LawNext

Hosted by Populus Radio, Robert Ambrogi

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Nov 2026

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LawNext is a weekly podcast hosted by Bob Ambrogi, who is internationally known for his writing and speaking on legal technology and innovation. Each week, Bob interviews the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in the legal industry. From legal technology startups to new law firm business models to enhancing access to justice, Bob and his guests explore the future of law and legal practice.

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November 10, 2026Episode 34133 min

Live from ClioCon, Jack Newton on Clio's 'Refounding,' Its Push into the Courts, and Why Data Is the Only Durable Moat

Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton describes the past year as nothing less than a "refounding" of the company he started 18 years ago. In this episode of LawNext, recorded live on the floor of ClioCon 2026 in Boston the day after his opening keynote, Newton explains what he means by that. He also discusses the announcements he made during that keynote – the most ambitious product rollout in Clio's history, with a new brand identity, agentic workflows, Clio Phones, a built-in document management system, automated timekeeping and much more. Asked by host Bob Ambrogi to pick his own highlights from the keynote, he offered two. The personal one was retiring Clio's original logo after 18 years. For customers, the bigger news was agentic AI, which he demonstrated in the keynote through a day-in-the-life story of a family millwork shop to show what "context creates capability" means in practice. He compares Clio's strategy to Apple's – vertically integrating the business of law, the practice of law and AI to build products no one else can. Newton also explains why Clio is moving into the judiciary. He argues that AI-empowered consumers and lawyers will send an "agentic flood" of filings into courts that are already in crisis. To respond, Clio has hired Casetext cofounder Pablo Arredondo and former Michigan Chief Justice Bridget McCormack and acquired the AI startup Learned Hand, founded by Shlomo Klapper. He acknowledges that the market is small, about 33,000 judges in the United States, but said that Clio is pursuing it both for its mission and for the halo effect of judges using its tools. Finally, Bob asks Newton about Clio's moat now that the frontier AI companies are moving into legal. His answer is data: a billion legal documents from vLex spanning 110 countries, another billion court filings through Clio Docket, and 18 years of operational context from law firms. Newton argues that stitching together 10 different systems through MCP connectors is "a bit of a pipe dream" that produces a fragile "Rube Goldberg machine" and is hard to govern securely. For more from ClioCon, see: ClioCon 2026: A Quick Wrap-Up of Everything Clio Announced Today (And It's A Lot.) At ClioCon, Legal's AI Future Is Already Here, Along with 3,000 People Eager to Shape It . Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

November 3, 2026Episode 34033 min

NetDocuments CPO Dan Hauck on the Company's Redesigned Platform, the Legal Context Graph, and Building an Agentic DMS

As NetDocuments rolls out a completely redesigned user experience, a new Microsoft 365 integration, and real-time co-authoring, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Chief Product Officer Dan Hauck in an episode recorded live at the company's Inspire conference in Orlando in October. Hauck, who last appeared on the show in 2022 , explains how the company rethought its interface for an agent-ready world, why customers can switch freely between the old and new experiences with no forced migration, and how the new M365 add-in replaces legacy desktop integrations so lawyers can work across Windows, Mac and mobile devices. Hauck also digs into the legal context graph, the proprietary knowledge infrastructure the company launched earlier this year that continuously maps the relationships among every matter, document, communication and person across a firm's entire document repository. He explains how it works, how it helps agents perform better, and how it can dramatically reduce the cost of token consumption. He also walks through other NetDocuments' announcements, including the general availability of tabular review, new document generation and redlining in the NetDocuments assistant, interactive HTML reports, and a beta MCP connector with Legora that joins existing connectors to Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and others. A former litigator who founded ThreadKM before NetDocuments acquired it, Hauck draws parallels between today's AI shift and the early days of technology-assisted review in e-discovery, when lawyers first learned to pair human judgment with machine speed. He discusses why NetDocuments keeps investing in its own interface even as MCP lets users reach their documents from other AI platforms, how smaller and midsized firms can benefit from the context graph without dedicated knowledge management staff, and what an agentic DMS might look like in daily practice. Hauck also shares how he keeps pace with rapid change, including lessons he learned about context from building out his own home automation with Claude. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

October 29, 2026Episode 33935 min

NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter on Why the DMS is Becoming the Firm's 'Intelligence Layer'

NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter believes the document management system is becoming something else entirely: a law firm's organizational intelligence layer. As lawyers increasingly do their work inside AI tools such as Claude, Harvey, Legora and ChatGPT, Baxter says NetDocuments' job is to build and preserve the firm's context, then make it accessible through whatever interface the user chooses. He even acknowledges that the DMS may eventually become "headless." Recorded live at NetDocuments' Inspire conference in Orlando, this episode finds host Bob Ambrogi and Baxter, who joined the company as president in 2017 and became CEO the following year, discussing how generative AI is reshaping both the company and the legal market. Baxter lays out his three-layer view of legal AI: the models, which NetDocuments does not build; the "harness," which users will swap at will; and the organizational data and context, which he argues is the layer that will endure. He describes how NetDocuments' document intelligence pipeline, semantic embeddings, and context graph aim to capture not just what is in a firm's documents, but how its lawyers negotiated and reached outcomes, even after the partner who handled a matter has retired. Baxter also shares the results of NetDocuments' internal benchmarking, which found that running AI work against its context graph cuts token costs by roughly half, with savings reaching about 70% on the most expensive models. He discusses where AI pricing is headed (a predictable base plus consumption), why the company still invested two years in a new user interface, and what distinguishes successful AI deployments from those that stall. Along the way, Baxter makes NetDocuments' case against competitors, describes recent wins among Fortune 100 companies and AmLaw 200 firms, and reports month-over-month AI usage growth of 40% to 50% on the platform. He also explains how Claude Code transformed his engineering team, which built a tabular review feature in three months with one team instead of the 12 months and multiple teams originally scoped, and why that has made him more excited than worried about the so-called "SaaSpocalypse." Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

October 1, 20261 hr 3 min

'The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done': Noah Waisberg on Why Selling a Business Hurts, and How Zuva Aims to Fix It

Five years ago, Noah Waisberg sold Kira Systems, the pioneering AI contract-analysis company he co-founded, to Litera. Even though the deal itself went well, the experience of going through the sale was hard, Waisberg now says. But that experience provided the fuel that turned into his next business. As part of the sale , he kept a copy of the underlying Kira technology and about 30 of the company's roughly 180 employees, and used them to launch Zuva . Zuva started as an API-only company, but it has since turned its focus to the sell side of M&A. After interviewing some 200 dealmakers about the most painful parts of selling a business, Zuva built software to help sellers manage the flood of bidder questions. It also launched a tech-enabled diligence service that pairs Kira's AI with experienced former Big Law associates. Zuva says the service delivers work product comparable to Big Law at a fraction of the cost. Waisberg was last on LawNext in 2021 , marking the 10th anniversary of Kira and the release of his book, AI for Lawyers. In today's episode, he and host Bob Ambrogi discuss Zuva's new direction and what the recent expiration of his post-sale restrictions means for the company. They recorded this conversation on the day Harvey announced its latest mega-funding round, so they also talk about the prospects for Harvey and Legora against the frontier labs, and why Waisberg recently remarked that we've hit "peak legal tech." He also covers the limitations of today's AI that he thinks the market underestimates, and why the billable hour remains the biggest obstacle to efficiency tech. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Chapters: (00:00) Introduction (03:16) From Kira to Zuva (09:49) Why Selling a Business Is Hard (17:00) Zuva's Sell-Side Strategy (35:27) The Legal AI Market (51:52) AI's Limits and the Billable Hour (58:25) The Case for Selling Your Business

September 21, 2026Episode 33742 min

An Offer She Could Not Turn Down — Bridget McCormack on Joining Clio to Transform Technology for Judges

Legal tech company Clio has long said that its mission is to transform the legal experience for all. Until now, that "all" has largely focused on law firms and their clients, but recently Clio announced a major initiative to develop technology for the judiciary. As part of that initiative, it hired Pablo Arredondo, the former cofounder of Casetext and developer of CoCounsel, one of the first AI legal assistants, to lead product development. Arredondo was on this show on Sept. 1 to discuss his new role. Now, Clio has made another major hire to help lead this project: Bridget Mary McCormack, the innovative former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and current president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association, who will join Clio in October as general manager, judiciary, to lead the market and commercial strategy for the judiciary business. On the day her hiring was announced, McCormack sat down with host Bob Ambrogi to discuss why she considered this an offer she could not turn down and how she believes she, Arredondo, and Clio can transform the legal experience for the judiciary. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. Chapters: (00:00) Introductions (02:49) Bridget McCormick's New Role at Clio (08:44) Co-Designing Technology with Judges (11:11) Building Tech for the Judiciary vs. Law Firms (15:35) Addressing Court Challenges with Technology (20:28) Bottlenecks in the Court System (23:30) Improving Existing Court Technologies (25:20) Integrating Technology in Courts (28:00) The Role of AI in Judicial Processes (32:02) Addressing Self-Represented Litigants (35:50) Balancing Tradition and Innovation in Courts (40:20) Setting Goals for the Future of Court Technology If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

September 16, 2026Episode 33639 min

As Alex Su Is Named President of Latitude Legal, We Talk about Why AI Is Driving Demand for Flex Talent

Call it Alex Su, redux. We do not usually have the same guest on LawNext twice in the same year, but there is good reason to have Alex back, as he has just been named president of Latitude Legal, the flexible legal staffing company. Last February, Alex and host Bob Ambrogi recorded a live episode of this podcast over lunch in a Cambodian restaurant in Alex's hometown of Alameda, Calif., as part of our LawNext on Location series. They talked about his winding career, from Sullivan & Cromwell associate to federal clerkship to legal tech startups and finally to chief revenue officer at Latitude. In that interview, Bob asked Alex what was coming next. His answer was that as AI got better, the demand for lawyers with real judgment — to direct it, check it, and own the work — would only grow. Seven months later, that prediction is proving prescient. In just the first half of this year, Latitude says it has seen a 52 percent jump in new law firm and corporate clients. So with Latitude's promotion of Su to president, he returns to LawNext to discuss why he thinks AI is driving more demand for experienced lawyers, not less. He also talks about how Latitude's client-service model relies on former law firm partners and senior in-house counsel, why he pushes back on labeling flex talent as "contract attorneys" or calling Latitude an ALSP, and why he expects the market for flexible legal talent to keep expanding as law firms and legal departments sort out what AI can and cannot handle. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

September 8, 2026Episode 33544 min

Casefleet Founder Jeff Kerr on Fact Management in the Age of AI

Chronologies have become one of legal tech's hottest categories, with a wave of AI startups promising to turn a messy evidentiary record into a structured timeline in minutes. Jeff Kerr and his company Casefleet were more than a decade ahead of the pack. Kerr finished law school in 2010 and made what he calls the crazy decision to start a law firm as his first job after graduating. Running an employment practice, he found that winning cases came down to knowing the chronology cold. But the only tools for building one were a Word document and a lot of patience. So he taught himself to code, left practice in 2015, and founded Casefleet. On this episode of LawNext, Kerr joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss what a decade of building fact-management software looks like now that AI has arrived. Last month, Casefleet launched Casey, a conversational AI agent that proposes facts, links them to legal issues, and drafts documents — with a citation engine that rejects any citation not matching the exact text of the underlying document. Kerr deliberately draws a hard line on what he will let his AI do. Casefleet's agent is fully agentic in the sense of researching and iterating on its own, he says, but it stays read-only – it will not send emails, make calls, or file anything. Among the other topics they cover: Why Casefleet's pre-AI data model turned out to be the right foundation for AI, and why classic Casefleet still runs alongside Casey. The company's move back toward e-discovery, including newly added document production, and why Kerr isn't chasing terabyte-scale cases. What happens to specialized litigation tools if the frontier AI labs push further into legal. Why Casefleet, profitable since 2018 and largely bootstrapped, may raise outside capital in the coming year. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

September 1, 2026Episode 33436 min

Why Legal AI Pioneer Pablo Arredondo Is Joining Clio to Build Technology for the Courts

Pablo Arredondo, the Casetext cofounder who helped build some of the earliest and most influential applications of AI in legal practice, is joining Clio as senior vice president, judiciary, where he will lead the company's strategy for extending its technology into the courts. In this episode, recorded just ahead of the announcement, Arredondo tells host Bob Ambrogi why he is turning his attention to the judiciary — and why he believes the challenge starts with the sheer torrent of material flooding into the courts. "On Monday, somewhere on the order of three billion tokens are going to hit court dockets," he says. Arredondo cofounded Casetext in 2013 and helped develop CARA, the first brief analyzer, and CoCounsel, the product that brought generative AI into everyday legal workflows. After Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in 2023, he joined that company, leaving at the end of last year. In this conversation, he traces how his interest shifted toward the courts — from watching judges organically adopt Casetext's Parallel Search to a recent project at Cornell's Legal Information Institute using LLMs to annotate the U.S. Code of Conduct for Judges with centuries of judicial ethics thinking from rabbinic, Islamic and Roman Catholic traditions. Arredondo also explains why courts need "judiciary grade" technology rather than tools built for lawyers, how AI is driving a surge in pro se filings, whether AI could ever replace judges (his short answer: "absolutely not"), and where he plans to start when he officially begins the role Aug. 31. This is Arredondo's second appearance on LawNext this year, following a February conversation at his home in Tiburon, Calif., about his career and what would come next. Now we know. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

August 11, 2026Episode 33339 min

LexisNexis CTO Greg Dickason On Building Legal AI In Real Time with Customers in Its New Innovation Lab

This week, LexisNexis announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City — a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Amazon Web Services sit in the same room and build legal AI together, in real time. The company is calling it a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped: Instead of developing products internally and asking customers to validate them afterward, customers bring their pain points into the lab, engineers code against them on the spot, and prototypes that pass muster can move into Lexis+ with Protégé in a matter of weeks. Our guest today is the person leading that effort: Greg Dickason , chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Dickason joined LexisNexis in 2019 and previously ran the company's Asia-Pacific business, where he launched Lexis+ AI in that region. Before LexisNexis, he was chief technology officer at CoreLogic. In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi recorded just ahead of the launch, Dickason explains what actually happens inside the lab as engineers code live alongside customers, and how this differs from the customer input LexisNexis has always said drives its product development. They also discuss what has already come out of the lab, including a multimedia Protégé Vault that lets a lawyer query a video deposition; why legal drafting is the lab's first priority; and how Dickason sees agents reshaping legal work. Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

August 5, 2026Episode 33245 min

SurePoint's New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change

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. His answer to that question is direct: This is a mandate for change, not business as usual. Steinberg is candid that SurePoint still has integration work ahead of it after acquiring four companies in four years — Coyote Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, and ZenCase in 2025 — and he says the company will keep looking at acquisitions while it does that work. Steinberg is no stranger to legal technology. He founded Redwood Analytics in 2000, an early innovator in helping law firms use their own data to understand their profitability, and sold the company to LexisNexis in 2008 (which then sold it to Aderant in 2014). He spent the years since in medical records retrieval for litigation and in other sectors, and served as a senior advisor to Aquiline Capital Partners, the private equity firm backing SurePoint. He arrives at a company whose roots go back to 1982. Among the topics Jeff discusses: Why he distinguishes between machine learning and generative AI when it comes to developing systems firms need to trust completely. What he is hearing in his early conversations with customers about AI adoption. How SurePoint decides whether to build, buy, or partner. Why he thinks the mid-sized firm market has proven more resilient than many had predicted. The three priorities he has set for his first year. For an interview with outgoing CEO Thurston, see: On LawNext: SurePoint CEO Eric Thurston on Acquiring ZenCase and His Vision for Mid-Market Practice Management . Thank You To Our Sponsors 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). CosmoLex , helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. Ajax , the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

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