LawNext

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders and opinions, and for its RECAP suite, which is the largest free collection on the internet of court filings and dockets.

But there is a lot more to the Free Law Project, as you will hear from our guest on today’s episode, Michael Lissner, the Free Law Project’s cofounder, executive director, and chief technology officer. Lissner started the Free Law Project while earning his master’s degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, with the assistance of cofounder Brian Carver, who was then an assistant professor at the school and who is now copyright counsel at Google.

Since then, the Free Law Project has expanded into a multifaceted source of legal data and tools, all with the goals of providing free access to legal materials and developing technology to enhance legal research and innovation.

The Free Law Project’s data also supports a range of academic research and investigative journalism, including having provided data that fueled the recent Pulitzer Prize awarded to news organization ProPublica for its reporting on the financial conflicts of Supreme Court justices.

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.

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

March 1 marked the culmination of an ambitious and audacious project to digitize and provide free and open access to all official court decisions ever published in the United States. Called the Caselaw Access Project, it came about, starting in 2015, through an unusual partnership between Harvard Law School and a Silicon Valley-based legal research startup called Ravel Law.

The massive undertaking involved scanning nearly 40 million pages from some 40,000 law books and converting it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases, some dating as far back as 1658. While Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab did all the work, Ravel — and later LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel in 2017 — footed the bill.

Harvard completed that digitization in 2018, making those cases available for free to the general public, but until March 1, 2024, any commercial use of the cases was restricted by the agreement between Harvard and Ravel (and later LexisNexis). The March 1 milestone marked the full release of the cases, free of any restrictions.

On today’s LawNext, we will get the inside story of the history of the Caselaw Access Project and talk about the significance of this final lifting of all restrictions on the data. How did the partnership ever come about in the first place? What was the scanning process like? What does this data mean for the future of access to law, particularly in the face of generative AI?

To do all of that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three guests who played instrumental roles in the project:

• Daniel Lewis, the cofounder and CEO of Ravel Law, who is now CEO of the contract review company LegalOn.
• Adam Ziegler, the former director of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and the Caselaw Access Project (who recently wrote a first-person account of the project)..
• Jack Cushman, the current director of the Library Innovation Lab.

Nik Reed, the cofounder and COO of Ravel Law, and now senior vice president of product, R&D and design at Knowable, was also scheduled to be on the show, but had to cancel as of the recording time.

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.

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

Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five “cluster projects” that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact.

The students – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today’s LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work:

• Whitney Triplet, who is in her final semester at Southern University Law Center.
• Paul Campbell, a part-time student in his fourth year at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.

Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.

In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes:

• On LawNext Podcast: Two Law Students Who Took On Systemic Racism in the Legal System.
• On LawNext Podcast: The Legal Fellows Tackling Systemic Racism in Law.

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.

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

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.

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.

As generative AI sweeps through the legal profession, lawyers face challenges in learning to use it responsibly and properly. This summer, one of the world’s largest law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, began to address that challenge by partnering with the legal skills training company AltaClaro to develop a training program for its summer associates on prompt engineering and the responsible use of generative AI.

On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Abdi Shayesteh, the founder and CEO of AltaClaro, a company that takes a unique experiential approach to lawyer training. They talk about the genesis and development of that AI training program, and what it covers. Shayesteh also provides an update on the company’s growth and development since he was last on this podcast in January 2021 – a period during which the company raised a seed financing round of $2.5 million and substantially expanded its menu of course modules.

When Shaesteh, a serial entrepreneur who became a lawyer, saw how poorly prepared new associates were to practice law, he began to research education science and came up with the concept for AltaClaro. Today, its customers include law firms who use it to train associates and individual lawyers seeking to develop and enhance their skills in areas such as drafting contracts, handling M&A transactions, or closing a commercial loan deal.

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.
• Universal Migrator, the easiest way to move your firm’s data and documents from one app to another.
• Trial Pad, an easy-to-use app to organize, annotate, and present evidence

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