LawNext

Jaksot

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  As Alex Su Is Named President of Latitude Legal, We Talk about Why AI Is Driving Demand for Flex Talent 16.09.2026 39min

  Call it Alex Su, redux. We do not usually have the same guest on LawNext twice in the same year, but there is good reason to have Alex back, as he has just been named president of Latitude Legal, the flexible legal staffing company.  Last February, Alex and host Bob Ambrogi recorded a live episode of this podcast over lunch in a Cambodian restaurant in Alex's hometown of Alameda, Calif., as part of our LawNext on Location series. They talked about his winding career, from Sullivan & Cromwell associate to federal clerkship to legal tech startups and finally to chief revenue officer at Latitude.  In that interview, Bob asked Alex what was coming next. His answer was that as AI got better, the demand for lawyers with real judgment — to direct it, check it, and own the work — would only grow. Seven months later, that prediction is proving prescient. In just the first half of this year, Latitude says it has seen a 52 percent jump in new law firm and corporate clients.  So with Latitude's promotion of Su to president, he returns to LawNext to discuss why he thinks AI is driving more demand for experienced lawyers, not less. He also talks about how Latitude's client-service model relies on former law firm partners and senior in-house counsel, why he pushes back on labeling flex talent as "contract attorneys" or calling Latitude an ALSP, and why he expects the market for flexible legal talent to keep expanding as law firms and legal departments sort out what AI can and cannot handle.   Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  Casefleet Founder Jeff Kerr on Fact Management in the Age of AI 08.09.2026 44min

  Chronologies have become one of legal tech's hottest categories, with a wave of AI startups promising to turn a messy evidentiary record into a structured timeline in minutes. Jeff Kerr and his company Casefleet were more than a decade ahead of the pack. Kerr finished law school in 2010 and made what he calls the crazy decision to start a law firm as his first job after graduating. Running an employment practice, he found that winning cases came down to knowing the chronology cold. But the only tools for building one were a Word document and a lot of patience. So he taught himself to code, left practice in 2015, and founded Casefleet.   On this episode of LawNext, Kerr joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss what a decade of building fact-management software looks like now that AI has arrived. Last month, Casefleet launched Casey, a conversational AI agent that proposes facts, links them to legal issues, and drafts documents — with a citation engine that rejects any citation not matching the exact text of the underlying document.   Kerr deliberately draws a hard line on what he will let his AI do. Casefleet's agent is fully agentic in the sense of researching and iterating on its own, he says, but it stays read-only – it will not send emails, make calls, or file anything.   Among the other topics they cover:   Why Casefleet's pre-AI data model turned out to be the right foundation for AI, and why classic Casefleet still runs alongside Casey. The company's move back toward e-discovery, including newly added document production, and why Kerr isn't chasing terabyte-scale cases. What happens to specialized litigation tools if the frontier AI labs push further into legal. Why Casefleet, profitable since 2018 and largely bootstrapped, may raise outside capital in the coming year.   Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  Why Legal AI Pioneer Pablo Arredondo Is Joining Clio to Build Technology for the Courts 01.09.2026 36min

  Pablo Arredondo, the Casetext cofounder who helped build some of the earliest and most influential applications of AI in legal practice, is joining Clio as senior vice president, judiciary, where he will lead the company's strategy for extending its technology into the courts. In this episode, recorded just ahead of the announcement, Arredondo tells host Bob Ambrogi why he is turning his attention to the judiciary — and why he believes the challenge starts with the sheer torrent of material flooding into the courts. "On Monday, somewhere on the order of three billion tokens are going to hit court dockets," he says. Arredondo cofounded Casetext in 2013 and helped develop CARA, the first brief analyzer, and CoCounsel, the product that brought generative AI into everyday legal workflows. After Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in 2023, he joined that company, leaving at the end of last year. In this conversation, he traces how his interest shifted toward the courts — from watching judges organically adopt Casetext's Parallel Search to a recent project at Cornell's Legal Information Institute using LLMs to annotate the U.S. Code of Conduct for Judges with centuries of judicial ethics thinking from rabbinic, Islamic and Roman Catholic traditions. Arredondo also explains why courts need "judiciary grade" technology rather than tools built for lawyers, how AI is driving a surge in pro se filings, whether AI could ever replace judges (his short answer: "absolutely not"), and where he plans to start when he officially begins the role Aug. 31. This is Arredondo's second appearance on LawNext this year, following a February conversation at his home in Tiburon, Calif., about his career and what would come next. Now we know.   Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  LexisNexis CTO Greg Dickason On Building Legal AI In Real Time with Customers in Its New Innovation Lab 11.08.2026 39min

  This week, LexisNexis announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab 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.   Our guest today is the person leading that effort: Greg Dickason, chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Dickason joined LexisNexis in 2019 and previously ran the company's Asia-Pacific business, where he launched Lexis+ AI in that region. Before LexisNexis, he was chief technology officer at CoreLogic.   In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi recorded just ahead of the launch, Dickason explains what actually happens inside the lab as engineers code live alongside customers, and how this differs from the customer input LexisNexis has always said drives its product development. They also discuss what has already come out of the lab, including a multimedia Protégé Vault that lets a lawyer query a video deposition; why legal drafting is the lab's first priority; and how Dickason sees agents reshaping legal work.    Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  SurePoint's New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change 05.08.2026 45min

  SurePoint Technologies, a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named Jeff Steinberg its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating Eric Thurston, 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 Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, and ZenCase in 2025 — and he says the company will keep looking at acquisitions while it does that work. Steinberg is no stranger to legal technology. He founded Redwood Analytics in 2000, an early innovator in helping law firms use their own data to understand their profitability, and sold the company to LexisNexis in 2008 (which then sold it to Aderant in 2014). He spent the years since in medical records retrieval for litigation and in other sectors, and served as a senior advisor to Aquiline Capital Partners, the private equity firm backing SurePoint. He arrives at a company whose roots go back to 1982. Among the topics Jeff discusses: Why he distinguishes between machine learning and generative AI when it comes to developing systems firms need to trust completely. What he is hearing in his early conversations with customers about AI adoption. How SurePoint decides whether to build, buy, or partner.  Why he thinks the mid-sized firm market has proven more resilient than many had predicted.   The three priorities he has set for his first year. For an interview with outgoing CEO Thurston, see: On LawNext: SurePoint CEO Eric Thurston on Acquiring ZenCase and His Vision for Mid-Market Practice Management.    Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  From Product to Practice: Why Casetext's Former CTO Has Started An AI Native Law Firm 27.07.2026 52min

  As 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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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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  Law Democratized: Renee Knake Jefferson on Her Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis 20.07.2026 1t 3min

  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, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. 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 Renee Knake Jefferson 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 Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, 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 named her a Legal Rebel for co-founding the ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State together with Daniel Martin Katz. 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 Legal Ethics Roundup, 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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax, 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 06.07.2026 52min

  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, Mark Pike, 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: Claude for the Legal Industry. Webinar: How Legal Teams Put Claude to Work. Claude for Legal Github Repo. LawSites: Anthropic Goes All-In on Legal, Releasing More Than 20 Connectors and 12 Practice-Area Plugins for Claude.   Thank You To Our Sponsors This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, 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 01.07.2026 43min

  Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced a major push into legal, 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 Free Law Project and its CourtListener 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 Mike Lissner, 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, 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 22.06.2026 39min

  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. Amy Juers is CEO of Edge Marketing, a firm she founded in 1997 that serves clients across legal technology and accounting. Valerie Chan is CEO of Plat4orm, 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). CosmoLex, 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 09.06.2026 36min

  When Thoma Bravo took a majority stake in Casepoint 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: Paul Colangelo, a 25-year veteran of government and enterprise software, who was named Casepoint's CEO this week. 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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 02.06.2026 38min

  Neil Araujo, the CEO and cofounder of iManage, was last on this podcast almost exactly two years ago. 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 unveiled the next evolution 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 announced iManage MCP, 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 11.05.2026 40min

  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 Jason Noble, president and chief of product strategy at Ikaun, 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 27.04.2026 44min

  Recorded live at the annual meeting of the Legal Marketing Association in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with Rachel Shields Williams, 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 Monica Bay Women in Legal Tech Award. 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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 15.04.2026 1t 1min

  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 on YouTube.  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 Damien Riehl and Michael Bommarito. 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 ALEA Institute, the Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI, where a central focus of theirs is the FOLIO Project, 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 (FOLIO Enrich), for mapping law firm taxonomies (FOLIO Mapper), for browsing and editing legal ontologies (FOLIO Ontology Explorer), and much more. (See the full list of FOLIO resources.) 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 07.04.2026 1t 6min

  Are courts the next frontier for legal AI? Shlomo Klapper, founder and CEO of the AI-driven judicial case-preparation platofrm Learned Hand, 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 31.03.2026 43min

  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 Daniel Lord-Doyle, cofounder and CEO of Mary Technology, 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 closed a $7 million (Australian) seed round 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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 19.03.2026 39min

  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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).   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 05.03.2026 50min

  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. Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). Legalweek, 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 24.02.2026 46min

  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.   Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks. Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). Legalweek, 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.