LawNext

Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms, Conga acquired Contract Wrangler. For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Neil Peretz, it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to…

Gavin McGrane was a litigation attorney in San Francisco when he saw an opportunity to improve how legal professionals interface with the federal courts electronic records system, PACER, and to enable them to better tap into the data and knowledge contained within that system. 

In 2012, he…

There may be no more critical issue facing the legal profession than reregulation of legal services. Amid an escalating crisis in access to justice, proponents of regulatory reform argue that the only way to meaningfully address the crisis is to loosen restrictions on non-lawyers investing in and providing legal services. 

On Aug.1, Hari M. Osofsky took office as dean of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, after four years as dean of Penn State Law School and nearly two decades of teaching law. Having herself established a reputation for driving innovation, and coming into a school that is already recognized as innovative, her mission…

Zach Posner cofounded The Legaltech Fund in 2020 as the first venture capital firm laser-focused on law and legal technology. But even with that industry focus, he takes a broad view when it comes to what he considers legal tech, looking for startups that…

Does the billable hour get a bum rap? Nicholas d’Adhemar, founder and CEO of the London-based spend management company Apperio, believes so. The real culprit for out-of-control legal costs is something else altogether, he believes. By identifying it, d’Adhemar says, both clients…

[Note: This is the second of an exclusive two-part series on lawyer marketplace UpCounsel, which – 16 months after new owners rescued it from shutting down – is now launching a crowdfunding campaign. In part one, I wrote about UpCounsel came back from the brink of closing down and rebuilt its business.] …

With his contract-management company having just raised $40 million in Series B funding, Linksquares cofounder and CEO Vishal Sunak is aiming for some big goals, including “to build legal tech solutions that simply weren’t possible before.”

In announcing the raise, which brings the company’s total funding to $61.4 million, Sunak vowed that…

Mary Shen O’Carroll helped pioneer the field of legal operations during her 13 years as director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming the influential organization CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – and was elected its president in 2019. 

In…

The past year has laid bare, in shockingly explicit detail, the racial inequities of the justice system. Now, LexisNexis and the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium have partnered to launch a fellowship initiative for 12 law students to spend nine months working to end…

As the legal profession continues to transform and evolve, how can a law firm or legal department be “future ready”? What are the characteristics that define future-ready organizations and foretell their continued success?

Just out from Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is its 2021 Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report, documenting the top trends affecting…

New findings show that law firms that piloted the Mansfield Rule have grown the racial and ethnic diversity of their leadership by more than 30 times the rate of other firms. These firms have also exceeded the norm in the rates at which racially diverse lawyers progressed into partnership and at which women lawyers…