LawNext Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi

Stories are increasingly common of lawyers who leave law practice to start legal technology companies, but few achieve the level of success as an entrepreneur of Matt Spiegel. He was a criminal defense lawyer in 2009 when he founded MyCase, one of the earliest cloud-based law practice management companies. In 2012, he sold MyCase to AppFolio, and then left the company in 2015 to start a software company that helped organizations manage trade shows and events. In 2017, he returned to law to start his current company, Lawmatics, a client relationship management (CRM) platform for law firms. 
Spiegel was previously on episode 16 of this podcast in 2018, not long after he founded Lawmatics. He developed the product because he saw a gap in the legal market for software that would help firms automate their marketing and run their businesses as sales organizations. In the years since, he has raised $12.5 million in funding, expanded the platform with time-and-billing and e-payments capabilities, and added a generative AI feature to help law firms create and edit client emails and email marketing campaigns. 
In this episode of LawNext, Spiegel shares his story as a serial legal tech entrepreneur, discusses why he founded Lawmatics, describes how the platform automates legal marketing and relationship management, and talks about his future plans for the company and the platform.  
 
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Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
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It has been nearly a year and a half since Sheryl Hoskins joined Litera as its new CEO in April 2022. She came into that role following a period in which the company saw significant growth, fueled in part by a series of some 17 acquisitions, through which the company expanded from a primary focus on document technology into such areas as contract review, transaction management, firm intelligence, talent management, governance, and more. 
Since then, she has continued to drive further growth, most recently laying out an ambitious strategy around generative AI that will bring a series of product releases and enhancements over the coming months. Today, Litera is a company with more than 2.3 million global users, nearly 1,000 global employees, and 15,000 global customers, including 99 of the Am Law 100 and 90% of the largest law firms worldwide. 
Before coming to Litera, Hoskins had more than 20 years of experience in the global technology industry and an established track record managing global teams. She spent the first decade of her career at General Electric and McKesson Corp, where she held domestic and international leadership roles. Most recently, she was CEO of restaurant management platform Upserve. She also spent six years as an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army. 
In her first-ever appearance on a podcast, Hoskins joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her career, her decision to join Litera, the state of the company today, and her vision for its future. 
 
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.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence
 
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

Recently in Orlando, Fla., at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded a series of brief live interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Last week on this podcast, we featured the first set of those interviews – with 12 of the legal tech startups that were participating in ILTACON’s Startup Hub.This week we are featuring interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were attending the conference.
 
In these 11 short interviews, we speak with: 
David Wong, chief product officer, Thomson Reuters. 
Mike Fouts, chief business officer, ShareFile.
Carol Lynn Grow, co-owner and COO, LawToolBox.
Ted Theodoropoulus, CEO, Infodash.
Jerry Levine, chief evangelist and general counsel at ContractPodAI.
Monica Harris, product business manager, Cellebrite Enterprise Solutions.
Ahmed Shaaban, cofounder and managing director, Fulcrum Global Technologies.
Hossein Jabbar, CEO, PaayaTech. 
Richard Sayles, head of data analytics, Sapling Data.
Michael Murray, director of technology, Veritext.
Daniel Bonner, director of client solutions, Level Legal.
Be sure to also listen to last week’s interviews with the legal tech startups. 
 
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.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.
Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is just back from Orlando, Florida, where he attended ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Mic in hand, he recorded a series of brief interviews with some of the legal tech companies that were in attendance. Over the next two episodes of this podcast, we will share those interviews, starting today with the legal tech startups at ILTACON. 
Once again this year, the conference featured a Startup Hub in the exhibit hall, where 27 startups had booths showing their products. Although Bob was not able to interview all 27, he did have the opportunity to speak briefly with a dozen of them. Today’s episode features those 12 brief interviews. We speak with:
Joshua Aaron, CEO and cofounder, Aiden Technologies.
Anthony Seale, CEO, Legatics.
Yannic Kilcher, cofounder and CTO, DeepJudge.
James Ding, CEO and cofounder, DraftWise.
William Dougherty, cofounder, Capacity.
Horace Wu, CEO and founder, and Paul Farrell, director of customer success, Syntheia.
Noah Wittman, cofounder and  CEO of Priviom.
Ariel Nacson, cofounder and chief customer officer, CiteRight, together with Colin LaChance, CEO, Jurisage Inc.
Mat Rotenberg, cofounder and CEO, Dashboard Legal.
Yohei Fujii, cofounder and CEO, BoostDraft.
Floor Blindenbach, founder and CEO, Organizing4Innovation. 
Julien Steel, head of product, Henchman. 
In the next episode, we’ll feature interviews with some of the established legal tech companies that were there. 
 
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.
 
Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.  
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

Recently, Silicon Valley-based Gunderson Dettmer, an international law firm of more than 400 lawyers that exclusively represents clients in the innovation economy, launched ChatGD, a generative AI chat app for its lawyers and legal professionals that the firm designed and built itself. The launch appeared to make the firm the first in the U.S. to develop a proprietary internal tool using generative AI technology and possibly also the first firm anywhere to launch such a tool.
On today’s episode of LawNext, the two people who spearheaded the development — Joe Green, the firm’s chief innovation officer and also of counsel, and John Scrudato, the firm’s legal engineering and data strategy manager, join host Bob Ambrogi to share the story behind ChatGD. They explain why the firm wanted to develop its own generative AI app, describe what it does and how legal professionals can use it, and share how it has been received so far by the lawyers who have used it. 
As you will hear, Green and Scrudato see the development of the app as somewhat of a learning exercise — for the firm and for its lawyers — in anticipation of the enormous impact generative AI is likely to have on both legal professionals and clients. “We view this whole stage as very experimental and learning oriented,” Green says in the interview. “This is about getting the tool in the hands of lawyers in a safe way that they can really start learning about how to get value out of 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.
 
Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.  
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
 

Today’s episode offers a different perspective on the DoNotPay controversy – and ended up having an unexpected twist.
 
Earlier this year, DoNotPay, which described itself as the world’s first robot lawyer, and its founder Joshua Browder became the subject of harsh criticism after paralegal Kathryn Tewson tested several of DoNotPay’s self-help legal apps and concluded they were little more than smoke and mirrors – in some cases getting the law wrong, in others failing even to deliver the promised output. 
In the wake of Tewson’s allegations, this podcast recorded an exclusive interview with Browder, in which he called the criticism “a bit of a nothingburger.” I followed that Interview with one with Tewson, in which she described in detail how she tested the DoNotPay products and responded to Browder’s dismissal of her critique. 
Following those events, our guests today, Maya Markovich, executive director and cofounder of the Justice Technology Association and executive in residence for Justice Tech at Village Capital, and Tom Gordon, executive director of Responsive Law, an organization that represents the consumers’ voice in the legal system, co-authored an op-ed in which they argued that reforms in the regulation of the practice of law, such as those implemented in Utah, could have prevented the DoNotPay debacle, since DoNotPay would have had to have been licensed and regulated.
They submitted their op-ed to the American Bar Association’s Center for Innovation, which agreed to publish it in the Center’s biannual innovation trends report, slated to be released Aug. 1. In anticipation of that publication, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded the interview you’re about to hear with Markovich and Gordon, in which they discussed their op-ed and their views more broadly on regulatory reform. The interview was scheduled to post Aug. 1, in conjunction with the op-ed’s publication that day. 
But then the plan hit an unexpected twist. Instead of publishing the op-ed that day, the Center notified the authors that it had canceled the publication because of what it described as “political challenges” within the ABA, but that it had neglected to inform them of that. 
Because this interview was recorded before the ABA canceled the op-ed, you will hear references to the ABA’s publication of the op-ed. But since that never happened, Markovich and Gordon allowed us to publish the op-ed on LawNext. Ambrogi has also written a blog post detailing the whole sordid story. 
Show links:  
Opinion: DoNotPay Controversy Illuminates Urgent Need for Regulatory Reform.
Citing ‘Political Challenges,’ ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn’t Publish.



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.
 
Nota, the online business banking platform designed specifically for solo and small law firms.
Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm's data and documents from one app to another.
Overture.Law, The first attorney-to-attorney referral platform that lets you easily generate referral fees for clients you can’t serve.  
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.