LawNext

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.  

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.  

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.  

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  

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.