Version Up

One lawyer’s journey to digitally transform his legal practice. Version Up is a podcast about deploying AI and technology in legal practice. Host Kaj Rozga — a lawyer leading innovation inside a legal team at a Global 500 — cuts through the noise to talk with the practitioners, founders, and operators actually doing the work of rebuilding the practice and business of law for the AI era.Each episode is a practical conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s worth paying attention to. No hype. No sponsored takes. Just an honest dialogue about building and deploying legal technology at law firms and corporate legal departments.For lawyers, innovation leaders, legal ops professionals, founders and investors who want the TL;DR on the state of play in legal tech.| Hosted by Kaj Rozga | Music by Brett Ryback | views my own |

Version Up is a technology podcast hosted by Kaj Rozga, with 33 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Kaj Rozga hosts Version Up, a technology show with 33 episodes published.

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  Episode #34

  How AI Can Strenghten the Lawyer-Client Relationship

  Jul 30, 202644 min

  In this episode of Version Up, I am joined by Melanie Hallas Kirsch, a senior in-house lawyer, for a candid look at her personal journey adapting to generative AI. Mel shares how an everyday practitioner in a high-stakes practice area moves from basic curiosity to active experimentation, navigating the overwhelming flood of new tech tools without losing sight of practical realities. Rather than treating AI as a futuristic silver bullet, Mel breaks down how her perspective on legal technology has evolved, offering an honest look at how corporate attorneys can realistically integrate these tools into their daily work. Mel’s journey with technology began long before the recent generative AI boom, drawing on years of using early AI-like tools such as technology-assisted review (TAR) during large-scale document reviews. As general purpose and legal-specific AI tools came into being, she adopted a deliberate strategy to deploying them in her practice. A key highlight of Mel’s journey is her realization that senior legal experience acts as a crucial superpower when adopting AI. Because senior lawyers possess deep practice intuition and can instantly spot when an output fails the "smell test," they can use these tools safely as drafting assistants or advanced search engines. Successful adoption requires changing one's mindset to actively question and push back on the tool rather than accepting its first output. Learning how to leverage AI hasn’t come from generic, click-through corporate webinars, but from continuous self-education—listening to podcasts during long commutes, exchanging practical tips with peers, and taking time to experiment hands-on. In her day-to-day practice, Mel’s biggest productivity gains have come not from chasing niche legal software, but from personalizing general-purpose and off-the-shelf legal AI tools to match her personal workflow. She also openly shares her ongoing experiments and friction points—from attempting to build custom multi-step workflow agents to navigating data connectivity, security boundaries, and information siloing. On how AI will impact the client-attorney relationship, Mel offers a grounded framing. She explains how law firms will continue to do work for corporate clients, but that will move up the value chain to higher-stakes and higher-judgment work. She also outlines the ways that AI can strengthen the client-attorney relationship, whether it's a law firm and their client or an in-house lawyer and their business colleagues within a corporate. Ultimately, Mel’s journey offers a grounded perspective: while AI is an incredible aid for streamlining repeatable work and research, human judgment, risk tolerance, and client relationships remain the true core of legal practice. https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-hallas-kirsch/

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  Episode #33

  Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers for an AI-Disrupted Legal Market

  Jul 24, 202639 min

  In this episode, I sit down with Professor Kipp Coddington from the University of Wyoming College of Law to discuss how legal education is adapting to the age of AI and what skills tomorrow's lawyers will need to succeed. Kipp teaches an innovative course on AI and Internet Law that combines substantive legal issues with hands-on technology training. Students are expected to use AI throughout the course, experiment with tools such as Gemini Notebook, complete programming exercises, and analyze the legal, policy, and technical challenges emerging from AI adoption. His view is straightforward: lawyers do not need to become software engineers, but they do need to understand and embrace the technologies that are increasingly shaping legal practice. A major theme of our conversation is the debate taking place across legal education about how much AI students should be allowed to use. Kipp argues that law schools are trying to strike a balance between exposing students to transformative technology and preserving the critical thinking, reasoning, and judgment that legal education has always sought to develop. In his view, the goal is not to outsource thinking to machines but to teach students how to use AI responsibly while continuing to strengthen their own "wet neural network" through rigorous analysis and problem solving. What stood out most from the discussion was Kipp's experience teaching students in an AI-enabled environment. Despite concerns that generative AI might make student work more generic or less original, he observed the opposite. In a class assignment where students used AI tools to develop presentations on emerging legal issues, students brought a unique perspective, resulting in a surprisingly diverse range of topics and insights. Rather than producing forty versions of the same answer, students explored issues ranging from healthcare data and privacy to international AI regulation and business risk. Their own judgment, creativity, interests, and experiences shaped the output. That observation led to one of the most important takeaways of the episode: even in an AI-powered world, junior lawyers and law students continue to create value through their perspective. A student or first-year lawyer may not have decades of legal expertise, but they can bring fresh thinking, creativity, problem-solving ability, and a unique lens to legal challenges. AI can accelerate execution, but it does not replace the human judgment that helps lawyers identify risks, generate insights, and develop novel solutions. We also explored what skills law schools should be emphasizing in this environment. Kipp believes the most important traits are not technical. Instead, he highlighted humility, effective listening, empathy, intellectual curiosity, sound judgment, and the ability to operate in legal gray areas. Lawyers are fundamentally risk managers and counselors. They rarely provide simple yes-or-no answers. Their role is to help clients understand risk, evaluate alternatives, and chart a path forward. Those skills become even more important in a world where AI can generate answers but cannot fully replace professional judgment. The conversation also touched on how AI is changing teaching and assessment. Traditional take-home assignments and research papers present new challenges because of the ease with which AI can generate written work. Kipp discussed emerging approaches such as oral defenses, in-person examinations, and more interactive evaluation methods designed to ensure students truly understand the material. While these challenges are real, he remains confident that legal education can adapt and continue to identify and develop talent. Perhaps most striking was Kipp's optimism about the future. While acknowledging that some traditional legal business models may come under pressure, he sees a lot of opportunity for lawyers who embrace technology. He pointed to growing demand for professionals who understand both law and technology, including opportunities within AI companies themselves. Just as the internet created entirely new career paths for lawyers, he believes AI will create new roles, new industries, and new ways for legally trained professionals to add value. If you're a law student, young lawyer, legal educator, or anyone interested in the future of the profession, this conversation offers a thoughtful and optimistic perspective on how legal education can evolve while staying rooted in the timeless fundamentals of legal practice. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kipp-coddington/

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  Episode #32

  The Client-First Approach to AI Adoption at Law Firms

  Jun 30, 202645 min

  Denisa Kopandi, a senior associate at a leading Romanian law firm, joins to talk about LegalTechTalk 2026. The conversation quickly turns into an exploration of what it means for law firms to prepare for changes to the legal market caused by AI. One key takeaway for me: one of the first steps for law firms looking to prepare for AI's impact on their business is to understand what their clients are doing to deploy AI and what it means for their needs for outside counsel. So our conversation centers around a question that many law firms are still reluctant to confront: what happens when clients can do more legal work themselves? Denisa shares what she heard from in-house teams that are experimenting with AI, legal operations, and workflow automation. We discuss how legal advice may need to evolve from lengthy memos into clearer rules, decision trees, and systems that can be embedded into business processes and AI agents. Along the way, we dig into the risks of that approach, including whether traditional legal advice translates effectively into AI-driven environments and who bears responsibility when it doesn't. We also talk about how lawyers can move up the value chain. Rather than seeing AI as a threat, Denisa argues that it creates an opportunity for lawyers to become more strategic advisors—helping clients shape decisions before problems arise rather than drafting documents after the fact. In terms of the mechanics, one important insight that Denisa shares is that you don't need everyone to become a power user. A few motivated individuals can do a lot to cause the entire team to level up. This should be encouraging news for anyone unsure how to get from a "cold start" to an AI sprint. Another major theme is the future of legal training. It's a topic that is critical to the long-term sustainability of achieving an AI transformation at any legal enterprise. If AI takes over some of the work traditionally performed by junior associates, how do young lawyers develop judgment? Denisa offers a candid view from someone who is actively training junior lawyers today and explains why spotting AI mistakes may be more difficult than many people realize. Denisa Kopandi | LinkedIn Finally, we discuss the billable hour, law firm economics, and whether AI will push firms toward new service models that better reflect the value lawyers create for clients. This was a thoughtful conversation about client service, legal training, and the changing role of outside counsel. More than a discussion about technology, it's a discussion about how lawyers can stay relevant—and valuable—as their clients become increasingly sophisticated users of AI.

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  Episode #30

  Commitment Over Curiosity: The Real Drivers of AI Transformation at Law Firms

  Jun 8, 202650 minS0

  <p >Abhijat (Ab) Saraswat comes on the podcast to address *the* question that is on the minds of law firm innovation leaders: what makes AI transformation stick?</p> <p >On the surface, it looks like everything is going great. Training sessions, positive usage stats, vibe-coded POCs, vendor demos and pilots, some nice publicity on LinkedIn and at conferences. A law firm going AI-native. But underneath the surface progress is stalling. Cultural constraints, capacity limitations, technical debt, ineffective governance -- hidden icebergs are causing the AI transformation to stall out.</p> <p >Ab says that it all comes down to institutional...

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  Episode #29

  The Digital Brain and the Future of Legal Knowledge

  May 13, 202633 minS0

  <p >Jamie Tso and Raymond Sun join for a check-in on Legal Quants, their growing community of elite AI-native lawyers who design and deploy AI in their legal practice. A previous episode covered the origin story. This one ends up mostly being about LQ Brain — their adaptation of the "digital brain" concept, applied not to an individual's knowledge but to the collective intelligence of their entire community.</p> <p >The problem they were solving is simple: 700 to 2,000 WhatsApp messages a week, across a global network of highly technical lawyers, with no good way to preserve what gets figured out. A we...

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