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Ep 041: Tom Bruce on 27 Years of Disrupting Legal Information Jun 03, 2019

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Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and territories.

On this episode of LawNext, we talk with Thomas R. Bruce, who is retiring June 30 after 27 years leading the LII. In 1992, Bruce and former Cornell Law Dean Peter W. Martin founded the LII. They codirected it until Martin retired in 2003, after which Bruce continued as sole director. The LII blazed the trail of publishing law online for free, inspiring the creation of some two dozen similar organizations throughout the world, and carrying the banner for the right of citizens to have access to the laws that govern them.

Bruce says he is most proud that he was able to break the monopoly on legal information held by commercial publishers. "The time was ripe for change, and we were the first to use the Web to try our hands at it."

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Tom started his career as a stage and production manager before joining Cornell Law School as director of educational technologies. The first seeds of the LII were sowed, Bruce once wrote, with two gin-and-tonics, consumed by someone else. The rest, as they say, is history -- a history Bruce recounts in this episode.

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Ep 040: Gillian Hadfield on Redesigning Our Legal Systems May 21, 2019

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A lawyer, economist and scholar, Gillian K. Hadfield has devoted much of her career to studying how legal systems can be improved to ensure they meet the needs of the people they are meant to serve. In her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, she argues that the complexity of today's global, digital economy has pushed law to its limits, making it too expensive, too complicated, and too far out of touch with our needs.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Hadfield about her book and her proposals for reinventing the legal system. They also discuss her ideas for addressing the access-to-justice gap, her recent research on ensuring the safety of artificial intelligence, her belief that private investment is essential to sparking innovation in law, and her work with the Utah Supreme Court to launch a regulatory sandbox to test many of her theories.

With both a J.D. from Stanford Law School and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, Hadfield is currently based at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management, where she teaches courses in legal innovation and design, responsible development and governance of AI, the origins and evolution of the law, and contract law and strategy.

She is a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values and Policy and Global Agenda Council on Justice and co-curates the Forum's Transformation Map for Justice and Legal Infrastructure.

She was appointed in 2017 to the American Bar Association's Commission on the Future of Legal Education and is a member of the World Justice Project's Research Consortium. She serves as an advisor to The Hague Institute for the Innovation of Law, LegalZoom, and other legal tech startups.

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Ep 039: An Exclusive Look at the New LegalZoom-backed Project to Develop Better Contracts for Small Businesses May 13, 2019

Show notes

This week on LawNext, we get to reveal a project that could change the face of contracting for small businesses worldwide. Pulse -- backed by LegalZoom -- is a new initiative to deliver better contracts to small businesses. And to help develop it, Pulse has hired widely known contract-drafting specialist Ken Adams, author of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting.

On this episode of LawNext, Adams and Chas Rampenthal, LegalZoom's general counsel, join host Bob Ambrogi to provide details on Adams' new role as head of contracts and the system they are building to give small businesses a better contracting experience -- one that is driven more by expertise than by technology alone.

This episode gets kind of meta for us here at LawNext. Rampenthal was our guest for a show last August. After hearing the episode, Adams reached out to Ambrogi to ask if he would make an introduction to Rampenthal. Ambrogi did, and that led eventually to Adams' hiring and the launch of this new project.

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Ep 038: EY's Purchase of Pangea3, with Pangea3's Joe Borstein and Ed Sohn May 06, 2019

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A tremor rolled through the legal industry recently when Thomson Reuters announced that it had sold its managed services business, Pangea3, to global Big Four professional services firm Ernst & Young, a sign of Ernst & Young's increasing expansion into legal services.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi speaks with two of the leaders of Pangea3, Joe Borstein, global director at Pangea3, and Ed Sohn, vice president of product and partner management there. They provide further details on the deal and discuss its broader implications for the legal industry.

Joe Borstein is a global director with Pangea3, helping to oversee over 1,000 full-time legal, compliance, and technology professionals in offices across the globe, and also director of innovation for Thomson Reuters' corporate segment. Prior to joining Pangea3, Borstein practiced law at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, LLP, where he managed complex litigation in federal, state, and administrative courts. He is a 2005 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Ed Sohn is the vice president of product management and partnerships for Pangea3. He oversees an award-winning product portfolio that tech-enable managed services, products built in-house or from third-party partners. Sohn has served in a variety of leadership roles within Pangea3. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, he was a business litigation associate at King & Spalding in Atlanta, GA, where he is still based. Sohn has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's in computer science from the University of Illinois.

Borstein and Sohn also co-author the alt.legal column on Above the Law, where they write about innovative technologies and businesses in the legal industry.

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Ep 037: Logikcull Cofounder Andy Wilson on His Mission to Democratize Discovery Apr 29, 2019

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"Our mission is to make discovery instant and accessible for everyone," says Andy Wilson, cofounder and CEO of the e-discovery technology company Logikcull. "We believe that quick and affordable access to discovery ‒ the search for truth ‒ is a fundamental right to every citizen of Earth."

Wilson and CTO Sheng Yang launched their cloud-based e-discovery software in 2013 as an adjunct to a data-processing company they had run since 2004. As the software took off, they gave up data processing to devote themselves full time to building and expanding Logikcull. In 2016, they brought in $10 million in a Series A financing, and then in 2018 they raised another $25 million.

Today, coming off what Wilson says was the company's biggest growth year ever, Logikcull has customers all over the world, ranging in size from solo practitioners to major law firms, from Fortune 500 corporations such as Walmart to city and state governments, and it is even used by some journalists.

On this episode of LawNext, recorded live in Logikcull's San Francisco office, Wilson sits down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the company's founding, growth and future direction, including some of the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them. He also talks more generally about the state of the e-discovery industry.

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Ep 036: Atrium Cofounder Augie Rakow on the Alternative Firm's Successes and Challenges Apr 22, 2019

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Silicon Valley-backed Atrium is a different kind of law firm -- a dual entity that is part law practice and part legal technology company. The goal is to provide corporate clients with a more efficient and transparent alternative to traditional large firms, with Atrium's lawyers focusing exclusively on practicing law, while a second entity, Atrium LTS, handles all operations for the firm, even including marketing, and develops and operates software to streamline the firm's workflows.

Atrium was launched in 2017 by Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who sold the Twitch video platform he created to Amazon for $970 million, and Augie Rakow, a former partner representing startups at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to address Kan's own frustrations as a client with how legal services are delivered. Atrium raised an initial $10.5 million in funding in 2017 and then another $65 million last September in round led by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

On this episode of LawNext, cofounder Rakow, now chair of Atrium, joins host Bob Ambrogi for a frank and informative discussion. Rakow discusses the origins and structure of Atrium, the firm's progress so far in achieving its goals, Atrium's blueprint for future development, and the obstacles and challenges it has faced. They also discuss how Atrium differs from Clearspire, an earlier attempt at a dual-entity model.

Rakow attended Harvard Divinity School before discovering an interest in law and attending UC Hastings College of the Law. He joined Orrick as a corporate associate, later becoming partner. He specialized in representing startups in the Bay Area, where his clients included the driverless car industry's first "unicorn" startup, the world's then fastest-growing SaaS company, the first venture-backed consumer drone company, the leading Sand Hill-backed consumer packaged goods company, and several of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture funds.

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Ep 035: Felicity Conrad, Cofounder and CEO of Paladin Apr 16, 2019

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Felicity Conrad is on a mission to help expand pro bono legal services. The legal technology company she cofounded, Paladin, helps corporations, law firms, law schools and legal service organizations streamline their pro bono programs, with the greater goal of helping them serve more clients in need and help close the gap in access to justice.

Paladin has attracted some notable investors, including billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and host of the show Shark Tank,and also notable development partnerships, including with the law firms Dentons and Wilson Sonsini and the Chicago Bar Foundation.

On this episode of LawNext, Conrad joins host Bob Ambrogi for an in-depth discussion of the company she and cofounder Kristen Sonday launched in 2015. She explains how the platform works, describes Paladin's partnerships with legal departments, law firms and associations to expand it capabilities, and discusses her views on how technology can play a role in expanding access to justice.

Before founding Paladin, Conrad was a litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. An alumnus of NYU Law, McGill University and Sciences Po Paris, she previously worked at the United Nations on International Criminal Court issues, and has worked in international law around the world. In 2017, she was named both an ABA Journal Legal Rebel and a Fastcase 50 legal innovation honoree. In 2019, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center named her to its roster of Women of Legal Tech.

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Ep 034: Alternative Legal Models Panel Discussion Apr 08, 2019

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Not all law firms are equal. In fact, some of them are drastically different from one another. As technology becomes even more pervasive in the legal industry, the industry is changing and reacting.

This week, we share a special live panel discussion from UC Hastings' legal innovation hub, LexLab. The panelists spoke to an audience of legal tech startups, students, and legal professionals on some of the factors and considerations driving change in the law firm model.

Panelists speaking in this week's episode are: Augie Rakow of Atrium LLP; Sameena Kluck, previously of Thomson Reuters; Nick Long, Director of Gravity Stack at Reed Smith LLP; and Patrick Palace, of Palace Law. The discussion is moderated by Alice Armitage, professor and Director of Applied Innovation at UC Hastings, and CEP of LexLab.

The panel was recorded as part of the LexLab Lunch-and-Learn speaker series. LexLab is an innovation hub within UC Hastings, which is building a concentration in law and technology for students, and an accelerator for legal tech startups.

Ep 033: AJ Shankar, Founder and CEO of Everlaw Apr 02, 2019

Show notes

Everlaw is an e-discovery company that has attracted the interest of some big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms, raising nearly $35 million in the last three years. It was the first legal technology company to receive an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a firm known for backing a wide-ranging portfolio of successful companies such as Facebook Twitter, Airbnb, Box, Skype and Slack. Its $25 million Series B round last July was led by Menlo Ventures, one of the earliest Silicon Valley venture firms that also has a diverse portfolio that includes Uber, Roku, and Warby Parker.

Our guest this week, Everlaw's CEO AJ Shankar, was a computer scientist with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, when he founded Everlaw in 2011 as one of the earliest cloud-based e-discovery platforms. In a crowded e-discovery market, he believes that Everlaw stands out for its intuitive user interface, split-second speed, and range of features that span the e-discovery process from data uploads to trial preparation.

While working towards his doctorate, Shankar spent time as a technical expert at a national plaintiffs class-action law firm. Seeing the difficulties lawyers faced in sifting through massive quantities of data, he saw an opportunity to develop a better approach. That experience gave rise to Everlaw.

Shankar graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and computer science. He received his doctorate in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 2009. Prior to founding Everlaw, he cofounded Modista, a company that made shopping for apparel more intuitive.

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Ep 032: Kimball Parker, Head of Wilson Sonsini's New Tech Subsidiary SixFifty Mar 26, 2019

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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 at BYU Law School.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi visits Parker in SixFifty's Lehi, Utah, office, where they discuss Wilson Sonsini's reasons for creating a software subsidiary and for locating it in Utah, the privacy tool SixFifty is developing for businesses to comply with California's Consumer Privacy Act, and other products on SixFifty's roadmap, including several to enhance access to justice.

Parker also talks about the LawX Lab and its work to develop SoloSuit, an online tool to help debtors respond to collection lawsuits; Parsons Behle Lab, the subsidiary he started for his former law firm, and its GDPR compliance tool; and his first start-up CO/COUNSEL, a legal education and crowdsourcing site.

A 2013 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Parker began his legal career as an associate with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco. He returned to his home state of Utah in 2016, where he was with the law firm Parsons Behle & Latimer until starting SixFifty this year.

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