Jim Sandman may be one of the most impassioned advocates in the United States for ensuring access to justice for all. As president of the Legal Services Corporation since 2011, he oversees an organization that funds free civil legal services to more than 130 legal aid programs throughout the country. As a…

Over the last couple weeks, I have read and reread hundreds of posts from legal blogs. My reason for doing this was to screen the entries submitted in the inaugural LexBlog Excellence Awards contest, before sending the finalists off to the judging panel that will select the winners.

In reading through all…

In September, we announced a new awards competition for legal blogs — the inaugural LexBlog Excellence Awards, designed to honor exemplary writing on legal blogs — and we issued a call for entries.

We said then that we would announce the winners on Dec. 9. As many of you have noticed and asked about, that…

The two legal research companies Fastcase and Casemaker have settled their three-year legal battle over Casemaker’s claims of copyright in Georgia administrative regulations.

In federal court in Atlanta, the two companies jointly filed a stipulated dismissal of the matter. The request did not not reveal the terms of the settlement, but the dismissal was “with…

Jeroen Plink was named in 2018 as CEO of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions, a subsidiary of the international law firm Clifford Chance that designs and develops software to address clients’ business challenges. He is responsible for product development and go-to-market strategy for all its products, including CC Dr@ft, a legal document automation platform.

Plink…

The results are in — all 38,715 of them. Readers have been voting to select the 15 legal technology startups that will get to participate in the fourth-annual Startup Alley at the American Bar Association’s TECHSHOW conference, which is Feb. 26 to 29, 2020, in Chicago.  Voting ended Friday night and now we are…

Few would argue with the proposition that law firm hiring is dysfunctional. Firms place too much weight on prospects’ grades and schools’ prestige, pay new hires exorbitant salaries that require billing them out at rates that exceed their experience, provide inadequate training and mentoring, and struggle to achieve diversity.

A new startup aims to upend…

Friday is the last day to cast your vote to select the 15 legal technology startups that will participate in the fourth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2020. The 15 companies will face off in a pitch competition on TECHSHOW’s opening night and be featured as exhibitors in a special portion of the conference’s exhibition hall.…

In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone famously said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

That line came into my head when I was briefed last week on news being announced this morning of a unique partnership between two competing legal research companies, Fastcase and ROSS Intelligence, to share content and…

Nicholas (Nik) Reed was two months out of Stanford Law School when he and classmate Daniel Lewis cofounded the legal research company Ravel Law. Becoming its COO, he helped drive its growth.

When LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, he became vice president of product strategy, playing a lead role in…

When it rains it pours. Earlier today, I wrote about adoption of the duty of technology competence by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Now comes word of another U.S. state adopting the duty, bringing the total number of states to 38.

The latest is South Carolina, where on the day before…

Ever since 2012, when the American Bar Association amended the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to include a duty of technology competence, adoption has spread across the United States, with 37 states having now formally adopted some version of Model Rule 1.1, Comment 8.

But the U.S. is not alone in considering lawyers’ duty…