Inside Claude for Legal: Anthropic's Mark Pike on AI's Next Frontier in Law

LexisNexis CTO Greg Dickason On Building Legal AI In Real Time with Customers in Its New Innovation Lab

This week, LexisNexis announced the opening [https://www.lawnext.com/2026/08/lexisnexis-opens-customer-innovation-lab-in-new-york-to-bring-customers-engineers-and-ai-companies-together-to-build-legal-ai-in-real-time.html] of its Customer Innovation Lab [https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/customer-innovation-lab.page] in New York City — a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Amazon Web Services sit in the same room and build legal AI together, in real time. The company is calling it a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped: Instead of developing products internally and asking customers to validate them afterward, customers bring their pain points into the lab, engineers code against them on the spot, and prototypes that pass muster can move into Lexis+ with Protégé in a matter of weeks. Our guest today is the person leading that effort: Greg Dickason [https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/about-us/leadership/global-leadership/greg-dickason.page], chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Dickason joined LexisNexis in 2019 and previously ran the company's Asia-Pacific business, where he launched Lexis+ AI in that region. Before LexisNexis, he was chief technology officer at CoreLogic. In a conversation with host Bob Ambrogi recorded just ahead of the launch, Dickason explains what actually happens inside the lab as engineers code live alongside customers, and how this differs from the customer input LexisNexis has always said drives its product development. They also discuss what has already come out of the lab, including a multimedia Protégé Vault that lets a lawyer query a video deposition; why legal drafting is the lab's first priority; and how Dickason sees agents reshaping legal work. 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). * CosmoLex [https://rebrand.ly/CosmoLex-LNP], helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. * Ajax [https://rebrand.ly/AJAX-LNP], the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

SurePoint's New CEO Jeff Steinberg on the Mandate for Change

SurePoint Technologies [https://surepoint.com/], a company that provides practice-management, finance and growth technology products for mid-sized law firms, named Jeff Steinberg [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyhsteinberg/] its chief executive officer on July 23, elevating Eric Thurston [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericthurston/], who had led the company since 2023, to executive chairman. Two weeks into the job, Steinberg joins LawNext to speak with host Bob Ambrogi about what his appointment means for the company's customers. His answer to that question is direct: This is a mandate for change, not business as usual. Steinberg is candid that SurePoint still has integration work ahead of it after acquiring four companies in four years — Coyote Analytics and ContactEase in 2022, Leopard Solutions in 2024, and ZenCase in 2025 — and he says the company will keep looking at acquisitions while it does that work. Steinberg is no stranger to legal technology. He founded Redwood Analytics in 2000, an early innovator in helping law firms use their own data to understand their profitability, and sold the company to LexisNexis in 2008 (which then sold it to Aderant in 2014). He spent the years since in medical records retrieval for litigation and in other sectors, and served as a senior advisor to Aquiline Capital Partners, the private equity firm backing SurePoint. He arrives at a company whose roots go back to 1982. Among the topics Jeff discusses: * Why he distinguishes between machine learning and generative AI when it comes to developing systems firms need to trust completely. * What he is hearing in his early conversations with customers about AI adoption. * How SurePoint decides whether to build, buy, or partner. * Why he thinks the mid-sized firm market has proven more resilient than many had predicted. * The three priorities he has set for his first year. For an interview with outgoing CEO Thurston, see: On LawNext: SurePoint CEO Eric Thurston on Acquiring ZenCase and His Vision for Mid-Market Practice Management [https://www.lawnext.com/2025/03/on-lawnext-surepoint-ceo-eric-thurston-on-acquiring-zencase-and-his-vision-for-mid-market-practice-management.html]. 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). * CosmoLex [https://rebrand.ly/CosmoLex-LNP], helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. * Ajax [https://rebrand.ly/AJAX-LNP], the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Product to Practice: Why Casetext's Former CTO Has Started An AI Native Law Firm

As chief technology officer at Casetext, Ryan Walker [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwalkerdata/] helped build CoCounsel, one of the first and most consequential generative AI legal assistants — a product so significant it led to the company's $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters [https://www.lawnext.com/2023/06/the-rumors-were-true-thomson-reuters-acquires-casetext-for-650m-cash.html]. But Walker came away unsatisfied. Although the legal tech tools kept getting better, he believed, clients were seeing no benefit. Billing rates kept climbing and the efficiency gains never reached them. That spurred him to pivot from building products to forming a practice — General Legal [https://general.legal/], an AI-native law firm he cofounded and leads as CEO, built on the premise that the fastest path to transforming legal services is not retrofitting AI onto traditional firms, but rebuilding the law firm from the ground up on an AI-forward foundation. Just six months out of Y Combinator, the firm has some 400 clients, a newly launched venture financing practice, and, in what may be a first for a law firm, an MCP server that lets clients' AI agents engage the firm directly. In this episode of LawNext, Walker — not a lawyer but a PhD mathematician — tells host Bob Ambrogi why he believes AI can now automate 95% of routine legal work, how the management services organization structure allows an investable technology company to operate alongside a law firm, and why an AI-native firm paradoxically depends on hiring highly experienced lawyers rather than supercharging junior ones. He also explains the "second brain" approach that lets the firm's work product reflect each client's strategy, what earlier failed innovators like Atrium and Clearspire got wrong, and why he thinks the real reckoning will come when major clients simply refuse to pay for work AI can do. Walker cofounded the firm along with two other Casetext colleagues, Javed Qadrud-Din [https://www.linkedin.com/in/javed-qadrud-din/], who was head of AI at Casetext and is now General Legal's chief technology officer, and J.P. Mohler [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jp-mohler/], who was an LLM engineer at Casetext and is now chief product officer and managing partner. Their ultimate ambition, Walker says, is to make General Legal the biggest provider of legal services in the world and, along the way, to break the scarcity model that keeps legal help out of reach for the people and companies who need it. 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). * CosmoLex [https://rebrand.ly/CosmoLex-LNP], helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. * Ajax [https://rebrand.ly/AJAX-LNP], the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Law Democratized: Renee Knake Jefferson on Her Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis

Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis [https://amzn.to/451oKyK]. But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice? That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to Renee Knake Jefferson [https://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/main.asp?PID=5141] at the start of today's conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work sits at the intersection of legal ethics, judicial ethics, lawyer regulation, legal education and access to justice. She is also the coauthor of the acclaimed book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court [https://amzn.to/3RejPHr], an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. In 2013, the ABA Journal named her a Legal Rebel [https://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/2013_legal_rebel_profile_renee_knake] for co-founding the ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State together with Daniel Martin Katz [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-katz-3b001539/]. More recently, she was elected to the American Bar Association's Council for the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, the body responsible for accrediting J.D. programs — so, as she puts it, she's gone from offering constructive criticism from the outside to working on the inside In her "spare time" (as if she possibly has any), she writes the Substack newsletter Legal Ethics Roundup [https://legalethics.substack.com/], a weekly review of all things related to legal and judicial ethics. In today's conversation, Renee and Bob talk in depth about the access to justice crisis and what can be done to narrow the justice gap, including why the biggest barrier to legal help may be that people do not even recognize they have a legal problem. They also discuss the promise and peril of AI as a tool for closing the justice gap, why regulatory reform has not produced the domino effect many once predicted, and what lawyers, law schools, regulators and innovators can each do to move the needle. Spoiler alert: Jefferson remains a glass-half-full optimist — and by the end of this conversation, you may be too. 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). * CosmoLex [https://rebrand.ly/CosmoLex-LNP], helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. * Ajax [https://rebrand.ly/AJAX-LNP], the AI timekeeper lawyers want to use. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Inside Claude for Legal: Anthropic's Mark Pike on AI's Next Frontier in Law

When Anthropic launched Claude for Legal in May – more than 20 MCP connectors and a dozen practice-area plugins built specifically for legal work – it marked the company's biggest and most explicit commitment yet to the legal industry. It also reignited a debate that's been simmering since Anthropic's first legal plugin briefly rattled the stock prices of Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer back in January: Is Anthropic's entry into the legal market a major step forward for legal productivity? Or is it a threat to trust, governance and the existing legal-tech infrastructure? In today's episode, Mark Pike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markpike/], associate general counsel at Anthropic and product lead for Claude for Legal, joins host Bob Ambrogi to share the inside story of Claude for Legal and his own unconventional path into leading its development. Pike, who went from Facebook to Slack to building internal tools for Anthropic's own legal team, talks about how that work turned into a product that has ignited both excitement and concern throughout the global legal industry. Among the topics they discuss: * Why Anthropic decided legal deserved its own dedicated launch, and why now. * What plugins, skills, connectors, cookbooks and agents actually mean in plain English. * Why lawyers have become Claude's most active power users. * Anthropic's decision to partner, rather than compete, with major legal tech vendors such as Thomson Reuters. * How Anthropic thinks about human oversight and professional responsibility. * Confidentiality, data training policies, and what firms need to know before adopting these tools. * Anthropic's commitment to access to justice. * What Claude for Legal might look like a year from now. Whether you're excited about what this technology could mean for legal innovation, wary of what it means for the future of legal work, or just have questions about how it all works, this conversation offers insights. Background links: * Announcement: Claude for the Legal Industry [https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry]. * Webinar: How Legal Teams Put Claude to Work [https://www.anthropic.com/webinars/how-legal-teams-put-claude-to-work]. * Claude for Legal Github Repo [https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal]. * LawSites: Anthropic Goes All-In on Legal, Releasing More Than 20 Connectors and 12 Practice-Area Plugins for Claude [https://www.lawnext.com/2026/05/anthropic-goes-all-in-on-legal-releasing-more-than-20-connectors-and-12-practice-area-plugins-for-claude.html]. 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). * CosmoLex [https://rebrand.ly/CosmoLex-LNP], helping law firms manage their entire practice in one platform, from intake to payment. Try it free. If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.