LawNext

In February, Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini announced the launch of SixFifty, a software subsidiary that will develop automated tools designed to make legal processes more efficient and affordable for individuals, small businesses and emerging companies. Named president of SixFifty was Kimball Dean Parker, the lawyer who helped develop the innovative LawX design lab…



Gordon Smith, dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, once said: “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.”…

Last week, ABA TECHSHOW presented the third annual Startup Pitch Competition, which I was thrilled to moderate and help organize. Fifteen legal technology startups presented three-minute pitches before a live audience of TECHSHOW attendees, who then voted for their favorite.

In this special edition of LawNext, we partner with the Legal Talk Network to present a recording…

In January, the world’s largest law firm, Baker McKenzie, announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty, to help the firm “enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients.” They join a team led by David Cambria, who last year left Fortune 50…

For some two decades, Mark Chandler has been a leading voice for innovation and technology in the operation of legal departments and the delivery of legal services. Executive vice president and chief legal officer at technology giant Cisco, he has been the company’s top lawyer since 2001 and a member of its legal department since…

We thought 2018 was a banner year for investment in legal technology companies. But then, less than two weeks into 2019, the year got off to a roaring start with news of a $200 million strategic investment in Onit, a Houston company that provides enterprise workflow products for legal management, contract management and business process…

Mark A. Cohen has long been ahead of the curve. After 25 years as an accomplished trial lawyer, he founded one of the first legal process outsourcing companies and then cofounded Clearspire, the groundbreaking two-company law firm and service provider that became the blueprint for a new generation of innovative legal services providers.

Now,…



What do you get if you combine a virtual receptionist service with artificial intelligence? Spoiler alert: The answer is not robots answering the phone. Rather, the folks at Smith.ai say the combination results in a superior receptionist service for both live calls and website chat.…

With Judicata, Itai Gurari believes he has built a better legal research platform. A lawyer and computer scientist, his approach to designing a legal research engine was to first “map the legal genome” — that is, map the law with extreme accuracy and granularity. The result is a research engine that…

Our guest this week on LawNext is Daniel B. Rodriguez, who recently stepped down as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he gained wide recognition for his work to innovate legal education, and recently stepped up to become chair of the governing council of the ABA Center for Innovation, which focuses…

In major legal industry news, global law company Elevate announced its acquisition of the legal AI technology and consulting firm LexPredict. The move combines the comprehensive legal services offering of Elevate with the data science team and AI engine of LexPredict.

With the combination of Elevate’s alternative services model and LexPredict’s cutting-edge technology, does this acquisition…

Is the traditional form of contracting broken? Are static legal agreements irrelevant in a fast-moving global economy? Casey Kuhlman, CEO of the blockchain and smart contracts company Monax, believes we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we form and execute legal agreements.

Kuhlman and Monax are the principal forces behind the…