For legal technology company Clio, this was a particularly significant year, marked by major announcements – including its $1 billion acquisition of vLex – that many saw as transformative for the company. This was on full display at the company's ClioCon conference in October, where CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote laying out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do.

In today's episode, recorded live at ClioCon, host Bob Ambrogi sits down with the two key executives leading Clio's product and technology vision: John Foreman, who joined as chief product officer in May, bringing experience from major SaaS companies including MailChimp and Podium, and Jonathan Watson, the chief technology officer who's been with Clio for eight years.

They explore the company's ambitious vision to develop AI and expand into larger law firms, discuss how vertical software creates advantages for AI implementation, and explain why understanding the complete client journey enables more powerful automation. Foreman and Watson share insights on moving beyond simple chatbots to AI that can actually take action, the challenges and opportunities of expanding into the enterprise market, and what's next as they work to "finish drawing the owl."

"We've started to draw the owl for folks," Foreman says, "and we're going to finish drawing the owl, and it's going to be a beautiful owl."

Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal did finally close on Nov. 10.

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As new tools using generative AI promise to change the way we litigate and conduct discovery, what are the implications for day-to-day litigation workflows? On today's episode of LawNext, we feature a conversation with three guests about how law firms are navigating the urgency around gen AI adoption while staying grounded in practical realities.

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation at e-discovery company Everlaw's annual Summit in San Francisco, where gen AI was very much the talk of the conference — from new product announcements to candid discussions about how law firms are actually putting these tools to work. His guests are:

• Adam Borgman, senior associate in the labor and employment group at Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease.

• Julie Brown, director of practice technology at Vorys.

• Joshua Schnoll, Everlaw's chief marketing officer.

They talk about how Vorys has taken a disciplined approach to mapping lawyers' workflows before plugging in AI, why understanding how your professionals currently work is the essential first step before adopting new technology, and how tools like Everlaw's newly released Deep Dive are helping attorneys find insights across millions of documents that they might never have discovered on their own – including, as you will hear, a rather unexpected story involving Tums.

They also discuss the cost considerations around AI, the trust factor that still gives many lawyers pause, and what advice these experts have for firms that have not yet started experimenting with gen AI.

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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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Legal technology company Clio recently released the 10th edition of its Legal Trends Report, its annual analysis of data and survey responses on legal practice and emerging trends, and this year's report ventured into new territory. For the first time, the report included a neuroanalytics study of legal professionals, analyzing electrical brain activity in legal professionals as they performed various work-related tasks, in order to paint a picture of their emotional strain and mental focus as they worked.

For an in-depth look at this year's Legal Trends Report, its principal author, Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, sits down with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation recorded live at the 13th annual ClioCon, Clio's annual conference, which was held this year in Boston. They discuss the results of this first-ever cognitive study, as well as the report's other key findings, including what it shows about:

• AI adoption and its relationship to law firm growth.

• Clients' expectations around lawyers' use of AI.

• How potential clients find lawyers.

• The correlation between technology adoption and long-term success.

With Clio since 2012, Lenon is an attorney admitted to practice in New York who has focused much of his career on helping lawyers understand the benefits and risks of technology adoption within their practices. At Clio, he leads the development of the Legal Trends Report and contributes to legal scholarship and advancement, often speaking on law firm modernization, technology adoption, legal ethics and access to justice.

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• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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If content is the raw material of generative AI, it only makes sense that an AI-driven contract automation platform would want to acquire the world's largest database of contracts and clauses. That is exactly what happened recently when SimpleDocs, a company with an AI contract drafting, redlining and review platform, acquired Law Insider, which claims to be home to 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spanning more than 50 languages.

One aspect of this acquisition that makes it particularly interesting is that both companies were founded by the same person – and that person, Preston Clark, is our guest today. In that sense, you might say this isn't a typical acquisition story, but more the deliberate convergence of two complementary businesses that were built separately over more than a decade, each with its own DNA, but always with an eye toward this eventual combination.

In an AI market increasingly criticized for being "just GPT wrappers," Clark and his team are betting that workflow-specific tools powered by real contract data will deliver the precision and ROI that legal departments and law firms are demanding.

In our conversation, Clark walks us through the strategic thinking behind this acquisition and how this combined entity plans to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded legal AI market. He also shares his vision for the future – one that extends beyond contract drafting and review into adjacent workflows that could reshape how legal teams interact with contracts altogether.

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• Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential

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Last week brought the 13th annual ClioCon — the annual conference of legal technology company Clio — to Boston, Mass., where cofounder and CEO Jack Newton gave a keynote in which he laid out the company's vision for a new era of AI-driven legal work. That new era is one in which Clio becomes an "intelligent legal work platform" that serves not as a system of record, but as a system of action, powering lawyers through their workdays by automating much of what they do.

Many had wondered what Newton's keynote would bring, coming on the heels of the company's $1 billion acquisition of legal research and AI company vLex, the largest deal ever in legal tech. Newton did not disappoint, announcing a slew of new products and features, ambitious plans to integrate AI throughout Clio's products, and formal expansion into the enterprise legal market with a new division and a new platform. It was a keynote that left some people thrilled, others shell-shocked. Perhaps most striking was that so much of what he outlined was not off in the future, but here today.

The next day, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down live with Newton for this interview in which they recapped much of what Newton covered in his keynote and discussed what lies ahead for the company and its leader.

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In the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything.

One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its AI for Justice program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more quickly, wrongfully evicted tenants getting back into their homes before their possessions are destroyed, and innocent people in prison having their exoneration petitions filed years sooner.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two people at the forefront of this initiative:

• Laura Safdie is head of innovation for legal at Thomson Reuters and has been championing access to justice through technology since her days at Casetext, where she was a cofounder.

• Pablo Ramirez is executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino, a small organization of 45 staff members serving over 9,000 people a year in one of California's largest counties.

Together, they share powerful stories of how AI is enabling legal aid lawyers to be more efficient and more effective in doing what they came to this work to do – fighting for their clients.

They discuss the three pillars of the AI for Justice program – access, support and scale – and how Thomson Reuters is working to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the legal aid community. They also tackle the challenges that remain, from overcoming fear and skepticism about AI to reaching a highly disaggregated network of small, resource-strapped organizations. And they explore the bigger question: Can AI actually help close the justice gap, or are we just nibbling at the edges of an ever-growing problem?

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Recently, the legal technology company Case Status held its inaugural Client Experience Summit in Charleston, S.C., a conference devoted to exploring how AI, data and ethical practices can enable law firms to deliver a better experience for their clients.In an opening keynote at the conference, Andy Seavers, the cofounder and CEO of Case Status, unveiled several new products, including, most notably, Client Intelligence, an AI-driven platform that the company says represents a significant shift for law firms from reactive client management to predictive client engagement.

Shortly after Seavers delivered that keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who attended the conference, sat down with him for this interview to learn more about the company and its latest announcements. When Case Status first launched, it was often described as the Dominos pizza tracker for law, insofar as it enabled clients to easily keep track of the status of their case. As you'll hear from Seavers in today's interview, it has expanded significantly since then, into a full client experience and client intelligence platform.

Also in today's interview, Seavers discusses his just-published a book, Future Firm, Fossil Firm, in which he lays out a blueprint for how law firms can evolve. He discusses his vision of a "future firm," and why he believes that leadership posture, operational systems, and client experience are now the defining factors of firm success.

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Nearly two years ago on this podcast, we discussed the American Arbitration Association's innovation initiatives – and specifically its embrace of generative AI – with Bridget Mary McCormack, who became its president and CEO in 2023 after having been chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and Diana Didia, its chief information and innovation officer. On today's episode, McCormack and Didia – now executive vice president and chief technology and innovation officer – return for an update on innovation at the AAA.

In that prior podcast, McCormack and Didia spoke extensively about the AAA's innovation culture and their early experiments with gen AI. At the time, McCormack said that anyone who thinks they know where gen AI is going, even next week, is fooling themselves. While that may still be true, the AAA has certainly made some bold moves in that direction.

Most notably, just a few days before we recorded this episode, the AAA announced something unprecedented in the dispute resolution world – an AI-powered arbitrator that it is launching in November. This is not just another AI tool to assist lawyers or arbitrators. This is an AI system that will evaluate case merits, generate recommendations, and prepare draft awards — with human arbitrators validating and signing off on final decisions before they are issued.

In today's conversation with host Bob Ambrogi, McCormack and Didia dive deep into how this AI arbitrator works, what it means for the future of dispute resolution, and how it fits into the AAA's broader innovation strategy as the organization approaches its 100th anniversary next year. They also explore the cultural transformation within the AAA that has enabled these technological advances and what is coming next in their AI-native vision for dispute resolution.

• On the latest LawNext: Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur on Enhancing Access to Justice.

• On LawNext: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline Justice.

• On LawNext: CEO Nikole Nelson Returns with An Update on Frontline Justice's Mission to Empower Justice Workers and Bridge the Justice Gap.

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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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

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With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need. But what if the solution is not just about providing more legal services — what if it lies in fundamentally rethinking who can provide legal help?

In today's episode, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two of the nation's leading researchers on access to justice: Rebecca Sandefur, professor and director of the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and Matthew Burnett, director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

They argue that the access to justice crisis is actually a crisis of democracy. As cofounders of Frontline Justice, they have been pioneering research on "justice workers" — community members trained to help their neighbors navigate legal issues. Their recent article in the South Carolina Law Review, "Justice Work as Democracy Work: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democratization," makes a provocative case: When people cannot access their own law, democracy itself fails. They present compelling evidence from Alaska, where nearly 200 community justice workers now serve over 40 rural communities, achieving a 1-to-25 return on investment while dramatically expanding legal aid's reach.

In today's conversation, Sandefur and Burnett discuss the mounting evidence for justice worker effectiveness, including research from the U.K. demonstrating that trained non-lawyers often outperform attorneys on specialized tasks. They also discuss recent breakthroughs — including unprecedented support from both the Conference of Chief Justices and the American Bar Association — and examine what obstacles remain.

Sandefur and Burnett challenge the legal profession's monopoly on law, arguing that regulatory capture has estranged Americans from their own justice system. They envision justice workers as agents of democratization, expanding not just who can access legal help, but who can participate meaningfully in working democracy.

• On the latest LawNext: Sociologist Rebecca Sandefur on Enhancing Access to Justice.

• On LawNext: How A New Kind of Justice Worker Could Narrow the Justice Gap, with Nikole Nelson, CEO of Frontline Justice.

• On LawNext: CEO Nikole Nelson Returns with An Update on Frontline Justice's Mission to Empower Justice Workers and Bridge the Justice Gap.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?

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As Leslie Witt took to the stage Sept. 3 to deliver the keynote at Kaleidoscope, 8am's inaugural customer conference, it was the culmination of a whirlwind summer. It had been just four months since she had joined the company formerly known as AffiniPay as chief product officer, responsible for leading product transformation and strategy for established legal tech brands LawPay, MyCase, CASEpeer and Docketwise. In the intervening 16 weeks, the company had undergone a major rebrand and finalized details of its first major conference. Now, two weeks after the rebrand and as the conference got underway, Witt stood before the keynote audience detailing the company's newest product initiatives, including its upcoming launch of its generative AI-driven 8AM IQ.

Not long after Witt wrapped up her keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with her live for this extended conversation. They spoke at the Kaleidoscope venue in Austin in a recording studio provided by 8am, where they discussed her background and career, her reasons for joining 8am, and the product announcements she had made earlier that day. Those announcements included the beta launch of an AI "Chat with Cases" feature that allows lawyers to ask questions of and search their case files, the integration of three core 8am products — LawPay, MyCase and SmartSpend — on a single technology platform, and more.

Before joining 8am in May, Witt had more than two decades of experience in leading product teams. Most recently, she had served as the chief product and design officer at the mental health and wellness technology company Headspace. She previously held senior positions at Intuit, where she led global design, research and innovation initiatives focused on small businesses.

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to 8AM and Leslie Witt

01:43 Leslie Witt's Background and Experience

09:53 Brand Transformation from Affinipay to 8AM

15:44 Product Design Philosophy and Customer Engagement

20:22 Platform Integration and New Features

24:57 Future Directions and Industry Impact

Daniel Lewis has witnessed legal technology's evolution from multiple vantage points that few others can claim. As a Stanford law student in 2012, he and classmate Nik Reed co-founded the legal research startup Ravel Law with the audacious goal of taking on LexisNexis and Westlaw using machine learning and data analytics – at a time when such challengers were few and far between. Not only was Ravel Law pioneering in its own right, but it also spearheaded and funded the Caselaw Access Project, an ambitious partnership with Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab to digitize and provide free and open access to every official court decision ever published in the United States.

After Ravel's acquisition by LexisNexis in 2017, Lewis spent the next five years leading product teams within the legal research giant, including as vice president and general manager of its Practical Guidance and analytics products. This dual perspective – startup founder turned corporate executive – helped shape his understanding of what works and what doesn't when building technology for lawyers.

Today, as CEO and global chief executive of LegalOn Technologies, Lewis leads a 600-person company that is tackling contract review with a fundamentally different approach. Rather than relying solely on tech-enabled services or raw AI that can hallucinate legal advice, LegalOn combines large language models with attorney-developed playbooks to help in-house legal teams achieve up to 85% time savings on contract review. The company just raised $50 million, for a total raise of $200 million across multiple funding rounds – which Lewis says makes it the most well-funded AI company focused on in-house contract review – and announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to develop AI agents for legal workflows.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Lewis shares hard-won insights about the realities of legal tech entrepreneurship, from the "deranged" confidence required to challenge industry giants as a law student to the leadership lessons learned managing teams through multiple business transformations. He discusses why the current moment represents the most significant opportunity for legal tech innovation in decades, how AI agents will reshape routine legal work, and what he's learned about building technology that lawyers don't just try once but actually integrate into their daily practices.

Related episodes:

• From Ravel Cofounder to Knowable CEO, Nik Reed Has Learned that Building Quality AI for Legal Takes A Lot of Hard Work.

• On LawNext: The Inside Story of the Caselaw Access Project, with Three of the People Who Made It Happen.

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.

• Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).

• Paxton, Rapidly conduct research, accelerate drafting, and analyze documents with Paxton. What do you need to get done today?

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