From legal aid attorney to legal tech innovator, Sateesh Nori brings a unique perspective to the intersection of artificial intelligence and access to justice. 

After spending two decades in the trenches as a housing lawyer at legal aid offices in New York City, Nori now bridges multiple worlds – continuing his legal aid work at the Legal Aid Society of NYC while also serving as an adjunct clinical professor at NYU Law School in its eviction defense clinic and working as a senior legal innovation strategist at Just-Tech LLC, a technology consulting firm that focuses on legal services providers.  

He recently partnered with Housing Court Answers, a nonprofit tenants’ rights organization in NYC, and Josef, the legal automation company, to develop and launch Roxanne, an AI-powered tool to help tenants understand their repair rights, and he believes artificial intelligence could be the key to finally making meaningful progress in closing the justice gap. 

As if all that were not enough to keep Nori busy, he recently published a memoir, Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court, and gave a TEDx talk, How A Chatbot Can Save Someone From Homelessness. 

Today, in a conversation recorded live at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology conference in Phoenix last week, Nori and host Bob Ambrogi discuss why he believes that AI is as transformative as electricity, how he is using it in his own work, and why he believes law schools are failing to prepare students for the AI revolution.

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).

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Anastasia Boyko likes to say that she’s Goldilocks-ed her way through her career. True, it’s been a varied career, as she’s tried out different roles, but it is a career that has taken her full circle, from Yale Law School, where she graduated, and then eventually back to Yale Law to create a program in leadership for lawyers, and from Salt Lake City, where she grew up after she and her mother fled Soviet-era Ukraine, and then back to that city as chief innovation officer at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. 

Along the way, Boyko has learned a thing or two about the roles of leadership and innovation in legal education, and she has strong opinions about why law schools should do better at preparing students to be both leaders and innovators. In today’s LawNext, Boyko joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the journey of her Goldilocks-ed career and her insights on leadership and innovation, as well as ac-cess to justice. 

After graduating from Yale Law School, Boyko began her career in private practice as a tax lawyer. She went on to hold diverse professional positions, including law librarian, Supreme Court intern, banker, yoga teacher, wellness entrepreneur, and career coach. She returned to Yale Law as the inaugural dean of the school’s Tsai Leadership Program, where she developed an innovative leadership program for lawyers, and returned to the University of Utah’s law school, first as director of non-J.D. programs and then as chief innovation officer.

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• 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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On Dec. 5, in a move to enhance access to justice, the Supreme Court of the state of Washington issued a historic order authorizing a regulatory reform pilot program by which entities not owned by lawyers will be able to deliver legal services. The move makes Washington only the third state, after Utah and Arizona, to approve a comprehensive change to the longstanding rule that only entities owned by lawyers can practice law. 

The pilot, which will last for 10 years, is designed to test whether entity regulation will increase access to justice by enhancing access to affordable and reliable legal and law-related services. Entities approved to operate under the pilot will be allowed to practice law, but only under strict conditions that limit the duration of their operations and that require active monitoring and oversight. 

To discuss the development and details of this pilot, we are joined today by two guests representing the two organizations that proposed this pilot to the court and that will now be tasked with partnering to get it up and running. They are:

• Terra Nevitt, executive director of the Washington State Bar Association, and

• Craig Shank, a Washington lawyer and member of the Washington Supreme Court’s Practice of Law Board. 

Their share their perspectives on how this pilot could enhance access to justice and what the development means for regulatory reform more broadly. 

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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

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

On today’s LawNext: we hand over the podcast to NotebookLM to discuss the state of law practice management technology. 

If you haven’t heard of NotebookLM, it is a generative AI tool from Google that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions. Its output sounds a whole lot like, well, a podcast, with two hosts chatting it up about your documents. 

To quote Google’s own description, “With one click, two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on your sources. They summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth.”

So we decided to give it a try.

Back in September, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote a four-part series on his LawSites blog called, “The Shrinking Ownership of Law Practice Management Technology.” It was a deep dive into how ownership of law practice management software for solo and small law firms has been consolidated under just six major ownership groups. 

We loaded the four parts of that series into NotebookLM and asked it to generate its audio overview. What you’ll hear today is the discussion it generated, followed by Bob’s thoughts on what it produced. The NotebookLM audio is about 15 minutes long, and Bob’s comments will come after that plays. 

It is important to keep in mind that the audio generated by NotebookLM is not simply a summary. The two speakers do summarize key points from Bob’s articles, but they also add interpretations and perspectives that are nowhere to be found in the original source material. 

Here are the articles on which the audio is based:

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 1 of 4): A Market Dominated by Just Six Ownership Groups. 

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 2 of 4): A Scorecard of Who Owns What.

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 3 of 4): Future Development and Market Opportunities.

• The shrinking ownership of law practice management technology (Part 4 of 4): Wrapping It All Up.

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• ShareFile, Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience.

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You cannot have innovation without adoption. That was a theme I heard repeatedly when I attended the Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal conference in New York City in October. Our guest today, Paul Henry, would take that a step further and say you do not really have adoption without engagement. 

Henry is the founder and CEO of NGAGE Intelligence, a platform that provides law firms with highly granular and comprehensive behavioral analytics to help them understand whether, how and by whom their communication, collaboration and AI tools are being used.  

NGAGE was founded on the notion of employee engagement and how analytics can be used to measure and improve it. At the conference, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Henry to learn more about Ngage and how the analytics it provides can drive adoption, engagement and governance. 

A note that this was recorded live at the conference, as the morning keynote speech was being piped throughout the conference area, so I apologize for the background noise.

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• ShareFile, Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience.

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

Everlaw for Good is a program run by the e-discovery company Everlaw, through which it makes its software available at no cost to legal aid organizations, nonprofit organizations, and investigative journalists. 

One beneficiary of that program is the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights nonprofit that works to seek justice on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including torture, genocide, and war crimes. At the recent Everlaw Summit, the CJA’s work using the Everlaw platform was honored with the Everlaw for Good award. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the summit, which was held in San Francisco in October, and he had the opportunity to sit down to record this conversation with two of the CJA’s lawyers, along with the director of the Everlaw for Good program. Today’s guests are:

• Claret Vargas, senior staff attorney at CJA. 

• Daniel McLaughlin, senior staff attorney at CJA.

• Joanne Sprague, director of Everlaw for Good. 

They discuss the Everlaw for Good program and the specific impact it has had on CJA’s work. 

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.

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

• ShareFile, Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience.

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

In the field of legal knowledge management and innovation, Sally Gonzalez is both a legend and a trailblazer. Over the course of her 40-year career, she has worked for some of the world's largest law firms to develop and lead KM and strategic technology initiatives. She has overseen KM and information technology programs at such global firms as Norton Rose Fulbright, Dentons, Akin Gump, Covington & Burling, and Jones Day, and been a strategic consultant at major consulting firms including HBR, Navigant, PwC and, most recently, Fireman & Company, 

Gonzalez surprised some of those who attended the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held in New York City in October, where she was the keynote speaker, when she announced her retirement there and was recognized by her peers for her decades of contributions to the legal industry. That made her keynote, in which she spoke about core principles for successful KM, her swan song, of sorts. 

Following her keynote, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi, who was at the conference, sat down with Gonzalez to record this conversation about her thoughts on KM, innovation, AI, culture, change management, and much more. 

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).

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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

Recently, the Everlaw Summit, the annual customer conference of the e-discovery company Everlaw, convened in San Francisco. In his keynote address there, cofounder and CEO AJ Shankar announced the general availability, after a year of beta testing, of a suite of generative AI features for reviewing, coding and analyzing documents in discovery and litigation prep. 

LawNext host Bob AmbrogiI was at the conference, and the next morning, he sat down with Shankar for this conversation about Everlaw’s development of these AI tools and Shankar’s views on how gen AI will impact legal professionals. As you’ll hear him say, he makes no bones about calling it a game changer. 

With a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Shankar founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. He has been on this podcast twice before:

• In April 2019, where he discussed the company’s founding and early development.

• In November 2021, just after Everlaw became one of the first legal tech companies to achieve unicorn status, or a valuation of over $1 billion. 

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).

• Littler, local everywhere. 

• Steno, reliable court reporting with a revolutionary approach

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

At the Knowledge Management and Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City, Legal Services NYC was named as the inaugural winner of the LexPrize award, which is designed to recognize groundbreaking ideas in knowledge management and innovation for the legal industry. It won for its development of the Legal Services NYC KM Portal, a custom-built knowledge management portal designed to enable its legal professionals to more easily access important resources and more effectively collaborate with each other. 

LSNYC, whose 12 offices and more than 500 attorneys serve nearly 110,000 clients annually, developed the portal in partnership with Sente Advisors, a company that helps law firms and legal organizations develop innovative projects. Designed to be a home for user-submitted and curated knowledge that is easily searchable, LSNYC describes the portal as one part social network, one part intranet, and one part enterprise search. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the KM&I for Legal conference and had the opportunity to sit down there with two of the people who were instrumental in the portal’s design and development: 

• Alexander Horwitz, chief operating officer at Legal Services NYC. 

• Kate Boyd, chief operating officer at Sente Advisors. 

In today’s episode, Horwitz and Boyd share the story of the problem they set out to solve, the constraints they had to work within, and how they went about doing it. 

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).

• Littler, local everywhere. 

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

Recently, the law practice management company Clio launched Clio Duo, its generative AI legal assistant. On today’s LawNext, Jonathan Watson, Clio’s chief technology officer, joins the show to discuss Duo’s development, capabilities and future direction.He also talks about some of the other products Clio recently launched, including native accounting and custom reporting. 

Watson and LawNext host Bob Ambrogi recorded this conversation live at the Clio Cloud Conference in Austin, Texas, in October. Watson has twice previously been on this podcast, on Nov. 14, 2023, and on Nov. 3, 2022. He has been with Clio since 2017, and has been its CTO since 2021. He was previously director of engineering at Shopify. 

Note that this is the fifth and final episode we are posting that we recorded live at the Clio Cloud Conference. Check out the other four episodes: 

• Live from #ClioCon: Clio CEO Jack Newton on Generative AI and the New Duo AI Legal Assistant.

• Live from #ClioCon: A Clio Power Trio, with COO Ronnie Gurion, CFO Curt Sigfstead, and Board Member Mark Britton.

• Recorded Live At #ClioCon: A Deep Dive into the 2024 Clio Legal Trends Report, with Joshua Lenon, Clio’s Lawyer in Residence. 

• LawNext Podcast: The LegalTech Fund’s Zach Posner on Investing in Legal Tech (and His Upcoming Summit). 

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).

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

When Zach Posner was last on this podcast, it was 2021 and he was less than a year into having cofounded The LegalTech Fund, the first venture capital firm to be laser-focused on law and legal technology. Since then, his firm, of which he is managing director, has gone on to build up a portfolio of more than 60 legal tech companies in which it invests. 

His firm has also launched his own conference, the TLTF Summit, which will convene for the third straight year starting Dec. 4 in Key Biscayne, Fla. After attending the first summit, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi wrote in his review, “It was a superlative conference – one like no other conference in legal tech.”

We’ve been wanting to get Zach back on this podcast for an update, and as it happens, he was in attendance at the recent Clio Cloud Conference, where we were set up with my mics and recording equipment. So Zach and Bob sat down for this impromptu conversation about his firm, his conference, and his thoughts on the legal tech landscape. 

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).

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