LawNext

SurePoint Technologies, a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named Jeff Steinberg its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating Eric Thurston, who had led the company since 2023, to executive chairman. Two weeks into the job, Steinberg joins LawNext to speak with host Bob Ambrogi about what his appointment means for the company's customers.

As chief technology officer at Casetext, Ryan Walker helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. But Walker came away unsatisfied. Although the legal tech tools kept getting better, he believed, clients were seeing no benefit. Billing rates kept climbing and the effic...

Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing towa...

When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company's biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that's been simmering since Anthropic's first legal plugin briefly rattled the stock prices of Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer back in Jan...

Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced a major push into legal, much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem.

But the less talked about side of the story was potentially the more impactful – Anthropic's explicit commitment to access ...

Once upon a time, a legal tech vendor's goal in getting seen by potential customers was to rank on the first page of Google search. But in the age of AI, that is no longer enough. Now, when a potential buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a vendor, what matters is whether the company shows up in the answer the AI generates. And that, increasingly, depends on who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you...

When Thoma Bravo took a majority stake in Casepoint in January 2025 and merged it with the government-software company OPEXUS, it set the e-discovery pioneer on a broader course — deeper into the government market and squarely into FOIA and case management. Now the company has a new leader to see that course through: Paul Colangelo, a 25-year veteran of government and enterprise software, who was named Casepoin...

Neil Araujo, the CEO and cofounder of iManage, was last on this podcast almost exactly two years ago. In the dog years of the legal industry's AI age, that feels like a long time ago. Our conversation then was about law firms still feeling their way around generative AI. But now, as you will hear in this episode, the focus is about what it actually takes to put AI to work at scale — and iManage's answer is that ...

Law firms sell experience — but for decades, harnessing and operationalizing that experience has been a largely manual, chaotic process. In this episode, recorded live at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference in New Orleans, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with Jason Noble, president and chief of product strategy at Ikaun, to talk about how his company is changing that.

Ikaun is a managed serv...

Recorded live at the annual meeting of the Legal Marketing Association in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with Rachel Shields Williams, president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel was named a recipient of ALM's ...

We don't usually say this, but for today's LawNext, you're going to want to watch the video version, if you can. The audio will be good, but the video will be great. You can find it on YouTube. 

Why? Because we're going to be talking today about vibe coding, and you're going to want to see what our guests are showing today, not just hear them tell about it.

Those guests are Damien Riehl a...

Are courts the next frontier for legal AI? Shlomo Klapper, founder and CEO of the AI-driven judicial case-preparation platofrm Learned Hand, believes they are. A former litigator at Quinn Emanuel and law clerk for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Klapper is building what he calls a "reasoning engine" for judges — AI tools designed to help them manage crushing caseloads by organizing case materials, flagging...

E-discovery platforms have gotten great at narrowing millions of documents down to manageable sets. But what happens next — the grueling work of extracting facts, organizing them, and building a reliable case narrative — has remained largely manual. In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with Daniel Lord-Doyle, cofounder and CEO of Mary Technology, about the Australian startup's bet that "fact m...

For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, Bob heads across the bay, from San Francisco to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw, where he sits down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long game. 

AJ grew up in Connecticut, came west in 2002 for a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived withi...

Continuing his on-location interview tour of San Francisco, Bob heads an hour north to Santa Rosa to sit down with Nathan Walter, cofounder and CEO of Briefpoint, over a bottle of red wine at Paradise Ridge Winery, a spot literally around the corner from Nathan's house, sitting on the edge of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that divides Sonoma and Napa counties. It is a fitting setting for a founder who grew up in Sonoma ...

As Bob continues his LawNext on Location series – all recorded live in the San Francisco area at locations of each guest's choosing – he sits down with Pablo Arredondo at his home in Tiburon, a quaint Marin County town with a history stretching from Mexican land grants to naval outposts to a southern railway terminus. From Pablo's home office, the view looks out over Richardson Bay towards Sausalito and, if...

This episode is recorded live, and is best enjoyed on YouTube. Watch the episode here.

While Bob is visiting San Francisco for two weeks, he is sitting down for conversations with legal tech innovators and entrepreneurs "in their natural habitats" – places in the Bay Area they consider special. Today, in the first in this series, Bob sits down for lunch with Alex Su, chief revenue officer at Latitud...

In this episode of LawNext, we talk with Ryan Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Filevine, and Sona Sulakian, former CEO and co-founder of Pincites, about Filevine's acquisition of the AI-powered contract redlining company. The deal, which closed in December, marks Filevine's second major AI acquisition of the year. Even more notably for this traditionally litigation-focused company, it represents a significant strategic ...

Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg started legal AI company Harvey in 2022 as roommates in a San Francisco apartment. Pereyra had been working on AI research at Meta and Google, while Weinberg was a first-year litigation associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Today, they still share that same apartment, but their company has grown into a global enterprise serving more than 1,000 law firms and corporate legal departments...