LawNext
LawNext is a weekly podcast hosted by Bob Ambrogi, who is internationally known for his writing and speaking on legal technology and innovation. Each week, Bob interviews the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in the legal industry. From legal technology startups to new law firm business models to enhancing access to justice, Bob and his guests explore the future of law and legal practice.
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Law Democratized: Renee Knake Jefferson on Her Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis
07/20/2026
Law Democratized: Renee Knake Jefferson on Her Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis
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 sits at the intersection of legal ethics, judicial ethics, lawyer regulation, legal education and access to justice. She is also the coauthor of the acclaimed book , an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. In 2013, the ABA Journal for co-founding the ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State together with . More recently, she was elected to the American Bar Association’s Council for the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, the body responsible for accrediting J.D. programs — so, as she puts it, she's gone from offering constructive criticism from the outside to working on the inside In her “spare time” (as if she possibly has any), she writes the Substack newsletter , a weekly review of all things related to legal and judicial ethics. In today’s conversation, Renee and Bob talk in depth about the access to justice crisis and what can be done to narrow the justice gap, including why the biggest barrier to legal help may be that people do not even recognize they have a legal problem. They also discuss the promise and peril of AI as a tool for closing the justice gap, why regulatory reform has not produced the domino effect many once predicted, and what lawyers, law schools, regulators and innovators can each do to move the needle. Spoiler alert: Jefferson remains a glass-half-full optimist — and by the end of this conversation, you may be too. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Inside Claude for Legal: Anthropic's Mark Pike on AI's Next Frontier in Law
07/06/2026
Inside Claude for Legal: Anthropic's Mark Pike on AI's Next Frontier in Law
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? In today’s episode, , associate general counsel at Anthropic and product lead for Claude for Legal, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the inside story of Claude for Legal and his own unconventional path into leading its development. Pike, who went from Facebook to Slack to building internal tools for Anthropic's own legal team, talks about how that work turned into a product that has ignited both excitement and concern throughout the global legal industry. Among the topics they discuss: Why Anthropic decided legal deserved its own dedicated launch, and why now. What plugins, skills, connectors, cookbooks and agents actually mean in plain English. Why lawyers have become Claude's most active power users. Anthropic's decision to partner, rather than compete, with major legal tech vendors such as Thomson Reuters. How Anthropic thinks about human oversight and professional responsibility. Confidentiality, data training policies, and what firms need to know before adopting these tools. Anthropic’s commitment to access to justice. What Claude for Legal might look like a year from now. Whether you're excited about what this technology could mean for legal innovation, wary of what it means for the future of legal work, or just have questions about how it all works, this conversation offers insights. Background links: Announcement: . Webinar: . . LawSites: . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Legal Research for Everyone: Inside the CourtListener - Claude Partnership
07/01/2026
Legal Research for Everyone: Inside the CourtListener - Claude Partnership
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, significantly reducing the risk of using a general AI assistant to answer legal questions. As the Free Law Project itself put it: “A response built on verified CourtListener data is categorically different from one built on even the best model alone.” In today’s episode, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with , executive director and co-founder of the Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, and Nathan Dahlberg, the Free Law Project’s AI developer who actually built the CourtListener connector. They get into what was announced and why it matters, how the technology works under the hood, and, most importantly, the bigger questions it raises — about the potential impact on access to justice, and on the legal research industry.. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Chapters (00:00) Introduction to AI in Legal Tech (03:17) The Free Law Project and CourtListener (05:01) Anthropic's Commitment to Access to Justice (10:29) Understanding MCP Connectors (11:48) Potential Impact on Access to Justice (14:31) The Changing Landscape of Legal Research (17:21) User Interaction with AI Tools (20:00) Concerns About Self-Help Legal Tools (24:00) Marketing Challenges for Legal Tools (27:20) Understanding User Engagement with the Connector (29:00) Grounding AI Responses in Legal Data (30:30) The Future of Legal Research and MCP Connectors (34:10) Commercial Opportunities in Legal AI (38:55) User Experience and Privacy Concerns (43:10) Impact on Access to Justice
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Amy Juers and Valerie Chan on Marketing Legal Tech in the Age of AI Search
06/22/2026
Amy Juers and Valerie Chan on Marketing Legal Tech in the Age of AI Search
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 clients get ahead of that shift. is CEO of , a firm she founded in 1997 that serves clients across legal technology and accounting. is CEO of , a strategic communications firm working across legal, cybersecurity, AI, and other regulated industries. Last week, these longtime competitors announced a strategic partnership and a new framework they call the Trusted Answer Growth System, designed to help companies adapt to how buyers research and shortlist vendors in AI-driven search. In the conversation, Amy and Val discuss how generative AI is reshaping the buyer's journey, why earned media and third-party credibility carry more weight than ever, the new vocabulary marketers are wrestling with — from GEO to AEO — and what companies can do when AI tools get their story wrong. They also explain why, after years of competing, they concluded they were better off working together. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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New Casepoint CEO Paul Colangelo on AI, GovTech and the Road Ahead
06/09/2026
New Casepoint CEO Paul Colangelo on AI, GovTech and the Road Ahead
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 mission-critical government software is "DOGE-proof, recession-proof, pandemic-proof," and how Casepoint intends to stand apart in a crowded e-discovery field on security and governance. He also discusses the company's investment in agentic AI and the need to keep a "human in the loop," the customer tension between AI's promise and unpredictable token-based pricing, and why he expects bolt-on acquisitions ahead. Along the way, he reflects on the founders who built Casepoint and the culture he hopes to shape as he takes the helm. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Context Is Everything: CEO Neil Araujo on iManage's AI Strategy
06/02/2026
Context Is Everything: CEO Neil Araujo on iManage's AI Strategy
, 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 of its document- and knowledge-management platform, one built around what iManage calls a “context fabric” — an architectural layer the company says transforms an organization’s accumulated documents and activity into a “living, governed foundation” for AI agents. It also , a standardized, open-protocol connection that enables any AI systems to securely access governed iManage content without custom integrations. In this conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, Araujo discusses these and other recent developments. He also discusses where he sees the legal industry heading as AI moves from experimentation to operational reality. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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How AI Is Transforming the Way Law Firms Win Business, with Ikaun President Jason Noble
05/11/2026
How AI Is Transforming the Way Law Firms Win Business, with Ikaun President Jason Noble
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. Jason explains how the platform works, how the arrival of generative AI transformed what was previously possible, and why Ikaun positions itself as a managed service rather than a self-serve SaaS tool. Jason and Bob also get into the bigger picture of how law firms are responding to AI-driven changes in the competitive landscape, whether the billable hour can survive in an AI-augmented world, and whether the RFP process itself will look the same in the years ahead — or whether we're moving toward a future where agents are submitting and responding to proposals with minimal human involvement. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). Chapters (00:00) Introduction to Ikaun and Legal Tech Innovations (02:30) Jason Noble's Journey and Background (05:20) The Evolution of Ikaun and Its Focus (07:09) Experience Management in Legal Firms (10:30) Gathering Experience Data in Litigation (11:48) How Ikaun's Platform Works (14:05) The Impact of AI on Proposal Processes (18:07) Current Landscape of RFP Responses (20:31) Differentiating Ikaun from Competitors (22:45) Knowledge Management vs. Experience Management (24:01) Tailoring Solutions for Law Firms (25:49) Qualities of Successful Law Firms (27:24) Law Firms' Response to AI Integration (29:54) Pricing Strategies in RFP Responses (31:21) Competitive Landscape and AI's Influence (33:27) The Future of Billable Hours (35:50) The Future of RFPs and AI's Role (39:33) Client Satisfaction and Future Directions If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Legal Marketing Association President Rachel Shields Williams On AI, Innovation, and Why People Still Come First
04/27/2026
Legal Marketing Association President Rachel Shields Williams On AI, Innovation, and Why People Still Come First
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" stage of AI adoption to sustained, repeatable value. They get into the state of innovation in big law — including Rachel's view that firms cannot use AI or money to "skip the canyon of despair" in change management — and why she thinks meaningful innovation often looks less like a headline and more like getting one percent better every week. The conversation also covers the changing competitive landscape facing traditional firms, from AI-native entrants like Norm AI to MSOs and a resurgent ALSP market; the long-running debate over the billable hour; the four interrelated elements Rachel sees at the heart of every law firm's data — documents, clients, matters, and people; and what firm leaders should be doing right now to stay competitive over the next decade. Throughout, Rachel returns to a theme about which she calls herself an "unapologetic humanist" — technology and process will keep changing, but the firms that win will be the ones that put the right people in the room first. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Built on a Weekend: Damien Riehl and Mike Bommarito Show What Vibe Coding Can Really Do
04/15/2026
Built on a Weekend: Damien Riehl and Mike Bommarito Show What Vibe Coding Can Really Do
We don’t usually say this, but for today's LawNext, you’re going to want to watch the video version, if you can. The audio will be good, but the video will be great. You can find it . Why? Because we’re going to be talking today about vibe coding, and you're going to want to see what our guests are showing today, not just hear them tell about it. Those guests are and . By day, Damien works on AI products at Clio and Mike is CEO of 273 Ventures, a company that provides AI strategy and services for law firms and legal professionals. But outside their day jobs, they are also founders of the , the Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI, where a central focus of theirs is the , which is seeking to develop and maintain open legal standards and a comprehensive ontology to enable different legal systems to communicate with each other. FOLIO is an outgrowth of the SALI Alliance, whose ontology was largely developed by Damien. So what does any of this have to do with vibe coding? Well, in connection with their FOLIO project, Damien and Mike have been building an array of tools for tagging and enriching legal documents (), for mapping law firm taxonomies (), for browsing and editing legal ontologies (), and much more. (See the .) And they’ve built all of it by vibe coding. Not over months, not with a team of developers, but on their own, often in a single weekend day, using AI coding tools. When Damien first showed LawNext host Bob Ambrogi what he and Mike were developing, Bob thought, “It's not enough for me to just write about this. It really has to be seen, in action.” So he asked Damien and Mike to come on LawNext, share their screens, walk us through what they've been building, and show us what vibe coding actually looks like in action when it's applied to serious legal technology problems. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Learned Hand’s Shlomo Klapper on Why Courts Are the Next Frontier for Legal AI
04/07/2026
Learned Hand’s Shlomo Klapper on Why Courts Are the Next Frontier for Legal AI
Are courts the next frontier for legal AI? , founder and CEO of the AI-driven judicial case-preparation platofrm , believes they are. A former litigator at Quinn Emanuel and law clerk for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Klapper is building what he calls a "reasoning engine" for judges — AI tools designed to help them manage crushing caseloads by organizing case materials, flagging when lawyers bend the truth, and drafting bench memos and orders. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi interviews Klapper on the heels of significant news: Learned Hand just announced a partnership with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the largest trial court in the nation, to explore how AI can support judicial officers across the full arc of a case — from filing through drafting. The company's technology — the only AI built exclusively for the judiciary — is also used by the Michigan Supreme Court and trial courts in 10 states. In today’s conversation, Klapper discusses why courts are the next frontier for legal AI, what it takes to earn the trust of judges, and how Jevons Paradox — the idea that as legal services get cheaper, demand will explode — is reshaping the justice system. They also dig into the difficult questions around how Learned Hand addresses concerns about bias and hallucinations, and how it can overcome judges’ skepticism about AI and achieve broad judicial adoption. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Mary Technology Wants to Solve Litigation's 'Fact Chaos' Problem
03/31/2026
Mary Technology Wants to Solve Litigation's 'Fact Chaos' Problem
E-discovery platforms have gotten great at narrowing millions of documents down to manageable sets. But what happens next — the grueling work of extracting facts, organizing them, and building a reliable case narrative — has remained largely manual. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with , cofounder and CEO of , about the Australian startup's bet that "fact management" is the missing layer in litigation technology. Mary's approach is distinct from the large AI platforms that store documents as embeddings in vector databases. Instead, the company extracts every individual fact, enriches it with metadata, and links it directly back to its source — creating what Lord-Doyle calls a verifiable chain from work product to evidence. He makes a compelling case that in litigation, where fault tolerance is low and the stakes are high, the nuance lost by compression-based AI systems is exactly what matters most. The company just led by OIF Ventures and is expanding into the U.S. with a new San Francisco office and a new self-serve platform that lets smaller firms try it without a sales process. Lord-Doyle also talks about the concept of "productive friction" — why Mary deliberately won't let lawyers skip the verification step — and what he's learned about bringing an Australian legal tech product to the American market. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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LawNext on Location: Visiting Everlaw’s Headquarters For A Conversation with AJ Shankar, Founder and CEO
03/19/2026
LawNext on Location: Visiting Everlaw’s Headquarters For A Conversation with AJ Shankar, Founder and CEO
For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, Bob heads across the bay, from San Francisco to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw, where he sits down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long game. AJ grew up in Connecticut, came west in 2002 for a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived within a few blocks of the Berkeley campus ever since. He stumbled into the legal industry almost by accident — recruited to serve as a technical expert in litigation involving how the internet worked — and quickly realized that the legal world was home to some of the most technically fascinating and underserved problems he'd ever encountered. He never left. AJ had a prior startup, a computer vision company that was acquired, before launching Everlaw in 2011. The company was cloud-native and ML-infused from the start, built on the conviction, AJ says, that there's no single way to find the needle in a discovery haystack, and that building a genuinely useful litigation platform requires solving for collaboration, ease of use and scalability all at once. The bulk of the conversation focuses on generative AI, and how Everlaw has approached it differently than much of the market. Rather than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI deliberately throughout the platform — document summarization, coding suggestions, deposition analysis, fact extraction — always grounding responses in the actual documents at hand and citing sources so users can verify the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a question and get a synthesized, cited answer drawn from an entire document corpus in about a minute, is the feature AJ calls a "new era" for discovery — one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift. As Everlaw continues to grow, it also remains independent, with no private equity and no outside majority owners. As for AJ, he says he is in it for the long game, and has never included an exit slide in a fundraising deck. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Setting the Scene 03:23 The Journey to Founding Everlaw 08:36 The Evolution of Everlaw's Technology 11:06 Incorporating Generative AI into Legal Processes 14:04 Deep Dive: A New Era in Discovery 19:17 Transformative Experiences in Legal Discovery 22:27 Previewing Innovations at Legal Week 25:03 Understanding AI's Limitations in Legal Contexts 28:11 Navigating Hype in Legal Technology 30:47 The Impact of Foundation Models on Legal Software 34:36 Future Vision for Everlaw and Legal Tech 38:13 Closing Thoughts and Company Philosophy If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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LawNext on Location: At A Sonoma Winery, A Conversation with Briefpoint CEO Nathan Walter about Discovery, Disruption and, Of Course, Wine
03/05/2026
LawNext on Location: At A Sonoma Winery, A Conversation with Briefpoint CEO Nathan Walter about Discovery, Disruption and, Of Course, Wine
Continuing his on-location interview tour of San Francisco, Bob heads an hour north to Santa Rosa to sit down with Nathan Walter, cofounder and CEO of Briefpoint, over a bottle of red wine at Paradise Ridge Winery, a spot literally around the corner from Nathan's house, sitting on the edge of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that divides Sonoma and Napa counties. It is a fitting setting for a founder who grew up in Sonoma wine country, where wine is less a luxury than a way of life, and where his family's most treasured heirloom was a bottle from the year he was born. Nathan's path to founding Briefpoint is an origin story rooted in genuine frustration with the legal system. A U.C. Santa Barbara philosophy major who drifted into law school for lack of better options, he ultimately landed in civil litigation – and grew increasingly disillusioned with how discovery was weaponized to bleed defendants dry financially, even when they had done nothing wrong. After a particularly infuriating mediation where opposing counsel openly admitted the shakedown strategy, Nathan decided to do something about it. He taught himself to code from YouTube videos, built vaporware prototypes, cold-called attorneys to test demand, and eventually found his technical cofounder through a Discord gaming community he had created to build a social life after moving to Orange County. What followed was a years-long grind – including an 18-month stretch working days as an entry-level sales rep at another legal tech company and nights building Briefpoint, until a close acquaintance invested $100,000 of her own money so he could focus full time. Briefpoint launched in June 2022, before the ChatGPT wave, focusing narrowly on automating discovery responses – drafting objections, pulling relevant documents and generating formatted Word documents ready to sign. Nathan talks about the company's deliberate "go deep, not wide" strategy: rather than expanding into motions or other legal workflows to chase the AI hype cycle, Briefpoint is doubling down on doing discovery so exceptionally well that firms will pay for it alongside broader AI platforms, the way teams use Slack alongside the full Microsoft suite. The conversation also covers the threat to legal tech companies posed by foundation models such as Claude and GPT, the psychology behind why attorneys are resistant to automation (Nathan has a theory about "superstitious control" and lucky jerseys), the parallels between winemaking and product development, and the advice he'd give an aspiring founder: burn the ships, go full time and put yourself in a corner with no way out but forward. As for what varietal Briefpoint would be? A Russian River Pinot Noir – not a life-changing Cab, but reliably excellent at exactly what it promises. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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LawNext on Location: The View from Tiburon – A Conversation with Pablo Arredondo, Casetext Cofounder
02/24/2026
LawNext on Location: The View from Tiburon – A Conversation with Pablo Arredondo, Casetext Cofounder
As Bob continues his LawNext on Location series – all recorded live in the San Francisco area at locations of each guest’s choosing – he sits down with Pablo Arredondo at his home in Tiburon, a quaint Marin County town with a history stretching from Mexican land grants to naval outposts to a southern railway terminus. From Pablo’s home office, the view looks out over Richardson Bay towards Sausalito and, if you look carefully, the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen in the distance. It is a setting that is entirely fitting for a conversation with someone who helped shape one of the more remarkable journeys in the annals of legal technology. Pablo was cofounder of Casetext, the once-scrappy startup that spent a decade iterating, pivoting and persisting before striking gold with CoCounsel, the first GPT-4-powered AI legal assistant, unveiled on the nationally televised Morning Joe show on March 1, 2023. Just four months later, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in cash. Now, 2.5 years later, Pablo recently left TR, where he is, as he puts it, building a Lego Death Star with his daughter and finally paying attention to his well-being after 16 years of nonstop pursuit. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pablo reflects on the long road to CoCounsel – from a failed crowdsourcing experiment to CARA's brief analysis tool to the pivotal moment when Casetext signed a $20,000 innovation license with OpenAI and got early access to GPT-4, 10 weeks before ChatGPT's public launch. He describes the surreal experience of those first 48 hours after CoCounsel's debut, when he and cofounder Jake Heller identified 74 distinct legal use cases the tool could handle – any one of which, he says, "would have been a company in the old world." Pablo and Bob also dig into the bigger questions surrounding legal AI, including whether the field is advancing as fast as he expected; what the foundation models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google mean for legal-specific AI companies such as Harvey; and why he believes reasoning models and agentic AI represent the next genuinely profound leap beyond GPT-4. Pablo also candidly reflects on the TR acquisition and his work while at TR, and he offers hints on what may lie ahead for him – at least once that Death Star model is done. It is a conversation that is part memoir, part technology seminar and part meditation on what it means to have built something that changed a profession – and his life – all recorded with a sweeping, albeit cloudy, view of the majesty of San Francisco Bay. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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LawNext on Location: Lunch with Alex Su of Latitude Legal In Alameda, Calif.
02/18/2026
LawNext on Location: Lunch with Alex Su of Latitude Legal In Alameda, Calif.
This episode is recorded live, and is best enjoyed on YouTube. . While Bob is visiting San Francisco for two weeks, he is sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs “in their natural habitats” – places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, Bob sits down for lunch with , chief revenue officer at , over Thai iced tea and tofu dishes at Phnom Penh House, a Cambodian restaurant in Alameda that Alex considers something of a personal institution, frequenting it for both family meals and business meetings. Alex's career path is anything but linear. He started as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, clerked for a federal judge in Chicago, then drifted through a plaintiff's firm, a brief solo practice, and ultimately a leap of faith into legal tech sales – joining e-discovery company Logikcull in 2016. From there, he moved to Everlaw, then to Ironclad, where he served as head of community development, building a reputation that spread well beyond any job title. That reputation was shaped in large part by TikTok, where Alex's comedic, self-effacing videos skewering law firm culture – partners, associates, privilege logs and the absurdities of BigLaw – earned him , got shared inside Ironclad's internal Slack, and ultimately helped land him his next job. It's a story of accidental virality and deliberate reinvention that mirrors the broader shifts he sees in the legal profession. Now at Latitude Legal, an ALSP providing on-demand legal talent to law firms and corporate legal departments, Alex represents a kind of poetic symmetry: a lawyer known for championing "alternative careers" working at an "alternative legal services provider" — a label he thinks has outlived its usefulness, given how mainstream flexible legal talent has become. Bob and Alex also dig into the current state of legal AI – what's overhyped, what's underhyped, and why the pandemic was arguably a bigger inflection point for legal tech adoption than generative AI. Plus, Alex and Bob reflect on Bob’s three decades of covering legal innovation, the stubborn persistence of the billable hour, and why the justice gap remains stubbornly wide despite all the talk of disruption. It is a wide-ranging and candid conversation – one you may want to watch on video instead of just listening to the audio. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Chapters 00:00 Intro to Today's Lunch: A Special In-Person Series 04:45 Career Transitions: From Law to Legal Tech 23:27 Going Viral: The TikTok Journey 25:10 Balancing Humor and Professional Identity 26:54 Redefining Career Paths for Lawyers 28:39 The Evolution of Legal Careers 30:35 Innovation in Legal Practice 34:07 The Impact of the Pandemic on Legal Technology 34:28 The Future of Legal Technology and AI 38:10 Navigating Uncertainty in Legal Services 40:18 The Ongoing Relevance of Traditional Legal Models 42:11 Personal Reflections and Future Outlook
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From Customer to Acquirer: Filevine's Ryan Anderson and Pincites' Sona Sulakian on Building AI Contract Intelligence
01/28/2026
From Customer to Acquirer: Filevine's Ryan Anderson and Pincites' Sona Sulakian on Building AI Contract Intelligence
In this episode of LawNext, we talk with Ryan Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Filevine, and Sona Sulakian, former CEO and co-founder of Pincites, about Filevine's acquisition of the AI-powered contract redlining company. The deal, which closed in December, marks Filevine's second major AI acquisition of the year. Even more notably for this traditionally litigation-focused company, it represents a significant strategic expansion into the corporate and transactional legal market — a segment where Filevine saw 120% growth in 2025. What makes this acquisition particularly compelling is its origin story: Filevine was actually a customer of Pincites before acquiring the company. After Filevine's legal team became early adopters and enthusiastic users of the product, Anderson and his team recognized that Pincites' Word-native contract intelligence platform filled a critical gap in their offerings. The acquisition brings aboard sister co-founders Sona and Mariam Sulakian and their team, who will continue developing what Filevine now calls "LOIS for Word" — a drafting and redlining tool integrated directly into Microsoft Word. Along with host Bob Ambrogi, they discuss how the Sulakian sisters identified the market gap that led them to build Pincites, why they chose to build directly into Word rather than create a standalone platform, and what attracted them to Filevine among multiple suitors. Anderson shares his vision for building a comprehensive Legal Operating Intelligence System (LOIS) that connects contracts, depositions and all legal work into a single unified platform. They also explore the broader implications of AI for legal practice and access to justice, and how tools like Pincites and Filevine are transforming the way legal work gets done. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , March 9-12, North Javits Center, New York City. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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From Roommates to Billionaires: Harvey's Founders Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg on Building AI Infrastructure for Law
01/20/2026
From Roommates to Billionaires: Harvey's Founders Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg on Building AI Infrastructure for Law
Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg started legal AI company Harvey in 2022 as roommates in a San Francisco apartment. Pereyra had been working on AI research at Meta and Google, while Weinberg was a first-year litigation associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Today, they still share that same apartment, but their company has grown into a global enterprise serving more than 1,000 law firms and corporate legal departments and valued at a whopping $8 billion. In this episode of LawNext, Pereyra and Weinberg take us back to Harvey's earliest days, when they were sending thousands of LinkedIn messages trying to get anyone to look at their product. They share the pivotal moment when early access to GPT-4 transformed what they could build, the breakthrough that came when Allen & Overy became their first major client, and how they have evolved from building an AI assistant for individual lawyers to constructing what they call "essential infrastructure" for legal work. With host Bob Ambrogi, they discuss Harvey's vision for becoming an AI operating system that integrates across the entire legal tech ecosystem, their focus on memory and agentic AI that can handle complex multi-step workflows, and the massive infrastructure challenges of deploying AI at scale across global law firms while maintaining ethical walls and data security. Pereyra and Weinberg also reflect candidly on how two founders with no management experience have learned to scale a company now employing hundreds of people — more than 20 percent of whom are lawyers — and what it is like to go from struggling startup to being featured in The New York Times as AI billionaires while still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Clio Doubleheader: CMO Reagan Attle and VP of Payments A.J. Axelrod
01/14/2026
Clio Doubleheader: CMO Reagan Attle and VP of Payments A.J. Axelrod
In the last in a series of interviews recorded during the ClioCon conference in Boston in October 2025, we bring you a doubleheader – two interviews with two of the legal tech company’s key executives. In the first, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with , chief marketing officer at Clio since 2017. In a year in which Clio made the biggest acquisition in legal tech history with its $1 billion purchase of vLex, and in which Clio is aiming to dramatically expand its market and its use of AI, what are the challenges and opportunities for the person tasked with leading the company’s global brand and marketing strategy? One thing for sure, Attle says: It makes her job more complex. Listen to the interview to hear Attle’s perspective. In the second interview, Ambrogi sits down with , who joined Clio in November 2024 as vice president of payments and financial services. He fills us in on the two financial products unveiled at ClioCon: Clio Capital, a capital-advance program offering law firms fast access to funds for growth or cash-flow management, and Pay Later, a financing option for law firm clients to pay their legal bills in installments, while the firm gets paid up front. He also talks about what else may be on the horizon for fintech at Clio. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Fastcase Founder Ed Walters On the Implications of Clio’s Acquisition of vLex
01/07/2026
Fastcase Founder Ed Walters On the Implications of Clio’s Acquisition of vLex
The biggest deal of 2025 – in fact, the biggest deal ever in legal tech – was legal tech company . A global legal research company founded in Spain, vLex had, just two years earlier, , and the union of those two companies – which also included the Docket Alarm trove of court docket data – had further accelerated the development of Vincent, vLex’s generative AI technology. Now, with Clio’s acquisition of vLex, comes a combustible combination that has the potential to unify the fuel of all that vLex legal research and docket data with Clio’s cloud practice management technology to create an unprecedented, AI-driven platform that unifies both the business and practice of law. Against this backdrop, I sat down with Ed Walters, the founder and CEO of Fastcase, during ClioCon in October, to discuss the acquisition and its implications for the legal industry. Walters cofounded Fastcase in 1999 along with his former Covington & Burling colleague Phil Rosenthal. After Fastcase merged with vLex, he became vLex’s chief strategy officer. Since the Clio acquisition, he is now Clio’s vice president of legal innovation and strategy. Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Inside Clio's AI-Driven Transformation: CPO John Foreman and CTO Jonathan Watson
12/10/2025
Inside Clio's AI-Driven Transformation: CPO John Foreman and CTO Jonathan Watson
For legal technology company Clio, this was a particularly significant year, marked by major announcements – including its $1 billion acquisition of vLex – that many saw as transformative for the company. This was on full display at the company’s ClioCon conference in October, where CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote laying out the company’s vision for a in which Clio becomes an “intelligent legal work platform” that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do. In today's episode, recorded live at ClioCon, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with the two key executives leading Clio's product and technology vision: , who in May, bringing experience from major SaaS companies including MailChimp and Podium, and , the chief technology officer who's been with Clio for eight years. They explore the company's ambitious vision to develop AI and expand into larger law firms, discuss how vertical software creates advantages for AI implementation, and explain why understanding the complete client journey enables more powerful automation. Foreman and Watson share insights on moving beyond simple chatbots to AI that can actually take action, the challenges and opportunities of expanding into the enterprise market, and what's next as they work to "finish drawing the owl.” “We've started to draw the owl for folks,” Foreman says, “and we're going to finish drawing the owl, and it's going to be a beautiful owl.” Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Reimagining Litigation Workflows through AI: A Panel Recorded Live at the Everlaw Summit
12/01/2025
Reimagining Litigation Workflows through AI: A Panel Recorded Live at the Everlaw Summit
As new tools using generative AI promise to change the way we litigate and conduct discovery, what are the implications for day-to-day litigation workflows? On today’s episode of LawNext, we feature a conversation with three guests about how law firms are navigating the urgency around gen AI adoption while staying grounded in practical realities. LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation at e-discovery company annual Summit in San Francisco, where gen AI was very much the talk of the conference — from new product announcements to candid discussions about how law firms are actually putting these tools to work. His guests are: , senior associate in the labor and employment group at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease. , director of practice technology at Vorys. , Everlaw’s chief marketing officer. They talk about how Vorys has taken a disciplined approach to mapping lawyers’ workflows before plugging in AI, why understanding how your professionals currently work is the essential first step before adopting new technology, and how tools like Everlaw's newly released Deep Dive are helping attorneys find insights across millions of documents that they might never have discovered on their own – including, as you will hear, a rather unexpected story involving Tums. They also discuss the cost considerations around AI, the trust factor that still gives many lawyers pause, and what advice these experts have for firms that have not yet started experimenting with gen AI. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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The Neuroanalytics Of Using Legal Tech: Clio’s Joshua Lenon On A First-of-its-Kind Cognitive Study
11/11/2025
The Neuroanalytics Of Using Legal Tech: Clio’s Joshua Lenon On A First-of-its-Kind Cognitive Study
Legal technology company Clio recently released the 10th edition of its , its annual analysis of data and survey responses on legal practice and emerging trends, and this year’s report ventured into new territory. For the first time, the report included a neuroanalytics study of legal professionals, analyzing electrical brain activity in legal professionals as they performed various work-related tasks, in order to paint a picture of their emotional strain and mental focus as they worked. For an in-depth look at this year’s Legal Trends Report, its principal author, , lawyer in residence at Clio, sits down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation recorded live at the 13th annual ClioCon, Clio’s annual conference, which was held this year in Boston. They discuss the results of this first-ever cognitive study, as well as the report’s other key findings, including what it shows about: AI adoption and its relationship to law firm growth. Clients’ expectations around lawyers’ use of AI. How potential clients find lawyers. The correlation between technology adoption and long-term success. With Clio since 2012, Lenon is an attorney admitted to practice in New York who has focused much of his career on helping lawyers understand the benefits and risks of technology adoption within their practices. At Clio, he leads the development of the Legal Trends Report and contributes to legal scholarship and advancement, often speaking on law firm modernization, technology adoption, legal ethics and access to justice. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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As SimpleDocs Acquires Law Insider, Founder Preston Clark Shares the Strategic Vision
11/05/2025
As SimpleDocs Acquires Law Insider, Founder Preston Clark Shares the Strategic Vision
If content is the raw material of generative AI, it only makes sense that an AI-driven contract automation platform would want to acquire the world’s largest database of contracts and clauses. That is e when , a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, acquired , which claims to be home to 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spanning more than 50 languages. One aspect of this acquisition that makes it particularly interesting is that both companies were founded by the same person – and that person, , is our guest today. In that sense, you might say this isn't a typical acquisition story, but more the deliberate convergence of two complementary businesses that were built separately over more than a decade, each with its own DNA, but always with an eye toward this eventual combination. In an AI market increasingly criticized for being "just GPT wrappers," Clark and his team are betting that workflow-specific tools powered by real contract data will deliver the precision and ROI that legal departments and law firms are demanding. In our conversation, Clark walks us through the strategic thinking behind this acquisition and how this combined entity plans to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded legal AI market. He also shares his vision for the future – one that extends beyond contract drafting and review into adjacent workflows that could reshape how legal teams interact with contracts altogether. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Clio CEO Jack Newton on Its New ‘Intelligent Legal Work Platform’ and A New Era Of AI-Driven Legal Work
10/28/2025
Clio CEO Jack Newton on Its New ‘Intelligent Legal Work Platform’ and A New Era Of AI-Driven Legal Work
Last week brought the 13th annual ClioCon — the annual conference of legal technology company Clio — to Boston, Mass., where cofounder and CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote in which he laid out the company’s vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work. That new era is one in which Clio becomes an “intelligent legal work platform” that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do. Many had wondered what Newton’s keynote would bring, coming on the heels of the company’s $1 billion acquisition of legal research and AI company vLex, the largest deal ever in legal tech. Newton did not disappoint, announcing a slew of new products and features, ambitious plans to integrate AI throughout Clio’s products, and formal expansion into the enterprise legal market with a new division and a new platform. It was a keynote that left some people thrilled, others shell-shocked. Perhaps most striking was that so much of what he outlined was not off in the future, but here today. The next day, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for this interview in which they recapped much of what Newton covered in his keynote and discussed what lies ahead for the company and its leader. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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How AI Is Helping Legal Aid Serve 50% More Clients: Thomson Reuters’ AI for Justice Program One Year In
10/15/2025
How AI Is Helping Legal Aid Serve 50% More Clients: Thomson Reuters’ AI for Justice Program One Year In
In the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything. One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more quickly, wrongfully evicted tenants getting back into their homes before their possessions are destroyed, and innocent people in prison having their exoneration petitions filed years sooner. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two people at the forefront of this initiative: is head of innovation for legal at Thomson Reuters and has been championing access to justice through technology since her days at Casetext, where she was a cofounder. is executive director of the , a small organization of 45 staff members serving over 9,000 people a year in one of California's largest counties. Together, they share powerful stories of how AI is enabling legal aid lawyers to be more efficient and more effective in doing what they came to this work to do – fighting for their clients. They discuss the three pillars of the AI for Justice program – access, support and scale – and how Thomson Reuters is working to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the legal aid community. They also tackle the challenges that remain, from overcoming fear and skepticism about AI to reaching a highly disaggregated network of small, resource-strapped organizations. And they explore the bigger question: Can AI actually help close the justice gap, or are we just nibbling at the edges of an ever-growing problem? 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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From Client Experience to Client Intelligence: Case Status CEO Andy Seavers On Becoming A ‘Future Firm’
10/08/2025
From Client Experience to Client Intelligence: Case Status CEO Andy Seavers On Becoming A ‘Future Firm’
Recently, the legal technology company held its inaugural in Charleston, S.C., a conference devoted to exploring how AI, data and ethical practices can enable law firms to deliver a better experience for their clients.In an opening keynote at the conference, , the cofounder and CEO of Case Status, unveiled several new products, including, most notably, Client Intelligence, an AI-driven platform that the company says represents a significant shift for law firms from reactive client management to predictive client engagement. Shortly after Seavers delivered that keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who attended the conference, sat down with him for this interview to learn more about the company and its latest announcements. When Case Status first launched, it was often described as the Dominos pizza tracker for law, insofar as it enabled clients to easily keep track of the status of their case. As you’ll hear from Seavers in today’s interview, it has expanded significantly since then, into a full client experience and client intelligence platform. Also in today’s interview, Seavers discusses his just-published a book, Future Firm, Fossil Firm, in which he lays out a blueprint for how law firms can evolve. He discusses his vision of a “future firm,” and why he believes that leadership posture, operational systems, and client experience are now the defining factors of firm success. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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An AI Arbitrator? The Latest Innovations from the American Arbitration Association, with CEO Bridget McCormack and CTO Diana Didia
09/30/2025
An AI Arbitrator? The Latest Innovations from the American Arbitration Association, with CEO Bridget McCormack and CTO Diana Didia
Nearly , we discussed the innovation initiatives – and specifically its embrace of generative AI – with , who became its president and CEO in 2023 after having been chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and , 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 – 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. Related episodes: . . . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , 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.
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Justice Workers: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democracy Work, with Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew Burnett
09/22/2025
Justice Workers: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democracy Work, with Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew Burnett
With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need. But what if the solution is not just about providing more legal services — what if it lies in fundamentally rethinking who can provide legal help? In today’s episode, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two of the nation’s leading researchers on access to justice: , professor and director of the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and , director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. They argue that the access to justice crisis is actually a crisis of democracy. As cofounders of , they have been pioneering research on "justice workers" — community members trained to help their neighbors navigate legal issues. Their recent article in the South Carolina Law Review, “,” makes a provocative case: When people cannot access their own law, democracy itself fails. They present compelling evidence from Alaska, where nearly 200 community justice workers now serve over 40 rural communities, achieving a 1-to-25 return on investment while dramatically expanding legal aid's reach. In today’s conversation, Sandefur and Burnett discuss the mounting evidence for justice worker effectiveness, including research from the U.K. demonstrating that trained non-lawyers often outperform attorneys on specialized tasks. They also discuss recent breakthroughs — including unprecedented support from both the Conference of Chief Justices and the American Bar Association — and examine what obstacles remain. Sandefur and Burnett challenge the legal profession's monopoly on law, arguing that regulatory capture has estranged Americans from their own justice system. They envision justice workers as agents of democratization, expanding not just who can access legal help, but who can participate meaningfully in working democracy. Related episodes: . . . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , 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.
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Leading Product Transformation Amid Company Transformation: 8am’s New Chief Product Officer Leslie Witt
09/16/2025
Leading Product Transformation Amid Company Transformation: 8am’s New Chief Product Officer Leslie Witt
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 company’s newest product initiatives, including its upcoming launch of its generative AI-driven 8AM IQ. Not long after Witt wrapped up her keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with her live for this extended conversation. They spoke at the Kaleidoscope venue in Austin in a recording studio provided by 8am, where they discussed her background and career, her reasons for joining 8am, and the product announcements she had made earlier that day. Those announcements included the beta launch of an AI “Chat with Cases” feature that allows lawyers to ask questions of and search their case files, the integration of three core 8am products — LawPay, MyCase and SmartSpend — on a single technology platform, and more. Before joining 8am in May, Witt had more than two decades of experience in leading product teams. Most recently, she had served as the chief product and design officer at the mental health and wellness technology company Headspace. She previously held senior positions at Intuit, where she led global design, research and innovation initiatives focused on small businesses. 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , 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. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to 8AM and Leslie Witt 01:43 Leslie Witt's Background and Experience 09:53 Brand Transformation from Affinipay to 8AM 15:44 Product Design Philosophy and Customer Engagement 20:22 Platform Integration and New Features 24:57 Future Directions and Industry Impact
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Ep 301: From Law Student Startup Founder to Global CEO: Daniel Lewis's Legal Tech Journey
09/08/2025
Ep 301: From Law Student Startup Founder to Global CEO: Daniel Lewis's Legal Tech Journey
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 open access to every official court decision ever published in the United States. After Ravel's , Lewis spent the next five years leading product teams within the legal research giant, including as vice president and general manager of its Practical Guidance and analytics products. This dual perspective – startup founder turned corporate executive – helped shape his understanding of what works and what doesn't when building technology for lawyers. Today, as CEO and global chief executive of , Lewis leads a 600-person company that is tackling contract review with a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying solely on tech-enabled services or raw AI that can hallucinate legal advice, LegalOn combines large language models with attorney-developed playbooks to help in-house legal teams achieve up to 85% time savings on contract review. The company just raised $50 million, for a total raise of $200 million across multiple funding rounds – which Lewis says makes it the most well-funded AI company focused on in-house contract review – and announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI agents for legal workflows. In this wide-ranging conversation, Lewis shares hard-won insights about the realities of legal tech entrepreneurship, from the "deranged" confidence required to challenge industry giants as a law student to the leadership lessons learned managing teams through multiple business transformations. He discusses why the current moment represents the most significant opportunity for legal tech innovation in decades, how AI agents will reshape routine legal work, and what he's learned about building technology that lawyers don't just try once but actually integrate into their daily practices. Related episodes: . . 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. , home to the practice management platforms , , and ; the e-payments platform ; and the legal accounting software . , eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). , 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.
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