he believed, clients were seeing no benefit. Billing rates kept climbing and the efficiency gains never reached them. That spurred him to pivot from building products to forming a practice — , an AI-native law firm he cofounded and leads as CEO, built on the premise that the fastest path to transforming legal services...
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Law Democratized: Renee Knake Jefferson on Her Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis
LawNext
Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, . But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice? That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to at the start of today’s conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work...
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Inside Claude for Legal: Anthropic's Mark Pike on AI's Next Frontier in Law
LawNext
When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company's biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that's been simmering since Anthropic's first legal plugin briefly rattled the stock prices of Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer back in January: Is Anthropic’s entry into the legal market a major step forward for legal productivity? Or is it a threat to trust, governance and the existing legal-tech infrastructure? ...
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Legal Research for Everyone: Inside the CourtListener - Claude Partnership
LawNext
Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced , much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem. But the less talked about side of the story was potentially the more impactful – Anthropic’s explicit commitment to access to justice, highlighted by a direct partnership with the and its free legal research platform. Suddenly, anyone with a legal problem and a chat window could access verified, authoritative legal materials,...
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Amy Juers and Valerie Chan on Marketing Legal Tech in the Age of AI Search
LawNext
Once upon a time, a legal tech vendor’s goal in getting seen by potential customers was to rank on the first page of Google search. But in the age of AI, that is no longer enough. Now, when a potential buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a vendor, what matters is whether the company shows up in the answer the AI generates. And that, increasingly, depends on who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you as the authority in your category. On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two legal marketing and communications leaders who are seeking to help their...
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New Casepoint CEO Paul Colangelo on AI, GovTech and the Road Ahead
LawNext
When Thoma Bravo in in January 2025 and merged it with the government-software company OPEXUS, it set the e-discovery pioneer on a broader course — deeper into the government market and squarely into FOIA and case management. Now the company has a new leader to see that course through: , a 25-year veteran of government and enterprise software, who was . In this episode, recorded just before the announcement, Colangelo joins host Bob Ambrogi for his first podcast interview in the role. He talks about the mandate he's been handed 18 months into the Thoma Bravo era, why he believes...
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Context Is Everything: CEO Neil Araujo on iManage's AI Strategy
LawNext
, the CEO and cofounder of , was last on this podcast . In the dog years of the legal industry’s AI age, that feels like a long time ago. Our conversation then was about law firms still feeling their way around generative AI. But now, as you will hear in this episode, the focus is about what it actually takes to put AI to work at scale — and iManage's answer is that it starts with what Neil calls a knowledge foundation: the content, context and governance layer that makes AI responses not just fluent, but relevant and trustworthy. Two weeks before we recorded this episode, iManage ...
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How AI Is Transforming the Way Law Firms Win Business, with Ikaun President Jason Noble
LawNext
Law firms sell experience — but for decades, harnessing and operationalizing that experience has been a largely manual, chaotic process. In this episode, recorded live at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference in New Orleans, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with , president and chief of product strategy at , to talk about how his company is changing that. Ikaun is a managed service and technology platform that helps law firms streamline the proposal and RFP response process — from capturing and organizing matter experience data to using AI to assemble and draft competitive pitches....
info_outlineNearly two years ago on this podcast, we discussed the American Arbitration Association’s innovation initiatives – and specifically its embrace of generative AI – with Bridget Mary McCormack, who became its president and CEO in 2023 after having been chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and Diana Didia, its chief information and innovation officer. On today’s episode, McCormack and Didia – now executive vice president and chief technology and innovation officer – return for an update on innovation at the AAA.
In that prior podcast, McCormack and Didia spoke extensively about the AAA's innovation culture and their early experiments with gen AI. At the time, McCormack said that anyone who thinks they know where gen AI is going, even next week, is fooling themselves. While that may still be true, the AAA has certainly made some bold moves in that direction.
Most notably, just a few days before we recorded this episode, the AAA announced something unprecedented in the dispute resolution world – an AI-powered arbitrator that it is launching in November. This is not just another AI tool to assist lawyers or arbitrators. This is an AI system that will evaluate case merits, generate recommendations, and prepare draft awards — with human arbitrators validating and signing off on final decisions before they are issued.
In today’s conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, McCormack and Didia dive deep into how this AI arbitrator works, what it means for the future of dispute resolution, and how it fits into the AAA's broader innovation strategy as the organization approaches its 100th anniversary next year. They also explore the cultural transformation within the AAA that has enabled these technological advances and what is coming next in their AI-native vision for dispute resolution.
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