LawNext

Legal technology company Clio recently released the 10th edition of its Legal Trends Report, 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, Joshua Lenon, 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. 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). Eve, 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.

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 exactly what happened recently when SimpleDocs, a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, acquired Law Insider, 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, Preston Clark, 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. 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). Eve, 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.

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. 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). Eve, 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.

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 AI for Justice 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: Laura Safdie 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. Pablo Ramirez is executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino, 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. 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). Eve, 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.

Recently, the legal technology company Case Status held its inaugural Client Experience Summit 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, Andy Seavers, 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. 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). Eve, 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.