From Product to Practice: Why Casetext’s Former CTO Has Started An AI Native Law Firm
Release Date: 07/27/2026
SurePoint’s New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change
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, 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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, 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
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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....
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Legal Marketing Association President Rachel Shields Williams On AI, Innovation, and Why People Still Come First
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Recorded live at the annual meeting of the in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with , president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel was named a recipient of ALM's . Rachel and host Bob Ambrogi discuss how AI is reshaping the work of legal marketers, and why she believes the marketing community is uniquely positioned to help law firms move past the "I'm curious, I want to click the buttons"...
info_outlineAs chief technology officer at Casetext, Ryan Walker helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. 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 — General Legal, an AI-native law firm he cofounded and leads as CEO, built on the premise that the fastest path to transforming legal services is not retrofitting AI onto traditional firms, but rebuilding the law firm from the ground up on an AI-forward foundation. Just six months out of Y Combinator, the firm has some 400 clients, a newly launched venture financing practice, and, in what may be a first for a law firm, an MCP server that lets clients' AI agents engage the firm directly.
In this episode of LawNext, Walker — not a lawyer but a PhD mathematician — tells host Bob Ambrogi why he believes AI can now automate 95% of routine legal work, how the management services organization structure allows an investable technology company to operate alongside a law firm, and why an AI-native firm paradoxically depends on hiring highly experienced lawyers rather than supercharging junior ones. He also explains the "second brain" approach that lets the firm's work product reflect each client's strategy, what earlier failed innovators like Atrium and Clearspire got wrong, and why he thinks the real reckoning will come when major clients simply refuse to pay for work AI can do.
Walker cofounded the firm along with two other Casetext colleagues, Javed Qadrud-Din, who was head of AI at Casetext and is now General Legal’s chief technology officer, and J.P. Mohler, who was an LLM engineer at Casetext and is now chief product officer and managing partner. Their ultimate ambition, Walker says, is to make General Legal the biggest provider of legal services in the world and, along the way, to break the scarcity model that keeps legal help out of reach for the people and companies who need it.
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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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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CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free.
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Ajax, the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use.
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