Ep 238: Thomson Reuters’ AI Strategy for Legal, with Mike Dahn, Head of Westlaw, and Joel Hron, Head of AI

The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.

With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them -- legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance. 

One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality. 

On today’s episode, we’ll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer:

• Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation.

• Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.

• Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America. 

One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules. 

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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.

• Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

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Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry’s first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product.

At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr’s cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections.

Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.

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.

• Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

• Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

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On this episode of LawNext: A conversation about Thomson Reuters’ strategy around generative artificial intelligence with two of the executives most directly responsible for its development and implementation. 

In a year dominated by discussion of generative AI and its potential impact on the legal profession, Thomson Reuters has played a leading role. It started in June, when the company announced its $650 million acquisition of the legal research and AI company Casetext and the CoCounsel generative AI tool Casetext had developed in collaboration with OpenAI.  

Then, in November, Thomson Reuters made good on its promise to integrate generative AI within its flagship legal research platform, introducing AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision. Soon after that, it rolled out generative AI within Practical Law, its legal know-how product.

What does this all mean for legal research and legal software, now and into the future? Today we go deep into TR’s AI development with two of the company’s leaders in this area: 

• Mike Dahn, senior vice president and head of Westlaw product management. 

• Joel Hron, head of artificial intelligence and TR Labs.

We talk about the development of AI Assisted Research in Westlaw Precision, the company’s broader AI product strategy, its acquisition of CoCounsel and where that fits in its AI strategy, how the company is protecting against hallucinations and ensuring security, and the future of AI at Thomson Reuters and more broadly. 

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.

• Noodle: automate all of your practice's admin work, while you focus on growing your business without increasing headcount.

• Sharefile for Legal: Securely send, store, and share files – plus discover document workflows designed to improve your client experience

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035. 

In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebecca Sandefur, one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice (who was on LawNext in 2020); Matthew Burnett, senior program officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF); Jim Sandman, president emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (on LawNext in 2019); and other notable names. 

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nikole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice. Before starting there in November, Nelson had been executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation, where she was instrumental in launching a statewide community justice worker project that won the 2019 World Justice Challenge. She was also instrumental in bringing about an Alaska Supreme Court rule change in 2022 allowing justice workers supervised by Alaska Legal Services to provide limited scope legal help in certain situations. 

Nelson describes how justice workers helped Alaska Legal Services better serve the legal problems of people across the state’s remotest regions, and how new models of justice workers in other states could similarly help reach those who are not now receiving adequate help for their legal problems. She also recognizes that Frontline Justice faces obstacles in achieving its mission, and she shares her thoughts on how it can overcome them. 

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.

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At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap. 

Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC’s first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab’s advisory board. 

Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today’s episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab. 

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.

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One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice, and since joining the AAA, she is credited with having “supercharged” its innovation efforts – particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI. 

Also critical to those innovation efforts has been Diana Didia, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at the AAA, who had helped ignite the association’s innovation efforts well before McCormack arrived and whose work not only set the stage for continued innovation but has been critical in helping the organization drive forward into embracing generative AI. 

Our guests on today’s LawNext, McCormack and Didia – along with many others on their team – have been working full bore over the past year to drive further innovation at the AAA and to integrate AI into its own work and into the broader field of dispute resolution. They recently launched the AAAi Lab, a website supporting AAA users, arbitrators, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI, and also ClauseBuilder, a generative AI tool for writing clear and effective ADR clauses. 

When we spoke, they were preparing to present this week on the AAA’s innovation efforts and its adoption of AI as part of a panel at Legalweek in New York. 

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.

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking” 

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At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?

This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district from using third-party service providers such as PacerPro, RECAP or DocketBird. That order came on the heels of a memorandum from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that – while it didn’t outright ban the use of such service providers – it did urge courts to warn filers to be cautious about using third-party services and software.

Were these actions justified? Is there reason to be concerned about third-party providers? And what exactly is the best way to protect sealed documents? 

To answer these questions, the legal tech company PacerPro brought together a panel of experts for a live program presented during the annual meeting of the National Docketing Association in Boston in October. On the panel were: 

• Josh Blandi, CEO and cofounder of UniCourt. 

• Sara Collins, vice president of product management, File & ServeXpress. 

• Gavin McGrane, cofounder of PacerPro. 

• Snorri Ogata, chief technology officer at Tech Unicorn and formerly chief information officer at the Los Angeles Superior court and, before that, at the Orange County Superior Court, two of the largest court systems in the United States.. 

I moderated the panel and recorded it for this podcast. Thanks to the panelists, the NDA, and PacerPro for allowing me to do that. 

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.

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking” 

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In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he and his team decided to build the solution they needed for themselves. 

By 2018, they had dubbed the software ZenCase, and in 2021, after continuing to develop and refine it, they migrated their first 50-plus user law firm onto the platform and officially launched it commercially to the legal market at large.

On today’s LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Fraser, who is now the CEO of ZenCase, and Olivia Mockel, its president and COO. Mockel recently moved to ZenCase after several years in leadership roles at other practice management companies, including most recently as CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis.

So what makes ZenCase different from other practice management platforms and what types of law firms is it suited for? In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Fraser and Mockel about all that and more, including how they are incorporating generative AI and their plans for future development. 

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.

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking” 

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley, who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter, and Ilona Logvinova, managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.

Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference in New York City, sharing their views and insights on innovation from their unique perspectives. Shortly after they spoke, they sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record this conversation about innovation in legal. 

Note that since we recorded this conversation, Dooley has left Goodwin Procter.

This is the third LawNext episode featuring conversations recorded at the conference. To listen to the prior two, check out:

• Two KM Keynotes – Andrea Alliston, KM Leader At Fasken, and Mark Smolik, GC at DHL, On Disruption and Innovation in Legal, in which we spoke with the conference’s two keynote speakers. 

• The Founders of Two Legal Tech Startups: Nicole Clark of Trellis and Kevin Walker and Bryan Davis of Centari, featuring interviews with two of the startups that attended the conference. 

The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. 

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.

• DocReviewPad, the easy-to-use app to review, organize issue code, and produce documents

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking” 

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City. 

First up is Nicole Clark, cofounder and CEO of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in January 2002.) Then, in the second part of the show, we speak with the cofounders of Centari, an AI-powered knowledge management and dealmaking platform, Kevin Walker, the company’s CEO, and Bryan Gilbert Davis, its CTO. 

LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and recorded both of these interviews live there, where both of these companies were sponsors and exhibitors. The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company. 

For more from the conference, check out the last episode of LawNext, which featured interviews with the two keynote speakers from that conference: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL. 

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.

• TranscriptPad, an easy-to-use app to review, search, and annotate transcripts

• CARET serves over 10,000 firms with practice management and document automation technology to enable savvy professionals to refocus their expertise on what truly matters.

• Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the "one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking" 

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.