Ep 250: CEO Ross Guberman On How BriefCatch Is Expanding Its Mission to Help Legal Professionals Improve their Writing

06/05/24 • 40 min

This has been a notable year for BriefCatch, a legal technology company devoted to helping legal professionals improve their legal writing. It started nine months ago, with the company’s raise of a $3.5 million seed round, continued with its roll outs of new products and features, and then to its formation of a legal writing advisory panel of judges, advocates and academics.

All of that culminated in BriefCatch’s announcement last week of its hires of three legal tech veterans into key executive roles in marketing, sales and product management, all to help lead it into its next stage of growth and development: Lydia Flocchini as chief marketing officer, Darren Schleicher as chief sales officer, and Kyle Bahr as product manager of AI and other new products.

Ross Guberman, the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is our guest today to discuss the company’s history, growth, recent news, and future plans – which will include the launch of a suite of AI-enabled products. A former practicing lawyer, he was a legal writing coach and speaker when he conceived of BriefCatch, which he formally launched in 2018.

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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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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.

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

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Ep 249: How The Free Law Project Works to Expand Access to Legal Information, with Cofounder Michael Lissner

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.

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.

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

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undefined - Ep 251: Cofounder Jason Tashea on the First Year and Uncertain Future of Georgetown’s First-of-Its-Kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship

Ep 251: Cofounder Jason Tashea on the First Year and Uncertain Future of Georgetown’s First-of-Its-Kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship

Eighteen months ago, the first-of-its-kind Judicial Innovation Fellowship launched with the mission of embedding experienced technologists and designers within state, local, and tribal courts to develop technology-based solutions to improve the public’s access to justice. Housed within the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the program was designed to be a catalyst for innovation to enable courts to better serve the legal needs of the public.

In August, the program will wrap up its inaugural cohort, which placed three fellows in courts in Kansas, Tennessee and Utah. But even though those three fellowships were successful, our guest today, Jason Tashea, the program’s founding director and cofounder, says its future is uncertain because its continued funding is uncertain. “These programs are expensive, they are hard to fundraise for,” he says.

In today’s episode, Tashea, an entrepreneur, educator, and award-winning journalist, joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the need for and genesis of the program, the fellowships it supported this year, and his assessment of the program’s success. He also shares his thoughts more broadly on the need for innovation in the courts to address the gap in access to justice.

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.

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