LawNext Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi

As the law practice management company Clio today announced a record $900 million funding round, the largest ever for a cloud legal technology company, at a whopping $3 billion valuation, Clio’s founder and CEO Jack Newton joins LawNext for an exclusive podcast interview. 
In a conversation recorded last week, ahead of today’s announcement, Newton and host Bob Ambrogi dive deep into this investment and what it means for Clio, its customers, and the legal industry. Newton founded the company 16 years ago and has overseen its growth into a global legal tech powerhouse, with more than 1,100 employees worldwide. 
“My ambition was always to build this into something that would be a multi-decade company, a hundred-plus year company, and a company that would leave a lasting impact on the legal industry, and a company that would transform the legal industry in a really positive way,” Newton says in the interview. “And what I see this investment round as being is, number one, a huge validation of the success Clio has had in driving that transformation, but more importantly, positioning us to even have a more transformative and more impactful next chapter to our story.”
  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.
 

Jacqueline Schafer, the founder and CEO of Clearbrief, was inspired to start the company based on her own experiences as a litigator and appellate advocate. A pivotal moment for her came in an asylum case she was handling pro bono, when her ability to point the judge to critical evidence that supported her arguments saved her client from deportation and possible death. At that moment, she later old me, the thought crystalized for her, “If you can show the judge the evidence that really tells your client’s story, that’s how you win.’”
Soon after, Schafer set to work building Clearbrief, AI-powered software that works within Microsoft Word to help lawyers find the best facts to support their legal writing. This week, the four-year-old company announced that it had raised an additional funding round of $4 million, bringing its total funding to nearly $8 million. Along the way, it has racked up numerous awards, including Legalweek’s 2023 litigation product of the year, Clio’s 2022 Launch//Code Developer Contest, Legalweek’s 2022 new law company of the year, and the American Legal Technology Awards’ 2021 legal tech startup of the year.
Schafer is our guest today on LawNext, as she shares her journey from practicing lawyer to startup founder, describes how Clearbrief helps lawyers in their legal writing, and discusses what this latest investment means for the company and its customers.  
 
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.
 

Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public’s access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a catalyst for innovation to enable courts to better serve the legal needs of the public. 
In August, the program will wrap up its inaugural cohort, which placed three fellows in courts in Kansas, Tennessee and Utah. But even though those three fellowships were successful, our guest today, Jason Tashea, the program’s founding director and cofounder, says its future is uncertain because its continued funding is uncertain. “These programs are expensive, they are hard to fundraise for,” he says.
In today’s episode, Tashea, an entrepreneur, educator, and award-winning journalist, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the need for and genesis of the program, the fellowships it supported this year, and his assessment of the program’s success. He also shares his thoughts more broadly on the need for innovation in the courts to address the gap in 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.
 
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

This has been a notable year for BriefCatch, a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company’s raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics. 
All of that culminated in BriefCatch’s announcement last week of its hires of three legal tech veterans into key executive roles in marketing, sales and product management, all to help lead it into its next stage of growth and development: Lydia Flocchini as chief marketing officer, Darren Schleicher as chief sales officer, and Kyle Bahr as product manager of AI and other new products.
Ross Guberman, the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is our guest today to discuss the company’s history, growth, recent news, and future plans – which will include the launch of a suite of AI-enabled products. A former practicing lawyer, he was a legal writing coach and speaker when he conceived of BriefCatch, which he formally launched in 2018. 
 
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.
 

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets. 
But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today’s episode, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project’s cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master’s degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.
Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation. 
The Free Law Project’s data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices. 
 
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.
 

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.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.