LawNext

Monica Zent is a true pioneer in legal innovation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of ZentLaw, an award-winning alternative legal services provider that broke the traditional law firm mold when she founded it in 2002. ZentLaw has since grown into a nationwide legal services provider, serving global brands and major corporations with a unique subscription-based model and flexible talent approach.  But Monica's entrepreneurial journey extends well beyond ZentLaw. She's a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including early internet startups in the 1990s. She's a patented inventor, legal tech founder, angel investor, and advisor to numerous startups. In fact, Monica describes herself as having a "career portfolio" – she's an entrepreneur who has carved her own path through the legal industry and beyond. Her latest venture is the Law Innovation Agency, a collective that brings together a think tank component, consulting services, and investment connections to help organizations navigate the rapidly changing landscape of legal technology and AI.  Throughout her career, Zent has been a strong advocate for innovation, efficiency, and diversity in the legal profession. Her articles on legal innovation, women in technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership have appeared in publications like Inc. Magazine, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Huffington Post, and she has won numerous awards, including Corporate Counsel’s Women, Influence & Power in the Law Award in the Innovative Leadership category On today’s show, Monica joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her entrepreneurial journey and her vision for the future of legal services and legal innovation.    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 [https://joinparadigm.com/], home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther [https://www.practicepanther.com/], Bill4Time [https://www.bill4time.com/], MerusCase [https://meruscase.com/] and LollyLaw [https://www.lollylaw.com/]; the e-payments platform Headnote [https://headnote.com/]; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks [https://trustbooks.com/]. * Briefpoint [https://rebrand.ly/briefpoint-lawnext-podcast], eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). * SpeakWrite [https://rebrand.ly/SpeakWrite-LNP]: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice *   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

On May 5, 2025, PERSUIT [https://www.persuit.com/], a technology company that specializes in helping corporate legal departments select and manage outside counsel, announced that it had acquired Apperio [https://www.apperio.com/], a spend-management platform for corporate legal, in a move designed to create an end-to-end workflow solution spanning everything from matter intake to invoice payment.   “This acquisition accelerates our ability to connect every point in the outside counsel workflow with intelligence,” Jim Delkousis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-delkousis/], cofounder and CEO of PERSUIT, said at the time. “We’re not just managing spend — we’re turning it into performance.”   This week on LawNext, Delkousis joins host Bob Ambrogi to share his vision for PERSUIT and why he believes the Apperio acquisition brings “superpowers” that will help propel the company further forward in realizing that vision. The episode was recorded on the day PERSUIT announced the acquisition.  Before founding PERSUIT nearly nine years ago, Delkousis had an accomplished career as a litigation attorney, serving as a partner at King & Wood Mallesons in Australia and later helping establish DLA Piper's Middle East practice in Dubai. In the conversation, he will discuss how his experience on the law firm side informed his mission to shift the legal industry from time-based to value-based fee arrangements. He will also talk about the strategic vision behind the Apperio acquisition and how generative AI is accelerating the evolution of legal service delivery.   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 [https://joinparadigm.com/], home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther [https://www.practicepanther.com/], Bill4Time [https://www.bill4time.com/], MerusCase [https://meruscase.com/] and LollyLaw [https://www.lollylaw.com/]; the e-payments platform Headnote [https://headnote.com/]; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks [https://trustbooks.com/]. * Briefpoint [https://rebrand.ly/briefpoint-lawnext-podcast], eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). * SpeakWrite [https://rebrand.ly/SpeakWrite-LNP]: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice *   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

"Everybody understands the world is volatile, but they don't necessarily understand why it's volatile or how to deal with it," says Sean West, cofounder of Hence Technologies [https://hence.ai/] and author of the new book, Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business [https://amzn.to/3RDGGsG]. "Unruly is a play on words. ... The world is kind of ‘unruling.’ The rules and norms that were developed during globalization are falling away." On this week’s LawNext, West joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss how the collision of geopolitics, technology, and legal shifts is creating unprecedented challenges for businesses of all sizes – and their legal advisors. Their conversation explores how businesses can turn volatility into opportunity, the importance of strategic legal counsel in this environment, and why companies of all sizes need access to geopolitical intelligence. They also discuss Hence’s recent launch [https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-powered-platform-launches-to-help-companies-and-their-counsel-navigate-global-geopolitical-risks.html] of Hence Global [https://hence.ai/], an AI-powered platform designed to help businesses and their legal counsel manage geopolitical uncertainties by providing customized, real-time risk analysis and insights tailored to specific business roles and needs. West explains how the platform delivers personalized, role-specific intelligence that enables legal teams to better serve their clients and organizations in an increasingly uncertain world. Before cofounding Hence in 2020, West was global deputy CEO of Eurasia Group, a global affairs advisory firm, where he advised CEOs, general counsel and investors on geopolitical and legal risk. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, School of 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 [https://joinparadigm.com/], home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther [https://www.practicepanther.com/], Bill4Time [https://www.bill4time.com/], MerusCase [https://meruscase.com/] and LollyLaw [https://www.lollylaw.com/]; the e-payments platform Headnote [https://headnote.com/]; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks [https://trustbooks.com/]. * Briefpoint [https://rebrand.ly/briefpoint-lawnext-podcast], eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). * SpeakWrite [https://rebrand.ly/SpeakWrite-LNP]: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

LawDroid Founder Tom Martin on Building, Teaching and Advising About AI for Legal If you follow legal tech at all, you would be justified in suspecting that Tom Martin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasgmartin/] has figured out how to use artificial intelligence to clone himself.  While running LawDroid [https://lawdroid.com/], his legal tech company, the Vancouver-based Martin also still manages a law practice in California, oversees an annual legal tech awards program, teaches a law school course on generative AI, runs an annual AI conference, hosts a podcast, and recently launched a legal tech consultancy. In January 2023, less than two months after ChatGPT first launched, Martin’s company was one of the first to launch a gen AI assistant specifically for lawyers, called LawDroid Copilot. He has since also launched LawDroid Builder, a no-code platform for creating custom AI agents.  Beyond his work at LawDroid, Martin is an adjunct professor at Suffolk Law School, teaching "Generative AI and the Delivery of Legal Services," and is a co-founder of the American Legal Technology Awards [https://americanlegaltechnology.com/], which will be holding its sixth annual ceremony this October in Boston. In today's conversation, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi speaks with Martin about his journey from practicing lawyer to legal tech founder, his perspective on how gen AI is transforming the legal profession, and his insights on implementing AI in law firms and legal aid organizations.   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 [https://joinparadigm.com/], home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther [https://www.practicepanther.com/], Bill4Time [https://www.bill4time.com/], MerusCase [https://meruscase.com/] and LollyLaw [https://www.lollylaw.com/]; the e-payments platform Headnote [https://headnote.com/]; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks [https://trustbooks.com/]. * Briefpoint [https://rebrand.ly/briefpoint-lawnext-podcast], eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). * SpeakWrite [https://rebrand.ly/SpeakWrite-LNP]: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

In the gold rush of generative AI, it seems that every legal tech vendor wants to be a one-stop shop for legal technology. But after 15 years of developing legal tech, Nik Reed [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-nik-reed-b523b0/], CEO of Knowable [https://www.knowable.com/], a legal technology company devoted to helping enterprises bring order and organization to their executed agreements, believes that lawyers should be wary of the hype. Often, the most successful AI solutions are those that focus on solving specific problems exceptionally well rather than attempting to be all things to all lawyers.  On today’s LawNext, Reed joins host Bob Ambrogi for a conversation that explores what makes legal AI actually work well in practice. It is a topic he has been thinking about, in one form or another, since he was still a student at Stanford Law School, where he co-founded the legal research startup Ravel with classmate Daniel Lewis in 2012. After LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, Reed moved into strategic product management there, and then joined Knowable in 2019 to lead its product research and development. He became the company’s CEO last November, just as the company launched Ask Knowable, its generative AI suite.  In a conversation that explores what makes legal AI actually work in practice, Reed emphasizes the critical importance of pristine data environments, high-quality metadata, and clearly defined use cases. “It's still hard to build really good products, especially for lawyers, and it takes a lot of hard work,” Reed says. “ And anyone that's telling you that that's not the truth is probably already a product that you shouldn't be using.” But ultimately, he believes, AI has the potential to restore balance to legal practice by handling the rote work lawyers never wanted to do, allowing them to return to what they went to law school for – critical reasoning and solving complex problems. 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 [https://joinparadigm.com/], home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther [https://www.practicepanther.com/], Bill4Time [https://www.bill4time.com/], MerusCase [https://meruscase.com/] and LollyLaw [https://www.lollylaw.com/]; the e-payments platform Headnote [https://headnote.com/]; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks [https://trustbooks.com/]. * LEX Reception, [https://rebrand.ly/LexReception-LawNext-Podcast] Never miss a call, with expert answering service for Lawyers. * Briefpoint [https://rebrand.ly/briefpoint-lawnext-podcast], eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner). * SpeakWrite [https://rebrand.ly/SpeakWrite-LNP]: Save time with fast, human-powered legal transcription—so you can focus on your practice   If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.