LawNext Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi

In recent months, Epiq, a global company providing technology-enabled legal services, has announced new artificial intelligence and analytics features built using the AI capabilities of Amazon Web Services. These new features include a framework for building, training and deploying bespoke machine learning models as secure APIs for customers; integration of Amazon Bedrock for custom copilot development using a range of commercially available large language models; and other features.
Joining LawNext today to provide details on all this and to explain what it means for Epiq’s clients is Roger Pilc, president and general manager of Global Legal Solutions at Epiq. With Epiq since 2019, Pilc is responsible for driving strategy and execution around organic growth, strategic acquisitions, product development, technology, and innovation for a broad range of products in areas including information governance, forensics, e-discovery processing and hosting, managed document review, and advanced analytics.
Pilc and host Bob Ambrogi talk about Epiq’s evolution from primarily a services company to one that also develops its own proprietary technology, while also integrating with a range of technology partners. They also discuss Epiq’s recent initiatives to use AI to further enhance its products, including the Epiq Service Cloud, Epiq Discovery, and the Epiq AI Platform. We also hear Pilc’s thoughts on how AI will impact the future of legal services and the future of Epiq. 
 
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.
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As this episode is released, Aderant, a technology company that provides business and practice management software for mid- to large-sized law firms worldwide, is in the midst of its Global Momentum user conference, taking place in Nashville. At the conference, the company made a major news announcement – the launch of Stridyn, a new cloud platform that will form the foundation for all the cloud and AI applications the company offers. 
That launch marks the culmination of a year in which Aderant has continued to push its cloud-first strategy, most notably through its Expert Sierra cloud-based practice management system, and in which it has increasingly focused on the development of artificial intelligence tools to enhance law business management, including through MADDI, the AI powered virtual associate it introduced last June. 
My guest today is the person leading the company through all this, president and CEO Chris Cartrett. A 10-year veteran of the company, he was named president in 2021 and took over as CEO on Jan. 3, 2022. Now, just over two years into the job, and just ahead of Aderant’s conference this week, he sat down with me to discuss the news coming out this week and for a broader conversation about the company and the legal 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.
 
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Almost exactly one year ago, a new legal tech startup, The Contract Network, came out of stealth, with a mission to “radically accelerate the time for contract negotiations'' through an AI-powered contract collaboration platform where all parties to a deal engage in a secure and neutral environment. 
The company’s cofounder and CEO, Jim Wagner, is a legal tech veteran with a track record of starting and leading successful companies in contracting and e-discovery, including having cofounded the e-discovery company DiscoverReady, having been president of the contract management and analytics company Seal Software, and, after Seal was acquired by DocuSign, having been vice president of agreement cloud strategy there. 
With The Contract Network, Wagner aims to “change contracts for good” by solving the problem of contract negotiations taking too long and lacking tools for real-time collaboration, communication and transparency among all parties. On today’s LawNext, Wagner is our guest, to talk about what he sees as broken with the traditional contract negotiation process and how The Contract Network offers a better option. Given his 30-year career in this industry, he also shares his thoughts on how it has evolved and where we are today. 
 
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.
 
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With so much focus on the use of large language models in law practice, the Kelvin Large Language Model – or KL3M (pronounced CLEM) for short – stands out as distinct for two reasons. For one, it is the first LLM built entirely from scratch specifically for the legal market. In addition, it is the first LLM in any domain to be training entirely on clean, legally permissible data and to be certified as such by the organization Fairly Trained. 
To discuss how KL3M was developed and why this built-from-scratch, domain-specific LLM is significant for the legal industry, our guest for today’s LawNext is Jillian Bommarito, chief risk officer at 273 Ventures, the company that developed CLEM. Not only was Bommarito involved in developing KL3M and the data set used to train it, but she also oversaw the process of earning KL3M its Fairly Trained certification. 
Regular listeners of LawNext may remember my interview last year with two of the other principals of 273 Ventures, CEO Michael Bommarito, who is Jillian’s husband, and Chief Science Officer Daniel Katz, who were on this show just after they conducted the first experiment in having GPT take the bar exam. All three, along with Katz’s wife Jessica Katz, had formerly founded the legal AI and consulting company LexPredict, which was acquired in 2018 by the global law company Elevate. 
In today’s conversation, Bommarito talks about what went into developing the model and creating the dataset to train it, and discusses what it offers the legal market and why and how a law firm would use this model over others that are commercially available. 
 
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.
 
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

Timing is everything, it is said, and so it was either ironic or fateful that Maptician, developed as a hoteling platform to help law firms and businesses manage office space, launched in 2019, just before the pandemic and period in which offices once bustling with people turned into downtown ghost towns. 
But the company quickly adapted, says its CEO Alaa Pasha, expanding its platform to help law firms manage the new normal of hybrid offices and return to work, and it has continued to evolve to become an all-in-one platform for managing in-office needs and helping firms better plan and use their office space.
Pasha, who is our guest on this episode, says that, in his view, the company’s real focus is not space, but people, and helping law firms and businesses understand how to optimize their spaces for the people who work in them today, and how to plan their spaces for the years ahead. 
Side note: The recording of this conversation came about somewhat serendipitously, when host Bob Ambrogi was scheduled to meet with Pasha for a briefing during the Legalweek conference in January. When Ambrogi showed up at Maptician’s booth, the company’s publicist offered to record the conversation, and this is the result. Thanks to Maptician for allowing us to share it through this podcast. 
 
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.
 
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

With the tagline “Making Knowledge Work,” the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported, it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.   
But over the 30 years since its founding, it hit some speed bumps, of sorts, after it went through a series of acquisitions that led to its ownership by Autonomy and then by Hewlett Packard after HP acquired Autonomy in 2011. The HP-Autonomy deal famously turned into a fiasco when HP claimed Autonomy had fraudulently inflated its value, causing it to write off nearly $8.8 billion of the $11.1 billion purchase price, and the repercussions of that deal continue to reverberate, with Autonomy’s founder currently on trial in San Francisco for criminal fraud charges. 
With iManage, through no fault of its own, caught up in that morass, its original founding management team, led by Neil Araujo, swooped in and bought back the company in 2015. It was, Araujo now says, an opportunity to reboot and apply everything they had learned about what to do and what not to do to build a successful company. 
Neil Araujo is our guest in this episode, to share the story of how iManage became the success it is today and to give us a preview of what lies ahead on its product and development roadmap, including its plans for expanding its use of generative artificial intelligence. .
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.
 
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.