I am speaking tomorrow on a CLE webinar on the state of legal technology, but the last day to register is today at 3 p.m. ET.
In a program presented by the Massachusetts Bar Association, I am joining Damian Turco, MBA president and former chair of the MBA’s Law Practice Management Section, to discuss the state of legal technology in law practice.
And, yes, there will be AI.
The program, at 1 p.m. ET tomorrow, is free for MBA members and $50 for all others.
Sign up here. Hope you’ll join us.
]]>Yesterday, I reported here on a lawsuit filed March 20 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by a legal tech executive who alleges her former company owes her over $1 million in stock and that her former boss sexually harassed her.
As it turns out, just a week before she filed her lawsuit, her former company had sued her in federal court in Texas, seeking a declaratory judgment that it had terminated her for cause, and that, as a result, her stock option was also terminated.
As I reported yesterday, the plaintiff in the New York case, Silvia Diaz-Roa, filed the lawsuit against Hermes Law, a Texas law firm, and ClaimDeck, a litigation management system for insurers and insurance-defense firms that spun out of Hermes Law. The lawsuit also names Dwayne Hermes, the founder and CEO of both the law firm and the company, and Andrea Hermes, the cofounder of the company and legal compliance specialist at the law firm.
Diaz-Roa alleged that when she sought to exercise stock options worth over $1 million, the company terminated in order to deprive her of that compensation. She also alleged that she had been subjected to sexual harassment, including having been urged by superiors to flirt and become romantically involved with customers.
At the time I wrote that, I had not heard back from my request to the defendants for a response to Diaz-Roa’s allegations. Subsequently, I received an email from Stefanie Shah, an Austin lawyer with the firm Vela Wood, who represents the defendants.
Although her clients had not been served with the complaint in the New York matter, she said, they deny the allegations.
“It is my understanding Ms. Diaz-Roa filed suit in response to the declaratory judgment action my clients filed the week prior in the Northern District of Texas,” Shah said.
In their Texas lawsuit, ClaimDeck and Hermes do not deny Diaz-Roa’s claim that they granted her a stock option in 2020, but they say that, by the terms of that option, it would be forfeited in the event of a termination for cause. They say she never sought to exercise the option until after they terminated her.
Read the full text of the Texas complaint.
(ClaimDeck is a d/b/a of the company Syzygy Legal Tech Inc. For ease of reference, I am referring to the group of parties as Hermes and ClaimDeck.)
As for why they terminated her, the ClaimDeck and Hermes cite a number of reasons, including that she took actions to harm the companies’ reputations, demonstrated an increasing lack of respect for her coworkers and management, and lacked the skills necessary to perform her job.
Both the New York and Texas complaints agree that after Diaz-Roa first started working for Hermes in 2017, she began to pursue a graduate degree at Yale, while continuing to work part time for Hermes. ClaimDeck and Hermes say they paid the cost of her graduate education, in a total amount of some $170,000.
But after completing her degree and returning to full time work at Hermes, she refused to return to the firm’s office in Dallas, as had been planned, and instead moved to New York. The Texas lawsuit alleges that this violated the companies’ remote work policy, which allows only one remote work day per week.
The Texas lawsuit describes a number of alleged incidents that it says gave the companies ample cause to terminate Diaz-Roa. Because they terminated her for cause, they allege, her options to purchase stock terminated and the shares were forfeited back to the company.
In the Texas lawsuit, ClaimDeck and Hermes are asking that the court issue declaratory judgments that they terminated Diaz-Roa for cause, that her stock option terminated, and that she has no equity in the legal tech company.
“We expect that the New York and Texas courts will rule in favor of our clients,” attorney Shah said in her email.
]]>In a lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Manhattan, the former chief operating office of a legal technology company claims she was fired after attempting to exercise stock options valued at over $1 million.
The former executive also claims she was regularly sexually harassed during her employment and was urged by superiors to flirt and become romantically involved with customers.
The plaintiff, Silvia Diaz-Roa, filed the lawsuit against Hermes Law, a Texas law firm, and ClaimDeck, a litigation management system for insurers and insurance-defense firms that spun out of Hermes Law. The lawsuit also names Dwayne Hermes, the founder and CEO of both the law firm and the company, and Andrea Hermes, the cofounder of the company and legal compliance specialist at the law firm.
I emailed Dwayne Hermes asking if he wished to respond but I have not heard back from him. The defendants have not yet filed an answer in the lawsuit.
In her complaint, which you can read here, Diaz-Roa says that she started at the firm as an intern and quickly earned promotions as senior project manager and then director of innovation.
She says that she and Dwayne Hermes came up for the idea for ClaimDeck in 2019 and that it was incorporated in 2020. Starting in 2021, she alleges, she became “the driving force” behind ClaimDeck, while employed by both the law firm and the company. For ClaimDeck, she became head of product and chief operating officer.
In December 2020, Diaz-Roa alleges, the defendants awarded her compensation in the form of options to purchase 58,825 shares of ClaimDeck stock, or about 10% of its total shares.
Three years later, after her options had fully vested and were worth more than $1 million, she alleges that she informed Dwayne Hermes, along with ClaimDeck’s accountants and attorney, that she intended to exercise her right to purchase her options. Within weeks of expressing that intent, the defendants fired her without cause, she claims, alleging that their actual motive was to deprive her of the compensation she had earned.
Diaz-Roa also alleges that she was subjected to sexual harassment during her employment. Both Dwayne and Andrea Hermes regularly encouraged her to flirt and use her appearance to attract customers, she says. On other occasions, they encouraged her to become romantically involved with “certain individuals in the industry to benefit her employers.”
“Dwayne Hermes especially fixated on Diaz-Roa’s appearance, humiliatingly directing her to ‘fix’ her makeup and accusing her of looking ‘tired’ in front of other ClaimDeck and Hermes Law employees,” the complaint alleges.
Based on these allegations, Diaz-Roa’s complaint states causes of action for sexual harassment, breach of contract, deprivation of earned compensation, and others, and requests appropriate damages.
]]>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, I am joined this week 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.
]]>As technology continues to transform our economy and culture, businesses need a new breed of lawyers who understand the legal and commercial aspects of technology. There is a specific need for lawyers skilled in bringing new products and new companies to market.
Cornell Tech’s Master of Laws (LLM) in Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship is the first degree program of its kind in the world. It aims to develop core business and leadership skills necessary to meet the needs of tech and tech-dependent industries in a business-focused and holistic fashion. The Cornell Tech LLM equips you with the legal, business, and tech knowledge you need to succeed, whether your goal is to join a large law firm or in-house legal department, or launch your own startup, like Cornell Tech alum John DeFelice.
DeFelice, Cornell Tech LLM ‘21, co-founded Meili Tech, a startup that builds enterprise solutions focused on safety, automation, and compliance applications for industrial, commercial, and automotive clients. He credits the Cornell Tech LLM program with propelling him into the entrepreneurial arena and providing a variety of perspectives he would not have discovered otherwise.
“I chose Cornell Tech’s LLM program because, even before law school, I always itched to build a tech startup,” DeFelice said. “As I contemplated next steps in my career, I recognized there was room to add more perspective. Cornell Tech was the clear choice to fuse startup-focused legal and venture training. The program served as a wealth of new knowledge and a platform to embark on a significant career pivot.”
DeFelice adds that the work he completed within the LLM program at Cornell Tech is of use to him every day in his professional journey.
“While I came to Cornell Tech with prior commercial experience, my approach in this new landscape would not be nearly as effective had I not completed the program,” DeFelice said. “My work has been informed by essentially all competencies offered during the LLM — including early formation, IP strategy, technology transactions, data privacy, raising venture capital, board and team composition, and much more.”
Daswell Davis, Cornell Tech LLM ‘20, says his work life feels much like the interdisciplinary team experience he had at Cornell Tech. He now has the opportunity “to work as part of a brilliant, diverse, and highly collaborative team of experts who share common goals and values” as Senior Corporate Counsel at Akoya. Davis says his ability to provide strategic legal guidance to a fintech company that is simplifying data access for open finance comes directly from the rigorous, interdisciplinary, tech-focused learning environment he found at Cornell Tech.
“The intensive academic and professional training provided to students at Cornell Tech allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the legal, commercial, and societal implications of innovation, and equipped me with the requisite knowledge and skills needed to help emerging companies scale, while [also] navigating the plethora of challenges faced when bringing cutting-edge technologies and products to market,” Davis said.
The LLM program at Cornell Tech is much more than instruction and building solutions. As Davis notes, it’s an open door to leverage a wealth of knowledge, contacts and career possibilities.
“If I had to choose one thing, I would say the most valuable aspect of my LLM experience was the access it provided to the Cornell Tech and broader Cornell University network,” said Davis. “Never in my life have I had the opportunity to learn from and network with so many professors, guest speakers, practitioners, and just amazing innovators who are renowned experts and leaders operating at the top of their respective fields.”
Davis and DeFelice are just two of the success stories born of the LLM program. Cornell Tech boasts noteworthy career outcomes for the program — confirming that at nine months past graduation, nearly 100% of reporting graduates from all years who sought employment were employed, most in positions related to their Cornell Tech experience.
Cornell Tech is located in the heart of New York City and also maintains a cohesive intimate campus environment on Roosevelt Island. The New York City location benefits Cornell Tech LLM students by placing them minutes away from many of the world’s best lawyers and events. The location is also a draw for top-flight, core faculty and guest lecturers from local law firms and companies who are preeminent in their fields.
During the year-long program, students dive into studying law and building the transactional skills that emerging companies need in this increasingly complex and dynamic digital economy. The Cornell Tech LLM is open to top practicing attorneys and recent law graduates from the U.S. and around the world with an interest in technology.
Join us live today at 3 p.m. E.T. for the weekly Legaltech Week roundtable panel, where we discuss — irreverently at times — the tops stories in legal tech and innovation.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up free here to attend. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions. You can also catch prior episodes as a podcast or on YouTube.
Among stories on the table today:
Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:
Hope you will join us.
]]>A bit late with this, as it was announced earlier this week, but the International Legal Technology Association, in celebration of Women’s History Month, has named five women as its 2024 Influential Women in Legal Tech.
The list recognizes outstanding women leaders in the global legal technology community based on their mentorship history and level of impact.
The five were chosen from over 120 nominations and over 80 applications, according to Jeanne Martinez, ILTA’s director of membership and volunteer operations and head of the 2024 Influential Women in Legal Tech awards.
The women “are the movers and shakers within the legal community, and we have all benefited from hearing them speak at conferences, publications they’ve written, and programs they’ve developed,” Martinez said. “We salute them for fostering conversations on the intersection of law and tech and helping us aspire to contribute at the highest level possible.”
Here are the five honorees, and what ILTA said about each:
Alma is an established leader in legal innovation with a unique, multi-faceted view of what’s required to create impactful, long-lasting change. She is passionate about bridging the gaps that stand in the way of successful innovation and proudly prioritizes real-world adoption over “bells and whistles.” In her role as Crowell’s first Chief Innovation and Value Officer, Alma leads the firm’s innovation and value efforts, overseeing a wide range of initiatives relating to, among other areas, client value, cross-departmental data and analytics, knowledge management, practice innovation and generative AI. She also oversees the Research Services department, aligning traditional law firm tools and functions with modern approaches to knowledge management and value-driven services.
Related: In 2017, Asay’s trailblazing work as a women entrepreneur inspired a post I wrote, 2017: The Year of Women in Legal Tech.
Over the course of her legal career, Alma has earned numerous recognitions relating to her innovation work. She was named on the second annual list of LTRC’s “Women of Legal Tech” in 2016, and she was an early member of the Fastcase 50, “the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.” The ABA has also awarded Alma its distinguished “Legal Rebel” title, acknowledging those who are “remaking the legal profession . . . the pioneers who are changing the way law is practiced and setting the standards that will guide the profession in the future.” Most recently, Alma was honored as an AI Visionary, recognizing “individuals who have explored, promoted, or experimented with AI in novel ways in legal applications.”
Alma began her career as a successful attorney at an Am Law 10 firm. She loved practicing law but believed that better processes and technology could help lawyers thrive by enabling them to focus on the work they do best. In 2012, Alma founded her own legal technology company. In building her company, she gained first-hand experience in what it’s like to run a company and work with law firms from the client side. Before joining Crowell, she sold her business in 2017 and took on broader roles in legal innovation with alternative legal services and technology providers. She holds a J.D. from NYU Law and a B.A. from Pennsylvania State University.
Alma regularly speaks at industry conferences and spearheads client presentations on various innovation topics. Her 2023 engagements included “Spark Talks: Data-Driven Success Stories” at ILTACON, “Beyond Fees for Services Rendered: Defining Partnership and Value Adds in Client Relationships” at LVNx, and “Getting Buy-In for Process Automation and Legal Tech Adoption” at KM&I for Legal. She also authors the monthly “Women of Legal Tech” column for Legaltech News, elevating the profiles of other women making moves across the industry.
Aalia is a lawyer, legal technologist, entrepreneur, and mom of two. She currently leads Webber Wentzel Fusion, the NewLaw and legal technology division of leading African law firm, Webber Wentzel. Since starting her career, Aalia has pushed the boundaries between law and technology, with a passion for driving impact specific to the African context.
While practicing as an IP and technology law partner at the firm, she spearheaded lobbying efforts for regulatory reforms and established a legal incubator for high-growth tech businesses. This led to a chapter of intense growth and learning as a COO of a technology startup, where she honed her operational skills, commercial acumen, and resilience. She now finds herself back “home,” where she and the team focus on designing and delivering AI, legal technology, and alternative legal solutions that supercharge the firm and its clients and generate new revenue streams.
Terri Mottershead is the Executive Director of the Centre for Legal Innovation (Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific) (CLI) at the College of Law. Terri collaborates internationally with leaders of legal businesses, supporting them in transforming capabilities and practices to deliver legal services/products/solutions that exceed client expectations and cultivate workplaces that attract, empower, and retain multi-disciplinary talent.
She leads CLI’s global initiatives, including the Generative AI Initiative, Legalpreneurs Lab, and its podcast series, The Legalpreneurs Sandbox. Terri’s work in legal GenAI was recently recognized with her appointment as the inaugural Chair of the Queensland Law Society’s Generative AI in Legal Practice Joint Working Group. Before joining CLI, Terri was a practicing lawyer, founded startups on three different continents, and established or led the talent management functions for global firms and associations in Asia and the US, including Lex Mundi, the Inter-Pacific Bar Association, and DLA Piper LLP (US).
Caryn leads the Gilbert + Tobin Legal Service Innovation team and G+T Innovate. These teams provide specialized services to support Gilbert + Tobin’s legal service delivery and innovate to deliver new tools and services benefiting Gilbert + Tobin’s practice and clients. Caryn’s role encompasses responsibility for over 70 lawyers and business professionals working across Transformation, Legal Informatics and Data, Legal Project Management, and Knowledge Management.
Caryn was named “Most Innovative Changemaker” at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Awards Asia-Pacific 2022, “Innovator of the Year” at the Australian Law Awards 2022 and “Innovator of the Year” at the Partner of the Year Awards 2021. Under her leadership, Gilbert + Tobin also won “Excellence in Technology and Innovation” at the Australasian Law Awards 2023 for a third consecutive year and was named “Most Innovative Law Firm” at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Awards Asia-Pacific in 2019. Caryn is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Legal Innovation and is a director for various not-for-profit organizations. Caryn has a passion for expanding the focus and content of legal education to enable lawyers to succeed and thrive in the changing legal environment.
Ginevra Saylor is the National Director, Innovation and Knowledge Programs with the global law firm Gowling WLG LLP, where she leads the firm’s innovation, knowledge management, client and practice solutions, legal project management, and process re-engineering strategy and initiatives. In her role, she identifies and implements programs, processes, and tools that drive innovation and excellence throughout the firm and enhance the delivery of client services.
Ginevra has over twenty years of experience building and delivering strategies for innovation, knowledge management, client solutions, technology adoption, and process improvement. In previous KM leadership roles with two major firms, Ginevra developed strategies and initiatives for innovation, knowledge management, learning and development, client solutions, technology adoption, and process improvement and designed new projects and practice tools to leverage and build her firm’s knowledge base. An Ontario and Pennsylvania Bars member, she also has extensive and varied experience as a practicing litigator and educator.
Ginevra served as President of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Board of Directors for two years and Executive Vice President and Secretary respectively for four years before assuming the presidency. She also is a College of Law Practice Management (COLMP) Fellow. Ginevra and her Gowling project team won a 2021 Precedent Innovation Award for developing a contest rules application. Ginevra earned the ILTA 2016 Publications Shining Star Award and the 2016 Global Knowledge Management Congress Knowledge Management Leadership Award. She is a frequent author and international speaker on legal practice, innovation, legal technology, knowledge management, and related topics.
Ginevra has lived and worked in Canada, the United States, Greece, and Vietnam. She currently lives with her family in Toronto, Canada.
Congratulations to all.
]]>Ai.law, a legal technology startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate litigation documents, has added a new module that will draft the complaint to initiate a lawsuit.
While Ai.law already had modules for litigation tasks such as answering a lawsuit, responding to discovery, and pulling summaries from medical records, this new module allows a user to input relevant information about a case and generate a complete complaint.
The draft complaints include jurisdictional allegations, general allegations, claims with elements that are supported by facts, and a demand section.
The product, which is in beta, generates a Microsoft Word document formatted for the federal court system. Users in state courts will have to customize the formatting to fit local requirements.
In addition to drafting a complaint, Ai.law can also suggest legal claims you may want to include in your lawsuit or ways to potentially boost the damages you could recover, based on the specific jurisdiction and facts of your case.
To draft a complaint, you fill out a form with specific information about the case. In addition to the names of the parties and the jurisdiction, Ai.law asks you to provide:
Once those fields are complete, simply click “Generate Complaint,” and in a few moments a Word document is downloaded to your computer in the form of a complete complaint.
It should be unnecessary to say, but no lawyer should ever accept this output and file it with a court without first carefully reviewing and revising it. As noted above, you may also need to adapt its formatting to fit the requirements of the court where you will file it.
Ai.law suggests you may want to also run the draft complaint through its Dismissal Risk Analyzer to test for the sufficiency of the allegations.
More for fun than an in-depth test, I gave it a whirl, describing to Ai.law a made-up factual scenario in which a local newspaper published a story about a local building contractor alleging that he had bribed municipal officials in return for preferential treatment in awarding contracts.
Based on the fairly minimal information I provided, the application generated a complaint that included counts for defamation, business disparagement, tortious interference with contractual relations, and invasion of privacy.
You can read the complaint it generated here.
Overall, the complaint it generated was, at least on its face, a good first draft. Of course, I would need to research the elements of the various claims and determine whether more needed to be said or if any should be deleted, but even just the drafting could be a real time saver.
I also found the language, primarily in the introduction, to be a bit melodramatic. This opening paragraph is an example:
“In the heart of Boston, where trust and reputation are the cornerstones of local business, John Smith stands as a paragon of integrity, unjustly maligned by the reckless words of the Boston Beacon. Smith Contracting, a business built on the bedrock of honest work and community service, has been thrust into the shadow of scandal by a story as false as it is damaging. Despite John Smith’s unblemished record of service and his role as a pillar of the community—evidenced by his membership in the Chamber of Commerce and his dedication as a Little League coach—the Boston Beacon has callously sullied his name without regard for the truth.”
But some may like that style, and for those of us who do not, some simple editing would easily tone it down. In an email, Troy Doucet, the litigator who founded Ai.law, conceded the language could be “a bit fluffy,” but said it would be toned down over time.
After I used Ai.law to generate a complaint, I turned the tables, uploading the complaint it generated and, using its “Analyze Elements of Claims” feature, asking it to analyze the sufficiency of the allegations and the elements of the claims.
For each claim in the complaint, it described the elements that must be established and then indicated whether the complaint addressed each of those elements.
For example, with respect to the defamation claim, Ai.law said that one element of the claim is showing the defamatory character of the publication. “The statement must tend to harm the reputation of the plaintiff,” the AI said. “The article’s allegations are clearly defamatory as they accuse the plaintiff of criminal activity.”
But with respect to the claim of invasion of privacy, the AI said that one element, public disclosure of private facts, was not met in the complaint. “The disclosed facts must be private and not of public concern,” it explained. “The lawsuit does not clearly establish this element, as it does not detail what private facts were disclosed, though it suggests the article was not a matter of public concern.”
I have not spent any time evaluating the legal accuracy of Ai.law’s ability to identify claims and analyze elements of a claim. But I will say again that no lawyer should rely on any AI tool to the exclusion of conducting your own research and analysis of the legal and factual issues.
But as a tool to generate a first draft, it could potentially save you time, and is at least worth giving a try.
If you are curious to try Ai.law’s complaint generator for your yourself — or any of its AI applications — the company offers a free trial. After the free trial ends, it offers three tiers of monthly subscriptions, ranging from $209 to $649, depending on features and usage levels.
By the way, the year-old company was one of the 15 startups that competed in this year’s Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW.
]]>
Fast Company is out with its annual ranking of the world’s most innovative companies, and of the 606 companies that made the list, just four are from legal tech.
“The 606 organizations that we honor as Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024 have met our high bar for demonstrating innovation and the impact of those innovations on business and industry,” the publication says. “They lead their fields and are transforming the world.”
Here are the four legal tech companies that made the list, based on my review. If I missed any, please let me know.
Casetext, now owned by Thomson Reuters, was selected in the category most innovative applied AI companies for its product CoCounsel.
In its write-up, How Casetext is assigning every attorney an AI co-counsel, Fast Company says: “CoCounsel can generate — at a blazing speed — legal research memos, review thousands of documents to answer questions during discovery, and find specific contract items in vast databases of information.”
Fulcrum GT was selected in the category business services for simpifying legal spend management.
In its write-up, How Fulcrum GT built innovative tools to provide law firms with extra support, Fast Company says that Fulcrum GT’s product for corporate legal, RapidX, “is critical to businesses that, between 2022 and 2023, saw an average 29% increase in legal spending.”
Hello Divorce was named in the category social good.
In explaining its choice, Fast Company said, this online divorce company is turning a usually messy, adversarial, and costly legal burden into a smoother process.
“In 2023, the company rolled out services in all 50 states, and more than doubled the states in which it offers full-service divorce options from 5 to 11 — all while saving its customers almost $13,000 each.”
SpotDraft was named in the category of Asia-Pacific companies.
In its write-up, This Indian startup wants you to stop wasting time drawing up legal contracts, Fast Company says, “SpotDraft helps companies simplify contract creation and review by offering templates and automating the process of extracting contract data, freeing up in-house legal teams to work on less tedious tasks.”
Related: How It Works: VerifAI from SpotDraft, Using AI in Word To Help Lawyers Review Contracts Faster.
]]>InfoTrack may be one of the fastest growing yet least known legal technology companies in the United States. You may know it more through its brands, including ServeNow for finding process servers, One Legal for California court filing, LawToolBox for court calendaring, and the Legal Talk Network group of legal podcasts.
On the latest LawNext podcast, our guest Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack in the U.S., says the company is on a mission to innovate and even revolutionize litigation services and the litigation workflow. Already, its products are used every day by lawyers throughout the United States to file court cases, track court dockets, search court records, and arrange service of process, and it integrates with most major law practice management platforms.
InfoTrack in the U.S. actually grew out of a company founded in Australia in 2012, when it was spun out of the LEAP law practice management platform. InfoTrack expanded first to the U.K. and then in 2016 to the U.S.
Since coming to this country, it has expanded both organically and through acquisitions, including in 2020, when it acquired two legal tech companies, LawToolBox, the court calendaring company, and One Legal, a California provider of litigation support services such as court filing, service of process, and document retrieval, and in 2021, when it acquired Lawgical, the parent company of ServeNow, Serve Manager, and the Legal Talk Network.
Watts has been with the company since before it spun out from LEAP, and says he was employee number one when it expanded to the U.S. He and I talk about the company’s history, where it is today, and its plans for future growth.
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>SingleFile, a company that aims to automate outdated corporate compliance filing processes by leveraging AI technology, has raised $6.5 million, on top of three previous funding rounds totaling $8.6 million, bringing its total funding to date to $15.1 million.
Led by the VC firm Foundry Group, this round, an extension of the company’s seed round, included participation from all of the company’s prior investors in its three seed rounds, as well as by two new investors, The LegalTech Fund and Underdog Labs.
Other prior investors included Pioneer Square Labs; the law firms Wilson Sonsini, Perkins Coie, Fenwick & West, DLA Piper, and Cooley; and individual lawyers from the firm K&L Gates.
The company, which spun out of Pioneer Square Labs’ Seattle incubator in 2019, serves law firms, corporations and investor firms with a digital platform for filing and tracking annual reports and other state-required filings. It also offers entity management and resident agent services.
The publication GeekWire recently named the company one of five finalists for its Startup of the Year award.
While the company has seen steady growth over the past couple years, CEO Aaron Finn told me in an interview yesterday, new beneficial ownership filing requirements that took effect this year under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) have helped the company’s business pipeline “blow up.”
With an estimated 32 million businesses subject to the law, the company offers a CTA filing and monitoring service. Finn said that a number of states are already considering enacting their own versions of the CTA, which will further complicate compliance.
The original idea for the company was to bring on companies as customers at their birth and then expand with them as their needs expand, handling their filing services, serving as their registered agent, and working on their annual reports and other required documents, Finn said.
But as the company researched and spoke to law firms about the CTA and realized the compliance challenges it potentially posed for businesses, and the market opportunity that presented, it decided it needed to develop a product focused on that.
With the addition of its CTA filing and monitoring service, that means that, on a single platform, the law firm can do the entity formation, the company can do the filings and other compliance work it needs to do, and the beneficial owners can provide the information required of them.
“So the whole thesis of our company is that modern technology can help take the manual paperwork burden out of this industry,” Finn said, “And we’re seeing it really blossom with CTA combined with filing and registered agent services.”
As important as the CTA filing will be for the businesses covered by this law, an estimated 45% of them are going to have to report changes in beneficial ownership throughout the year — changes that must be reported within 30 days. “We think the real work is going to come in monitoring those changes,” Finn said.
“If you don’t have a system of record where all of your information is being looked at in one place — like the filing work, the amendments, ownership changes, percentage ownership changes, officer and director changes, the expiration date of a driver’s license that you gave the Treasury Department — if you don’t have all that into one place, how are you going to be able to monitor the change part of this for that 30 day requirement?”
Even as the SingleFile platform allows companies to monitor its filings and related information, it also allows law firms to see activity by the entities that they represent and ensure that they are meeting all requirements, without the firm having to email the client or check with the state secretary’s office.
Finn said that roughly half of SingleFile’s business comes from law firms and half from corporate legal departments, with several private equity, venture capital and real estate investment firms also customers.
With this new round of funding, SingleFile will focus on building out new products, improving its existing interface, and hiring sales, marketing and other employees, Finn said. The company currently employs just under 30 people.
Competitively, SingleFile positions itself against traditional companies in the registered agent and legal filing industry, such as CT Corporation, owned by Wolters Kluwer, and and CSC Global, as well as against newer CTA compliance solutions. SingleFile’s cloud-native infrastructure differentiates it from competitors, Finn said, by offering a seamless, integrated platform for managing various compliance and legal processes.
Referencing the challenges companies face in complying with jurisdictional differences in filing requirements, Finn said, “I believe there’s an opportunity for SingleFile to really become the sort of Stripe of compliance — to have that all programmed to be able to take company information and pass it to the government, the jurisdiction that needs it, at the time they need it, without having to have a lot of humans involved in that process.”
]]>On my left: the edge of the off-ramp, a modest guardrail, and a fifty-foot drop. On my right, inching closer: a tractor-trailer determined to occupy my lane. I hit the brakes. The truck kept rolling. Its wheels pressed into my car as it wedged me against the curb and carved a tail-to-nose dent in my poor Toyota.
This was early 2015, on my commute to Cambridge, Mass., the morning of a critical meeting at Harvard Law School, where I worked. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain and l were sitting down with Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed, the founders of a legal research startup named Ravel Law, along with lawyers from Harvard’s Office of General Counsel, Debevoise & Plimpton and Gundersen Dettmer. We’d all been working for over a year on a contract that would make it possible, someday in the future, for everyone to have free and open access to all the official court decisions ever published in the United States. After an exhausting year of negotiations, it was time to lock ourselves in a room and figure out if we had a deal.
About the Author |
---|
Adam Ziegler is a lawyer and software builder. He led the Caselaw Access Project and other work at Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab from 2014 to 2021. He works currently at TrueLaw, which helps law firms use AI to improve their operations and services. |
Fast forward nine years, and that “someday in the future” finally is here. On March 1, 2024, our collective efforts on this project — the Caselaw Access Project — culminated in the full, unrestricted release of nearly 7 million U.S. state and federal court decisions representing the bulk of our nation’s common law. I had the privilege to lead this work at Harvard for almost eight years. Wrecked Toyota aside, it was a career-defining experience, and I’m immensely grateful to everyone at Harvard and Ravel who worked hard to make it possible.
To mark the occasion, I wanted to share some of the project’s inside story, reflect on its impact and look ahead to what I hope this data will make possible in the future.
Court decisions are public information — they’re authored by judges and issued publicly to tell us what the law is, and why. We all should have free, easy access to the law, and no one should gain competitive advantage from having privileged access to the law itself.
But historically we’ve not treated the law this way. Instead, we’ve acted like our law is created and owned by the companies that publish it. Our courts, with few exceptions, have allowed publishers to control access to the law and to dictate how we read, study, cite and use the law. Naturally, publishers have prioritized their commercial interests. They’ve made the law scarce and expensive. The effect has been to stifle innovation and competition in the field of legal information and, I would argue, to impede justice and the rule of law.
This is why the Caselaw Access Project needed to happen and why it was worth doing, even with all the obstacles, frustrations and compromises along the way.
I interviewed to join the Harvard Law Library and manage the project in late 2013, about a year after Nik, Daniel and Prof. Zittrain (or “JZ” as he’s affectionately known) had hatched the idea for the project and started working out a skeletal framework for a potential deal.
I’ll confess: when I first learned the project would not be paid for directly by Harvard, but instead would be funded by a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup that would get a few years of special access in return, I almost bailed. I thought it was absurd. Why would Harvard rely on a fledgling startup for this, especially at the cost of limiting access?
By the time we’d arranged ourselves around a conference table in early 2015, I had a different perspective. I’d spent the last year negotiating the deal with Daniel and Nik but also with Harvard’s many internal stakeholders. I’d come to understand that while Harvard’s librarians and resources made the project uniquely possible, Harvard’s bureaucracy and wealth also made the project virtually impossible. It was only through a capable partner like Ravel that the project had a real chance.
I’d also seen that Daniel, Nik and the Ravel team weren’t in it for purely commercial reasons. Although our team knew we had to give Ravel a few privileged years to exploit the project’s data, we drove a hard bargain to ensure the project would serve the interests of scholars and researchers and the broader public. Most importantly, we had to be certain that if (or when) one of the big publishers bought Ravel, their acquisition would not undermine the project’s goals. We had to make sure a buyer would be locked into continuing to support the project and would have no power to stop it. We were dealing with Ravel, but we were also negotiating against Ravel’s future buyer.
This led us to push for a battery of onerous protections and commitments. Ravel’s acceptance of these terms made clear to me that even within the context of their commercial goals, they shared the public interest motivations of the project. Most legal tech startups make bold declarations about public interest, access to justice and democratizing the law when it suits them. Very few make company-defining commitments that put those priorities front and center.
Ultimately, by mid-2015, the deal had taken shape. Harvard would contribute the law books and run the scanning process inside the law library. Ravel would pay for the scanning and subsequent data processing, including redaction of any extraneous material that didn’t originate from the courts. Both Harvard and Ravel would get access to the processed data. Harvard would have the right to share the data on a restricted basis immediately. Ravel would be obligated to provide public access from day one and would put its source code in escrow to secure this obligation. In exchange, Ravel would get an exclusive right to exploit the data commercially for roughly six years after we finished digitization – until March 2024. If Ravel or its successor ever stopped providing public access to the data, they would lose their commercial advantage and all the data would go free.
The contract still took a couple more months to finalize. There were other terms that were important to the investors and university administrators we needed to approve the deal. There were a few dicey moments where it looked like everything might fall apart over trivial concerns. But finally, we closed the deal and the signature pages hit my inbox. A short while later, we publicly announced the project and the key terms of the deal.
Then came the real work.
Inside the library, we’d been eagerly gearing up for the digitization effort. In parallel with the negotiations, we’d run a proof of concept that allowed us to figure out the process, equipment, systems and staffing we’d need to meet our quality standards. We’d carefully modeled out the costs and timing. We knew exactly how many pages per day we could scan, how much it would cost and what dials we could turn to alter cost or throughput if needed.
When the deal closed, we were ready to go. We’d already tackled many of the toughest challenges:
Overcoming these practical challenges was the hardest work we did, and the success of this phase was due entirely to the professionalism, dedication and adaptability of the library team in the face of quite a bit of pressure and skepticism, including from within Harvard. There were no high-paid consultants, distinguished thought-leaders or pompous muckety-mucks telling us how to do this. Mostly it was just a bunch of library professionals, a programmer and a token overbearing lawyer rolling up our sleeves in the basement and striving together to figure it out because we cared. Real innovation.
Scanning was the hardest thing, but it wasn’t the only thing. We also had to transform 40 million scanned page images into structured data representing all of the individual cases, which could be displayed for people on the web, downloaded in bulk and served machine-to-machine through APIs.
We had a lot of help here, both from Ravel and from the vendor we relied on to handle the processing. What stands out especially from this phase are two, related things: redaction and imperfection.
In the project’s early years, the remote possibility that a legal publisher might try to stop our work loomed large. It consumed a lot of time, energy and resources, and it forced us to make compromises.
The problem was this:
To achieve our goals on the project, we had to contend with this gnarly problem. The only solution available to us was redaction.
Redaction means the removal or obfuscation of unwanted information. “Unwanted” is exactly how we felt about the headnotes and other editorial materials embedded within the pages of the books we had scanned. We would have gladly worked with a “clean” version of the official law, but it did not exist. The only official version of the law was the contaminated one. And so we had to prioritize, above almost everything else, the accurate identification and removal of these unwanted materials from every page and every court decision that came out of every book that was not yet in the public domain. This was not easy.
The short version of this story is: we had to figure out what editorial content to expect in the scanned pages; we had to be ready to alert on any unexpected content; we had to identify where this content lived within a case and on a page; we had to excise this material from the textual data; and we had to paint solid black boxes over the content on the scanned images. We had to do all of this with extreme precision to ensure that everyone could see the law and no one could see the editorial litter.
Now let me tell you what I really think. Headnotes, key numbers, annotations and the like can be useful. Viewed in their own right, they’re not garbage at all. They’re the product of major investment and serious effort by trained professionals. There was a time when they were needed to assist the discovery and understanding of the law. They do deserve protection, but only as an independent enhancement layer that’s distinct from the law itself. When they’re combined with the official law in a way that interferes with propagation and access, they’re best viewed as pollution. It’s a great failure of our judges, courts and legislatures that they’ve allowed — and continue to allow to this day — commercial entities to mingle their owned commentary with our official law.
If you’re interested in learning more on this topic, I recommend reading the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org and the many briefs submitted supporting access to law, including the amicus brief that we filed. If you’re a redaction nut, please enjoy an example of our work on Vol. 323 of the Federal Reporter 2d.
Because we invested so much in redaction, we had to make sacrifices elsewhere. The two biggest sacrifices were in the transcription of opinion text and in the scope of the project. We used a technology called optical character recognition (“OCR”) to extract all the case text from the scanned images. OCR output is not perfect. It typically requires some degree of machine and/or human correction. While we corrected some of the OCR output – text that identified parties and courts, for example – we did not correct the OCR output of the actual opinion text. In fact, the raw OCR quality is extremely good, and more than sufficient for most purposes. But it’s not perfect, and our law deserves perfection.
We also couldn’t keep digitizing the law forever. We had to limit the scope of the project, and we needed to turn our attention to the work of making the data accessible online. And so we had to end scanning in early 2017, although eventually we were able to extend it into 2018.
I’ve heard people question these compromises, as if they made the project pointless. That’s bunk. We calculated that if we made sure to create and share high quality scanned images and metadata for the full historical record — the work that would be hardest to reproduce — technology would continue to improve and others (ideally the courts) would step up to contribute going forward. Indeed, this is what’s happening. OCR technology is much improved, and it’s not too hard to redo the OCR to get better results. With all the images and metadata now freely, publicly available for anyone to access, we can all go to work making the text fidelity even better.
As for the project’s scope, Ed Walters and the good folks at Fastcase (now vLex) generously agreed to share their transcriptions of some newer court decisions. At the same time, the non-profit Free Law Project, led by Mike Lissner, continues to set the standard and do a far better job than the government itself in providing widespread public access to newly issued court decisions and case dockets. The courts haven’t done their part yet, but I’m still hopeful.
So the data isn’t perfect. It’s a little bit stale. But these gaps are closing, and someday they’ll be gone.
Everything I’ve shared to this point was a precursor to the ultimate end goal: free public access online. Ironically, when we started, we had no idea what public access would look like or if our team in the library would deliver it. This is why we made sure the contract required Ravel to deliver public access.
Then in June 2017, LexisNexis announced that it had bought Ravel. Their public statements expressed an intention to continue supporting the project and to follow through on Ravel’s commitments. Privately they said the same thing. They had little choice; they inherited the contract, and it was airtight. Either follow through and gain the benefit of the remaining commercial exclusivity and a friendly relationship with Harvard, or renege and see all the data — which by this time was nearly complete — go free immediately.
But words are easy. In practical reality, we were caught in an awkward dance in which Lexis did the minimum required under the inherited agreement, and only if we held them to it. Their follow-through on public access was perfunctory at best. I would’ve been happy to see Lexis lean into the opportunity and become a bold standard-bearer for true public access to law. I also would’ve been happy to see Lexis wholly abandon the commitments Ravel had made. But now that the hard digitization work was basically done, I had little interest in frantically waving around the contract and chasing Lexis to do something it had no intrinsic motivation to do. I also knew it would be difficult and frustrating to get Harvard to throw any real institutional weight behind persuading Lexis to do much more.
So instead of focusing our energy on pushing Lexis, we started working earnestly within the Library Innovation Lab to take advantage of the rights the contract gave us to offer public access directly ourselves.
This was my favorite part of the project. This is what our Library Innovation Lab loved to do and did best: design and code high-performing, open source software that would fulfill the fundamental library mission of enabling access to knowledge.
We had almost free rein to build anything we wanted that would make it easier for people to read and study the law. The biggest question we faced was whether to try to build a free legal research tool that might substitute for expensive commercial products. We decided not to. Instead, we focused on providing direct access to the data. We wanted to enable others to build tools and products, and we wanted to explore new ways of interacting with the data. We did build a simple search and viewer interface for those who just wanted to read a few cases, but we chose mainly to prioritize things that commercial vendors would never do.
It’s hard in a post like this to describe the technology we built, so instead I’ll invite you to use the Caselaw Access Project and, if you’re so inclined, to copy and remix the project’s code. When you visit CAP today, you’ll see that the legacy site and tools are still available at https://old.case.law, but they’re set to sunset in September 2024 now that there are no restrictions on the data and everyone can do what only the Lab could do before. Check out Trends, an amazing interface built by the Lab’s current director, Jack Cushman, to allow people to explore how legal language and ideas evolved. Another favorite of mine is Colors, built by Anastasia Aizman in 2019 as an early, whimsical exploration of the data using natural language processing and neural networks.
These explorations mattered, but our biggest technical achievements were not the vivid demo applications we built ourselves. The real contribution was constructing the robust “plumbing” through which we could deliver the data to others.
The plumbing we built had two main parts: an API and a bulk data service. The technical details are amazing, and if technical details are your thing, stop reading and go look at the code. Reach out to Jack Cushman and the Lab’s current team to learn more about what we did. Find ways to contribute to the amazing work the Lab is doing now in the areas of legal AI and web archiving.
Broadly speaking, we designed the API for people writing computer programs that would need on-demand access to information about particular U.S. court decisions, or who wanted to maximize what they could do with their daily allotment of full-text cases. We designed the bulk data service for verified non-commercial researchers who wanted to work with large volumes of court decisions to gain some new insight or to investigate big ideas across the dataset.
One key emphasis was to slice and dice and repackage the data in as many ways as we could, to support the widest possible range of users and uses. As a result, now you can get PDFs of the scanned images, either as individual cases or whole volumes. You can get cases as JSON or XML, with the text of opinions as plaintext, HTML or XML. You can get whole cases, or just the metadata. You can get smaller datasets reflecting any of the time periods, jurisdictions, courts and titles in the collection. You can get specialized datasets that reflect all the citation-based connections (the “citation graph”) among cases. You also can create your own specialized datasets based on any search term and a variety of complex filters. If you want to quickly curate and download a dataset of all decisions issued between 1960 and 1990 by courts in Iowa, which mention “farm” and cite to the Indiana Supreme Court, go for it. If you want to put the entire collection of published U.S. court decisions on a thumb-drive, have at it.
While immersed in solving the practical challenges of the contract, the scanning, the processing and the delivery, we didn’t think much about the impact the project might have once we made the data available. We took it on faith that someone would find it useful.
We launched both the API and the bulk data service publicly in late 2018 and got a wave of favorable publicity. The one bit of recognition that stands out for me was an editorial in the The Harvard Crimson titled “In Favor of the Caselaw Access Project.” For some reason, there’s something special about a student publication expressing gratitude for our work.
Publicity is not the same as impact. What really mattered was whether people used the data. For a while it was hard to know what people were doing, but now we can start to see the evidence. If you look at references to the project on Google Scholar or SSRN, you’ll see hundreds of articles across a dizzying array of topics like antitrust law, linguistics, judicial partisanship, tax law, organ transplant litigation, machine learning and LLMs, legal pedagogy, and the long-term common law influence of cases involving enslaved people, just to name a few. If you search on the web, you’ll see over 50 library guides that highlight the project as a source for legal research or scholarly data and hundreds of thousands of links into the project’s website. If you look at Reddit, you’ll see an endless scroll of posts mentioning the project in all sorts of useful (and some wild) contexts. If you look at Github or HuggingFace, you’ll see a growing number of technical projects using and crediting the project. If you talk to lots of legal tech startups, like I do, you’ll hear how much easier it is to start something new because of the project.
This is only what’s public and easy to find in a few minutes online, or what people I happen to talk to are willing to share. This is just in the relatively short time since we launched the data, and all of it came during a period in which we had to artificially limit and condition access. Now the floodgates can open.
Now I shift from personal recollection and observation to speculation. What comes next as a result of the Caselaw Access Project? I don’t really know.
I believe the project will continue to enable scholarly research that helps us better see the harmful patterns, prejudices and past failures of our legal system, so that we can work together toward something much better. In law school, I learned a lot about civil procedure and commercial transactions but absolutely nothing about how our courts handled slavery before the Civil War. For a long time, I was ignorant about the active efforts of our profession in perpetuating this sin. But through the Caselaw Access Project’s data and tools, I learned that protecting slavery was one of our courts’ most prominent early priorities. Through important work by others using the data, I’ve learned that this shameful legacy continues to influence our law today.
I also have a strong hunch that generative AI will transform the legal industry, and that the project’s data will play a meaningful role. My hope is that the project will make it easy for smart, creative people to explore new AI-enabled ideas that would have been impossible if the law remained locked away in books and proprietary databases. I’m happy that it will be within reach for anyone with technical skills to build their own version of an AI legal assistant, rather than it being reserved only to companies with special access to the law. I also suspect the project’s data will be part of the solution to citation hallucination, and I hope courts will soon realize that the root causes of this problem are bad lawyering and inaccessible law, not technology.
There are positive versions of the future in which the project contributes to tools and services that help lower the access to justice barrier, improve the quality and value of legal work and allow people to better understand their rights and obligations. These are the future scenarios I’m committed to and will continue working toward enthusiastically.
But there are also versions of the future in which technical experts, with no awareness of or regard for the nature of the law, might use the project’s data to inadvertently do dangerous and harmful things. Here I’ll share a word of caution about the common law and the data we’ve helped make available: it’s always complicated, often ugly and frequently just plain evil. These cases are full of horrific details of violence and suffering. The people mentioned in the cases are real. Many of them, or their families and friends, are still living. And finally, over the course of the 350-plus years represented in the dataset, the law has often been horribly, disgustingly wrong. Don’t make the mistake of believing the law of Alabama or Massachusetts from 175 years ago is fit to inform a modern-day free legal advice chatbot. Don’t assume judges are always impartial or never prejudiced. Don’t presume all law is good law.
These are not reasons to keep the law closed or to continue giving privileged access to a few large companies, but they are compelling reasons for all of us to be thoughtful about how we use and share the data. Perhaps they are reasons, going forward, for judges to think differently about how they write opinions and what details need to be made explicit for a decision to carry its weight.
***
All in all, I’m incredibly fortunate that I could contribute to this project and work closely with so many amazing people to see it through from idea to impact. I’ve been lucky to work on a lot of great projects, but this one stands alone in every way. So worth it.
]]>Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about two more cases of AI-hallucinated citations in court filings leading to sanctions, and now comes the case of a Florida lawyer suspended from practice after filing cases that were “completely fabricated.”
On March 8, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom from practicing in that court for one year, after which he will be eligible to apply for reinstatement.
In ordering the suspension, the court adopted the report and recommendation of its grievance committee, which issued a report in January finding that Neusom violated rules of the court and Florida’s Rules of Professional Conduct through a series of actions, including having filed pleadings that contained frivolous legal arguments based on fabricated cases.
The matter was brought to the attention of the disciplinary committee after Neusom’s opposing counsel, Nabil Joseph, was unable to find the cases and asked Neusom to furnish text versions. Neusom “provided non-responsive and evasive answers to the request for the cited authorities,” according to the committee.
When the committee asked Neusom about the pleadings during a telephone interview, he said that “he used Westlaw and Fastcase and may have used artificial intelligence to draft the filing(s) but was not able to check the excerpts and citations.” In a subsequent written response, he failed to offer any explanation for the fabricated cases “or provide any sense of understanding of the seriousness of the situation.”
Based on this, the committee found that Neusom had not only failed to exercise the reasonable due diligence required of an attorney, but that his conduct went “beyond a lack of due diligence as some of his legal authorities were completely fabricated.”
“Whereas we understand that artificial intelligence is becoming a new tool for legal research, it can never take the place of an attorney’s responsibility to conduct reasonable diligence and provide accurate legal authority to the Court that supports a valid legal argument,” the committee wrote.
Based on the committee’s recommendations, Senior U.S. District Judge John E. Steele issued an order March 8 suspending Neusom from practice in that court for one year.
]]>Possibly the best deal in legal tech conferences is LIT Con, the annual legal tech conference produced by Suffolk Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab and its Legal Innovation and Technology Institute.
Even at full price, it is just $50. But you can sign up by tomorrow for just half that.
For that, you get a day-long program that includes substantive presentations mixed with rapid-fire talks from legal tech innovators and a student showcase of projects developed by students in the LIT Lab.
This year’s keynote speaker is Bridget Mary McCormack, former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association. (Check out my recent LawNext interview with her.)
I will moderate a panel on AI in practice featuring panelists Devshi Mehrota, CEO and cofounder of JusticeText; Jason Morris, senior software development engineer at Thomson Reuters’ Casetext; Kara Peterson, cofounder of descrybe.ai; and Jacqueline Schafer, founder and CEO of Clearbrief.
Other panels include a conversation with Julia Rogers, cofounder of Hello Prenup, and a discussion of building a public e-filing infrastructure.
If you cannot make it to Boston for the live event, you can sign up for the free livestream.
Read more about the conference here or go straight here to register.
]]>You probably use several legal technology products every day. Maybe you love some, maybe you despise others. Why not share your experiences so that other legal professionals can make better buying decisions?
On the LawNext Legal Technology Directory, there are actually two different ways you can contribute reviews.
And one way even earns you gift cards!
The quickest and easiest way to review a product is to write a short review in which you assign a star ranking and briefly describe the product’s pros and cons. This will appear directly on the product’s listing page in the directory.
If you prefer to go into more depth, you can write a detailed review for the product review section of the directory’s resources library. This will be highlighted on my blog, appear as a standalone article on the site, and also be linked from the product’s listing page.
Let me provide more details on each option.
Every time you contribute a product review to LawNext, you earn points towards a gift card. Contribute four product reviews to earn $25 or more in rewards. Here is how to contribute a review.
In addition, some products are eligible for extra rewards. Products that earn extra awards are shown in your dashboard. You can also find them anywhere in the directory by looking for the $ symbol next to their name. If a product is eligible for an extra reward, the dollar value displayed will be added to your rewards bank as soon as your review is published.
(By the way, if you would prefer to donate your rewards to a good cause, you can do that as well.)
If you wish to write a more-detailed review of a legal tech product, we welcome your contribution. If accepted, it will be featured in the resources section of the directory and also be highlighted here on LawSites. Here is how to do that:
Authors should be either:
Importantly, articles should be non-commercial. We welcome vendors to contribute, as they clearly have expertise in their areas of tech, but we will not accept vendor-written pieces that are salesy or promotional.
So you have two options for reviewing legal tech products. Write a short star-rating review or contribute a more in-depth review.
Either way, your contributions will help your colleagues in the legal field make more-informed buying decisions.
]]>descrybe.ai, a year-old legal research startup focused on using artificial intelligence to provide free and easy access to court opinions, has completed its goal of creating AI-generated summaries of all available state supreme and appellate court opinions from throughout the United States.
descrybe.ai describes its mission as democratizing access to legal information and leveling the playing field in legal research, particularly for smaller-firm lawyers, journalists, and members of the public.
It uses AI to generate summaries of court opinions and make them searchable. Opinions from 18 states so far also have AI-generated abstracts, highlighting the parties, issue, background, procedural history, analysis and holding.
“This is a major milestone for legal research and for access to justice,” said Kara Peterson, who cofounded descrybe.ai with her husband Richard DiBona, the software engineer who developed it. “Not only does our tool present an alternative to cost-prohibitive traditional search methods, but our unique approach also lowers barriers to the law because of the way the tool is built.”
descrybe.ai enables users to search using natural language, without having to match exact words. Search results, which can be sorted by relevance or recency, show paragraph-long summaries of matching opinions. Clicking through shows not only the full case, but also the AI-generated summary and, if one is available, the abstract.
The company says it is currently working on adding summaries of federal district court and appellate opinions and expects to have them within the first half of this year.
It also has a limited range of trial court opinions for Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
An opinion tracker within descrybe.ai lets users follow its progress in summarize opinions. So far, the tracker says, it has summarized 2.5 million opinions.
There is no cost or sign-up required to use the site, so if you are curious about it, give it a try.
]]>Training kicked off last month in Arizona for a new class of legal advocates who will work at community-based organizations throughout the state to provide free limited-scope legal help to clients in domestic violence and housing matters.
The training program, a partnership between the Arizona Supreme Court and Innovation for Justice (i4J), a program jointly housed at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona and the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, is preparing a cohort of 37 advocates who work at community-based organizations (CBOs) in Arizona.
As part of the social services they provide through their CBOs, the advocates will be authorized to provide free, limited-scope legal advice to their clients, upon completion of training and passage of a certifying exam.
This training represents an expansion of a pilot program, originally known as the Licensed Legal Advocate Program, developed by i4J and approved by the Supreme Court in 2019, to train and license lay legal advocates to advise victims of domestic abuse.
Related: LawNext Episode 60: Innovation for Justice Director Stacy Rupprecht Jane.
This year, the court renamed and expanded that program as the Domestic Violence Legal Advocate Pilot Program and broadened the types of entities that could participate to expand its reach to more organizations statewide.
The court also created a second program, the Housing Stability Legal Advocate Pilot Program, through which advocates are authorized to provide general legal information and advice regarding housing matters.
In both cases, the court’s orders modify Arizona’s rule prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law to allow individuals who receive certification through these initiatives to provide limited-scope legal advice within the everyday course of their services.
Among the prerequisites to certification are that a candidate complete the course of study developed by i4J and pass an examination.
Of this current cohort of 37, 28 will be housing advocates, five will be domestic violence advocates, and one will be trained in both.
i4J says that it developed these programs after extensive research made it clear that survivors of domestic violence and people experiencing housing instability want to receive legal help from trusted CBOs, and that CBOs want their staff to have the training to provide that help.
“As part of the global movement for legal empowerment, these trainings invite us all to critically reflect and dream of a legal future premised on a shared right to legal knowledge and power,” said Antonio Coronado, project lead for i4J’s community legal education initiatives.
Pictured above: Domestic Violence Legal Advocates (DVLA) and Housing Stability Legal Advocates (HSLA) advocates-in-training meet recently with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Access to Justice Director Rachel Rossi to discuss the impacts of these legal empowerment initiatives on their communities.
]]>
Among the most enduring yet dramatic success stories in legal tech is that of iManage, the document and email management company. Founded in 1995, its collaborative approach to content management made it popular among among law firms virtually out of the gate, and it was acquired eight years later for $171 million by Interwoven.
But after Autonomy gobbled up Interwoven in 2009 and then Hewlett Packard bought Autonomy in 2011, the deal turned into a disaster when allegations that Autonomy had inflated its value resulted in HP having to write off nearly $8.8 billion of the $11.1 billion purchase price and years of litigation that continues even now.
With iManage, through no fault of its own, caught up in this M&A morass, its original founding management team, led by Neil Araujo and Rafiq Mohammadi, swooped in and bought back the company in 2015 and immediately went to work to put it back on course. Within a year, the company launched its native cloud platform, iManage Cloud, and then went on to make several key acquisitions, including of UK artificial intelligence company RAVN Systems in 2017 and of legal transaction management company Closing Folders in 2020.
Last year, after taking a minority strategic growth investment from Bain Capital, the company launched iManage AI, an AI search engine built natively into its cloud platform, and then iManage Tracker, a matter-centric task management service.
Related video: How It Works: iManage Tracker.
Now, iManage is revealing new details on the fruits of those labors and how they have translated to continued growth, and it is laying out its plans for the year ahead to further innovate its platform through development of AI and to further expand its partnerships and integrations with technology providers, including Microsoft.
During 2023, iManage added more than 300 new companies and law firms as customers, bringing its total global customer base to 4,000 customers across six continents — an increase of 1,000 customers over the number it reported when it bought the company back from HP in 2015.
Among its customers are more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies, 80% of the Am Law 100, major accounting and financial institutions throughout the world, and thousands of smaller, boutique customers, it says.
Related video: How It Works: iManage Closing Folders.
Driving that growth has been a continued shift to iManage Cloud, the company says. Annual recurring revenue for iManage Cloud grew 36% year over year, and over 60% of the iManage customer base – or some 2,400 customers – now work in iManage Cloud.
All of that adds up to more than 11 billion documents and 11 petabytes of data handled in iManage for more than 430,000 users.
Having adopted the tagline, “Making Knowledge Work,” iManage says that over the next year it will emphasize significant innovation around its iManage knowledge work platform, including advanced AI services and capabilities across the platform.
“iManage will deliver powerful new capabilities leveraging generative AI for solutions like information retrieval, contract summarization, and email management – saving busy professionals time and enhancing productivity,” the company said.
Also over the next year, iManage plans to devote significant energy to partnerships. This includes continuing to build on its already established “better together” partnership with Microsoft, which includes significant improvements to its integration with Microsoft 365, native desktop co-authoring, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Co-pilot.
In addition, it said that its integration with ServiceNow and partnerships across a technology ecosystem of more than 200 partners will play a key role in expanding its footprint within law firms and legal departments.
Araujo, in a statement, said that 2023 was a remarkable year for iManage, and that its partnership with Bain Capital “helped propel the evolution of our modern, cloud native knowledge work platform, allowing us to better address our customers’ needs even as the knowledge work industry evolves at an unprecedented pace.
“As 2024 unfolds,” he said, “our dedication to people, innovation, and operational maturity remains steadfast, and we look forward to another year filled with fresh avenues for growth and opportunity.”
Learn more about iManage on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
]]>The arrival of 2024 brought a new reporting requirement for more than 32 million smaller companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will now have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.
With new requirements for companies to collect, document and submit previously unreported information – and with many companies confused about what the law means for them — legal tech companies are stepping up to help, with new products specifically designed to facilitate understanding and compliance.
One company that is taking the lead on this is Wolters Kluwer. It has launched a beneficial ownership platform for legal, compliance and accounting professionals, and enhanced its Legisway platform for corporate legal departments with new beneficial ownership functionality.
On today’s episode, we’ll dig into this new law and its requirements, and hear about how technology is helping companies comply. To do that, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by three executives from Wolters Kluwer:
Ross Aronowitz, vice president, law firm segment leader, at CT Corporation.
Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US.
Cathy Rowe, senior vice president and segment leader, U.S. professional market tax and accounting North America.
One further note: Last week, after we recorded this conversation, a federal court in Alabama ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act is unconstitutional. The ruling is limited to the two plaintiffs who filed the suit, and the federal government said it will file an appeal. Meanwhile, it is expected that the government will continue to enforce these new beneficial ownership rules.
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.
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.
]]>Proxiio Global Solutions, an India-based provider of litigation and corporate legal services for law firms and in-house legal departments, is today officially launching in the United States.
Proxiio says that it offers customers legal services delivered by a team of skilled lawyers with deep knowledge and experience in areas such as managed review, litigation and investigation, e-discovery, witness preparation, claims evaluation, data subject access requests (DSARs), contracts, and compliance management.
“Proxiio sets the gold standard in global legal services through unwavering dedication to subject matter expertise, steadfast commitment to quality, adaptability, collaborative approaches and the assurance of predictability, while seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technology,” its website says.
In a statement announcing the launch, the company said that its approach to addressing legal challenges is to start with the core lawyering tasks and then work backward to design efficient and meaningful processes.
It integrates technology into these processes where it can provide the most value, ensuring that clients benefit from its advantages, it says, taking a platform-agnostic approach to tailor solutions for individual clients based on their unique needs, considering factors such as size, scale and complexity.
“The time feels right to launch our company in the United States and bring our unique blend of expertise and technology to clients there,” Sanjay Singh, co-founder of Proxiio, said in a statement.
Leading U.S. sales Peter Vazquez, vice president of business development, who was formerly regional director of e-discovery sales for Consilio.
Proxiio says that it has a full-time team of qualified attorneys and certified project managers with decades of experience in leading the delivery of legal services for law firms and general counsel at large corporations.
The company says it is a RelativityOne Certified Partner and has invested heavily in state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure. The company is ISO-certified for information security and quality assurance.
]]>Thomson Reuters today brings its generative AI legal assistant CoCounsel Core to the United Kingdom, following its initial rollout in the United States and expansion last month into Australia and Canada.
The company also said that its AI-Assisted Research product, launched in November within Westlaw Precision for the U.S., would be available on Westlaw Edge UK within weeks.
CoCounsel Core is the generative AI product originally launched one year ago this month by the legal technology company Casetext. Following its acquisition of Casetext in June 2023, TR announced in November that it would integrate CoCounsel across multiple products, while also continuing to sell it as a standalone product, renamed CoCounsel Core.
Last month, TR expanded availability of CoCounsel Core to Australia and Canada, and with today’s announcement, it becomes generally available in the UK, where TR says it is already being used by multiple law firms.
“In just over a year since CoCounsel debuted, our goal of transforming how people work is becoming a reality in more places across the world, more quickly than we could have imagined,” said Jake Heller, cofounder and former CEO of Casetext and now head of the CoCounsel product at TR. “It’s proof that the Thomson Reuters build, buy and partner strategy is accelerating how quickly we can deliver generative AI solutions to the professionals who rely on us.”
CoCounsel Core provides customers with eight core generative AI-powered legal skills: Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline.
Casetext launched CoCounsel on March 1, 2023, helping to fuel a frenzy of legal tech companies developing generative AI products. To mark that one-year milestone, it recently published the CoCounsel Index of facts and figures about the product’s growth.
]]>If you are a company looking to target your advertising to an audience of those interested in legal tech, you would be hard-pressed to do better than this blog and our related media properties.
By definition, our audience is composed almost entirely of readers and listeners who are interested in legal tech news, ideas and trends. These are precisely the people who read this blog, listen to our podcasts, watch our videos, subscribe to our emails, and search our directory.
We currently have several open slots for sponsorships and paid content. These include:
The generosity of our advertisers and sponsors supports everything we do here: the reporting and commentary on this blog, the interviews on the LawNext podcast, the information we bring you through our other media and newsletters, and more.
If you are a company or organization interested in receiving our media kit or learning more about our opportunities, please contact ben@lawnextmedia.com.
]]>Two travesties persist in tainting access by all to the U.S. legal system.
One is the gaping lack of access to justice. The Legal Services Corporation estimates that 92% of the civil legal problems of the roughly 50 million low-income Americans receive no or insufficient legal help. Reasonable minds can quibble over that number – some say it is exaggerated – but no one doubts or disputes that the legal system falls dramatically short of serving those who need it, not just for those with low incomes, but also for the middle class and small businesses.
The other is the continuing lack of public access to the law. For both primary and secondary legal materials, many remain under the commercial lock and key of major publishers, or under dubious claims of copyright by government entities, or so disparately and poorly organized as to be effectively inaccessible.
As to both these travesties, there are many individuals, groups and organizations working hard to resolve them. For the most part, however, it seems that they work along separate tracks, pursuing parallel missions but employing separate strategies.
Yet the fact is that these two travesties – and their hoped-for resolutions – are inextricably intertwined. We can never fully resolve the access to justice crisis unless we also resolve the lack of free and open access to the law. For many with legal problems, simply knowing the law and their rights is the first step toward achieving a resolution.
What this means, perhaps, is that there should be greater coordination and collaboration between those working to close the justice gap and those working to free the law. On both fronts, these are major fights, but in unity, as they say, there is strength.
Once again, the fodder for these ruminations came from two parallel conferences. This happened a month ago, when I wrote a post, The Justice Gap in Legal Tech: A Tale of Two Conferences and the Implications for A2J, spurred by my impressions of the chasm between two conferences I attended in the same week – a chasm that drove home the funding gap between those who are developing legal technology to better meet the legal needs of low-income Americans and those who are developing legal tech to serve large law firms and corporate legal departments.
This time, the two summits were more closely aligned, and even physically adjacent, yet organizationally disconnected.
On Friday I attended Transform: Justice, a program by Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab held to commemorate the full release of the Caselaw Access Project’s case law collection from all commercial restrictions, as well as to consider the future of free and open access to law.
Only as that day ended did I learn that, three-quarters of a mile from Harvard Law, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was holding the Making Justice Accessible Summit, part of a project designed to advance a set of clear, national recommendations for closing the justice gap between the demand for civil legal services and the supply.
So at the same time that leaders of the access-to-law movement from all across the country were convening at Harvard to discuss their future course, just blocks away, leaders of the access-to-justice movement from all across the country were doing the same, each group oblivious to the other.
I attended only the Harvard program, so I cannot speak to what happened at the other, but I can tell you that, among those at Harvard, there was a whole lot of connecting the dots going on between access to law and access to justice.
As Carl Malamud, a man who has devoted his career to making government information accessible to the public, put it in his speech to the Harvard group:
“Promulgation of the law is a fundamental tenet of the rule of law, promulgation of the law is integral to free speech, to commerce among the states, to due process, and to access to justice. In the United States, the law belongs to the people.”
Or at least, the law should belong to the people. Yet when Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.Org, sought to publish the official statutes of the state of Georgia, the state sued him, accusing him in its court filing of engaging in “terrorism.”
That fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, resulting in 2020 in a watershed ruling for public access to primary legal materials, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., holding that Georgia could not claim a copyright in the annotations contained in its official code.
Related: On LawNext Podcast: Carl Malamud on His Three-Plus Decades of Working to Free the Law.
Four years after that ruling, Malamud still cannot get an up-to-date copy of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, he said in his speech Friday. It remains available only through LexisNexis, he said, subject to strict terms of use, a substantial rental fee, and technical restrictions on downloading and repurposing.
“It is read-only law,” he said. “It’s like a Netflix movie, which you can view on a properly registered viewer — if you have been authorized and authenticated — but guess what, don’t blink twice, as your movie may soon disappear.”
Georgia is not alone in asserting copyright over public law. Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico and Tennessee all do as well, according to Malamud.
“If ignorance of the law is no excuse, how can we have access to justice and due process if the law is locked behind a pay wall and subject to onerous and arbitrary terms of use by private parties?” Malamud asked rhetorically.
At Friday’s conference, he proposed a solution: Congress should pass a law mandating that any edict of government, including those issued by the states and local governments, be subject to mandatory deposit within the Government Publishing Office, where they would be openly available to anyone.
Malamud finds authority for Congress to do this in the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution, and specifically in its second sentence. While the first sentence of that clause requires that full faith and credit “shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State,” the second sentence says, “And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”
“For me, that second sentence is all about promulgation of the law, and I believe the answer is a Full Faith and Credit Act,” Malamud said. “The act would specify that any edict of government — including those issued by the states and local jurisdictions — are subject to mandatory deposit with the Government Publishing Office.”
Such a law would spur innovation in legal technology and actually benefit even established players like Lexis, Malamud asserted, in the same way that the lack of licensing restrictions way back in 1876 allowed John B. West to create the National Reporter System.
Whether Congress would ever enact such a law remains to be seen. For now, however, the fact remains that access to much of the law remains walled off. To quote Malamud once more:
“Today, exclusive rights to our legal materials have been granted to private players, each of which hides the law in private silos. The natural resource that is our legal system, the raw materials of our democracy, have been fenced off and privatized.”
Even as that state of affairs persists, many individuals, groups and organizations are working hard to change it. Friday’s program was tangible evidence of this. It was the culmination of years of work – literally of manual work of slicing and scanning law books – with the goal of providing free and public access to all U.S. case law.
Worth noting – having vilified LexisNexis in the discussion above of the Georgia case – is that the Caselaw Access Project probably never would have happened without the support initially of legal research startup Ravel Law and then of LexisNexis after it acquired Ravel. Yes, LexisNexis maintained a commercial restriction on the data through this month, but that was the quid pro quo that allowed the project to happen at all.
CAP’s database is a remarkable achievement in the annals of open access. But it is only one piece in a complex matrix of state, federal and local cases, laws, regulations, ordinances and more – not to mention secondary legal materials – where many remain inaccessible to the public.
Related: LawNext Episode 18: Adam Ziegler on How Harvard Put 360 Years of Caselaw Online.
Efforts to make law more accessible continue. In attendance at Friday’s conference were representatives of several of the other organizations that have been hard at work on this for years, most notably the Legal Information Institute and The Free Law Project.
Even other for-profit companies have been deeply and generously involved in providing free access to legal materials, including Justia, Fastcase and Canada-based Lexum.
Friday’s program at Harvard ended with informal roundtables discussing the future of open access – what it looks like and how it gets there. The Library Innovation Lab plans to incorporate input from those roundtables in a report it will release about access to law, which it envisions as a tool to help those advocating for more accessible and open legal information in the United States.
What seemed clear from the conversations during those roundtables was that any future vision of free and open access to law is also a vision of greater access to justice – that the two truly are inextricably intertwined.
It seems almost foolish to have to say that there is a direct relationship between access to law and access to justice. But I believe they are often perceived as different. One is often viewed as access to materials, while the other is viewed as access to outcomes. Ultimately, without access to the materials that define the law, the outcomes cannot be achieved.
Driving home Friday night from the event whose theme was transforming justice through access to law, I was struck by the irony that just a few blocks away was an event whose theme was greater access to justice.
As I said, I was not at the other event, but reading about it on LinkedIn, I learned that some of the country’s leading advocates of access to justice were there. Imagine if the two groups knew of each other’s meeting and had spent even an hour cross-pollinating ideas and strategies.
Maybe these are, in some ways, different battlefronts, but they are fighting the same war. The end goal is that everyone in the United States should have access to the law – including both the literal law and the justice system that applies and enforces it.
My call to action, therefore, is that these access warriors find ways to better work together. Rather than fight along parallel fronts, they should more explicitly acknowledge their common goal and more deliberately cooperate to achieve it.
]]>Launched just four months ago by engineers who previously worked for Uber, Google and Amazon, Traact, a SaaS platform that integrates a range of corporate functions in an all-in-one platform, today said it has entered into a strategic partnership with Klea, a Belgium-based provider of AI-enabled legal entity management.
The partnership will enable the companies to more effectively serve corporate legal departments and law firm clients on a global scale, they say, benefitting clients in North and South America, EMEA, APAC, and Africa.
By combining their complementary solutions, the companies say, they will enable customers to automate and streamline legal operations with the most modern technology and best customer service.
Initially, Traact and Klea will work together on business development, while they work to better connect their technology platforms and service teams.
As I reported in November when it launched, Traact’s all-in-one platform offers modules for entity management, permits and licensing, board management, matter management, contract management, disputes and litigation, finance and taxes (including spend management), and document management.
It weaves these functions together with a “tech-first” approach that includes digital collaboration, project management, and analytics tools. Customers can buy any mix of modules, depending on their needs, with flat-fee pricing based on the customer’s number of entities.
Klea, founded six years ago by former Magic Circle lawyers and Capgemini engineers, is a cloud-based platform for legal entity management and corporate secretarial work. Its tech-driven service offering is used by customers in Europe, Africa and Asia, and its customers include Epson, Levi-Strauss, Rayner, Mood:Media, Low Carbon, Saria and Cyncly.
“The Traact-Klea partnership brings together the best technology and service capabilities worldwide for the benefit of both organizations and our clients,” said Robert Holdheim, COO of Traact.
He said that the immediate plan is to integrate Traact’s entity management products and service offerings, while over time enabling Klea to offer additional Traact service modules to its clients.
“This win-win alliance is a perfect fit, and we look forward to its positive impact on many levels,” Holdheim said. “Together, we aim to bolster efficiency, product adoption, and cost reduction for our mutual clients.”
“As vanguards in the digitalization of legal processes, our collaboration signifies a pivotal shift in the landscape,” said Klea CEO Filip Corveleyn. “Traact’s comprehensive platform, renowned for its proficiency in cross-functional legal work and routine tasks within the U.S., harmonizes seamlessly with Klea’s sophisticated tech-enabled service solution, addressing the complexities of international corporate secretarial operations.”
]]>Back in 2018, something remarkable happened. The Caselaw Access Project, part of Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, completed its three-year project to digitize all U.S. case law — some 6.4 million cases dating all the way back to 1658, a span of 360 years.
It was a massive project that scanned 38.6 million pages from 39,796 law books and converted it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases (and which has continued to grow since then).
The project initially received financial support from legal research startup Ravel Law. After LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, it continued that support.
The goal was to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public in a standardized digital format. The cases are available to the public through a basic Caselaw page or via bulk downloads.
However, until this month, CAP’s contractual relationship with LexisNexis limited commercial use of the cases. Under Harvard’s agreement with LexisNexis (and originally with Ravel), LexisNexis retained control over the commercial use of the data through March 2024. Any company that wanted to use it for its own commercial purposes would have to license it from LexisNexis.
Now, to celebrate the full release of that data from all restrictions, the Library Innovation Lab is holding an event tomorrow, Transform: Justice, that is intended to begin the process of charting the future for access to law.
They have invited advocates, creators and users of open legal data to discuss what the organizers say is an inflection point for open legal data.
“AI is shaking up the way we all think about the power of information and data,” the event’s website says. “Free, accessible, and comprehensive access to the law is foundational to our democracy, and we believe we’re in a moment when big progress can be made.”
From noon to 2:30 p.m. E.T., three panels — all of which will be livestreamed — will recount the history of the project, discuss the future of open legal data, and consider the opportunities ahead.
The panels include a who’s who of speakers from the free law movement. Speakers include Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain; former Library Innovation law director Adam Ziegler; Ravel Law cofounders Nik Reed and Daniel Lewis; Free Law Project founder Mike Lissner; Legal Information Institute executive director Sara Frug; Angela Jaffee, account director at vLex and former national programs administrator for the Administrative Office of the United States Courts; Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org; Harvard Law Professor Alexandra Natapoff; and Chief Justice Mark V. Green of the Massachusetts Court of Appeals.
I will be there and hope to have more to report after the event.
Here is some further reading and listening:
Can AI help law firms stem revenue leakage and more efficiently turn their invoices into collected cash? That is the premise behind Oddr, a legal tech startup that recently launched what it says is the legal industry’s first AI-powered invoice to cash platform, centralizing law firm billing, collections, payments and reconciliation in a single product.
At the Legalweek conference in New York in January, where the platform was officially launched, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi sat down with Milan Bobde, Oddr’s cofounder and CEO, to record this conversation about the company and how it can help law firms streamline billing and improve collections.
Before starting Oddr, Bobde was senior director of product management at the enterprise software company Intapp and earlier worked at Thomson Reuters Elite as manager of a diverse portfolio of products.
[A special thanks to Oddr, which recorded this conversation, for allowing me to publish it here.]
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.
]]>Hotshot, a learning platform for legal professionals, today released the first five courses in a planned series designed to teach lawyers and other legal professionals about artificial intelligence and its impact on law practice.
The overall set of AI videos is designed to teach lawyers about the technology, its use cases for law practice, its risks and ethical considerations, its impact on different practice areas, and more.
Hotshot’s specialty is videos that are short and practical, accompanied by interactive quizzes and written materials, and the AI videos follow suit. Each is about 15 minutes long, broken into short sections of a few minutes each.
They feature a combination of scripted content with animated graphics and on-camera interviews with AI experts from law firms, corporate law departments, legal tech companies and law schools.
The courses released today are:
Other courses “coming soon” include:
Ian Nelson, cofounder of Hotshot, told me that the company has lined up a roster of leading AI experts to participate in these videos. They include:
Nelson said that Hotshot plans to soon add a learning track for the content and offer a certificate that people can post to LinkedIn to show they have taken the courses on the basics of generative AI.
Users will also soon be able to earn CLE for watching the AI videos if they watch them through Hotshot’s learning track.
A free-trial offer lets you view three of the courses at no cost. After that, Hotshot’s courses are available for purchase by law firms, law schools and individual lawyers and law students.
Pricing is based on numbers of lawyers at a firm and the training topics the firm suggests. A pricing calculator lets you see exactly what it would cost your firm.
]]>Henchman, a legal tech startup that provides legal teams with quick access to their previously written contract clauses and definitions directly within Microsoft Word, today released what it says is a first-of-its-kind integration with Microsoft Copilot through which Copilot users will be able to surface clauses and precedents from their document management systems that had been processed by Henchman.
“This pioneering collaboration empowers legal professionals to harness the power of collective knowledge stored in their document management system, streamline drafting processes, and enhance efficiency like never before, all while securely leveraging AI and benefiting from the best security protocols available from Microsoft,” the Belgium-based company said in announcing the integration.
For Henchman customers, the integration means that when they look for answers through Microsoft Copilot, it will be able to deliver suggestions that come directly from the customer’s DMS, such as iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint.
“Leveraging advanced algorithms and metadata, this synergy facilitates more accurate answers and boosts drafting efficiency, all while tapping into a legal team’s wealth of collective knowledge,” the company says.
Henchman — which recently was one of the 15 companies that presented at the ABA Techshow Startup Alley that I organize — said that the benefits of this integration include enabling users to:
It also enables knowledge managers to ensure that the right practice groups have access to the right sources, with the help of mirrored user permissions from the DMS.
The integration is currently available via early access for early adopters of Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Teams. As Microsoft gradually rolls out Copilot across its suite of products, Henchman says it will follow the same rollout cadence. The integration is available free of charge to all Henchman customers.
“At Henchman, we are dedicated to augmenting the way legal professionals work, wherever they work,” said Jorn Vanysacker, co-founder at Henchman. “Our integration with Microsoft Copilot represents a significant milestone in our journey to empower legal teams with the tools they need, whenever they need them, so they can thrive and become more efficient in their daily workflow.”
]]>For solo and small law firms, the current state of legal technology offers both promises and pitfalls. Technology such as generative AI poses traps for the unwary, but for those who understand and embrace technology, there are opportunities to run more profitable and efficient practices, provide better customer experiences, and improve work-life balance.
In light of this state of affairs, a new report out today by the legal technology company Gavel, 2024 Legal Tech Trends Report for Small and Solo Firms, has analyzed available data from multiple sources to identify the key legal tech trends impacting solo and small firms and recommend how they can prepare their practices for continued innovation and change.
While it has become a common marketing tool for legal tech companies to conduct and publish their own “trend” surveys, this one is interesting because, rather than conduct its own survey, Gavel has drawn on data from multiple industry surveys and synthesized the findings. Its sources include Thomson Reuters’ State of US Law Firms Report, Clio’s Legal Trends Report, Wolters Kluwers’ Future Ready Lawyer report, and the American Bar Association’s annual tech report.
It then goes on to offer insights on how solo and small firms can prepare their practices for innovation and change in the face of an environment of rapid change. For each of the five key trends the report identifies, it not only identifies what the data shows and why the trends matter, but it goes on to provide planning worksheets for each.
“Practitioners can fill out these worksheets, which relate to each major trend in the report, which will help them get on a path to develop a plan for their firm,” Dorna Moini, Gavel’s cofounder and CEO, told me.
I will leave it to you to download and read the full report, but the key trends it identifies and discusses are:
“New technology has created conveniences and efficiencies for both clients and attorneys, leading to increased client satisfaction, improved client experience, profitability, and a better work-life for attorneys,” the report says.
For solo and small firms, this is a concise and insightful look at trends they should be aware of and, more to the point, responding to.
]]>By Ari Kaplan, Ari Kaplan Advisors [Sponsored Post]
In collaboration with Affinity Consulting, iManage, and SurePoint Technologies, I was fortunate to interview 18 chief operating officers, 10 executive directors, one chief executive officer, and one chief administrative officer at law firms, with a median of 140 professionals and 73 lawyers, between February 21, 2023, and March 15, 2023, to better understand the most promising areas for growth, best practices for change management, and how firms can continue to thrive in an uncertain economic climate.
The new report – which you can download in full at Leadership, Growth, and Profitability in a Post-Pandemic Era: Insights on Navigating Digital Transformation in the Modern Law Firm – emphasizes the connection between legal technology and law firm success, the importance of training to ensure technology adoption, the influence of automation and document management on digital transformation, and how law firms are deploying data to create a competitive advantage.
Leadership is fluid and by definition requires an ability to navigate across expected and unexpected paths. In fact, modern leaders need to be simultaneously proactive and reactive. And in legal, they need to deftly honor tradition and strive for change without disrupting an inherently delicate balance between technological progress, generational shifts, and complex business dynamics. In describing the current environment, one executive director noted, “Not only were we keeping the spinning plates in the air before the pandemic, now someone has lit them on fire.”
For many leaders who participated in this survey, the legal field is at a watershed moment that offers them the chance to reimagine law firm management and to influence a new era of success.
“Now is the time to completely reinvent everything we are doing; we need to constantly pretend we are a brand-new law firm and change what we are doing in ways that are different from the past,” remarked a participating COO.
And the results are consistent with that view:
From carefully piloting a return to the office and embracing better business operations to deploying new technology and maximizing prospects for growth, the participating law firm leaders emphasized many areas of opportunity today, but the skills to seize them have changed. “You need to be adept at managing a broader array of people with different capabilities than ever before,” offered the COO of a larger midsize firm. “It is important for all leaders in law firms to have a very strong business sense,” explained another COO. “Now, more than ever, financial acumen and an understanding of data analysis are critical; budgeting and forecasting are much more important,” added an executive director.
Many skills required of new leaders have become more important or changed as a result of working in a less traditional manner. In fact, only 20% of the participants serve in law firms that require their employees to work in a central office five days per week. While 80% do not, most have certain parameters, and 57% either expect or aspire to see their lawyers and professionals in the office at least three days per week. This continues to be a fluid challenge.
The economy is presenting new opportunities for law firms that can provide quality legal work that is value-centric and exceeds client expectations. “Midsize firms that are smaller than the mega firms are well-positioned from a value proposition to become the law firm of choice for companies being impacted by a sluggish economy; there are also openings for firms that effectively deploy fixed fees because clients are looking for new value propositions,” said the COO of a larger midsize firm.
As they expand their technology and processes, firms are becoming more sophisticated stewards of their data. “What you don’t measure, you don’t manage,” said one COO, who added that “alternative fee arrangements are only successful if you can develop relevant KPIs and can guide the process.”
While most reported tracking billable hours, realization, and collections, there were others who are using KPIs more strategically. As one marketing leader noted, “The report validates the crucial need for firms to adopt data-driven approaches for using technology, tracking KPIs, budgeting, and developing their artificial intelligence strategies.” Adept Leaders Are Simultaneously
10% of the participating leaders reported spending between 31 and 40 percent of their job on strategy and innovation. 17% spend 21 to 30 percent, 27% spend between 11 and 20 percent, and another 27% spend up to 10 percent. “It is a big part of our job, especially because we are in the midst of a strategic planning initiative,” said one COO. “I wish it was more than it is because leaders should spend more time strategizing than putting out fires,” noted another.
10% of the participants reported that their law firms provide technology training for new leaders and 43% offer leadership training for new leaders, so there was a common theme of driving the adoption of new tools through hands-on instruction. “This research shows that technology is clearly a strategic asset for competitive, client-focused firms looking to grow and thrive,” said Debbie Foster, CEO of Affinity Consulting Group.
There was broad recognition among the participants of the need to incorporate automation and robust document management tools into their portfolios. In fact, 63% of the respondents work at firms that automate often-created documents. 70% are documenting their repeatable processes, 73% are creating workflows around their repeatable processes, and 40% are automating their repeatable processes.
“Over the last 18 months we have made a huge push for document automation,” noted an executive director. “We automate certain accounting processes, such as new matter intake, expense reimbursement, and reporting,” offered another executive director.
Technology is a clear enabler and catalyst for growth, revenue generation, and client service at many law firms, including those at which the participating leaders serve. 70% of the responding leaders reported that legal technology helps drive the growth of their law firms, 90% revealed that legal technology helps their firms increase revenue, and 100% noted that it helps their teams deliver better client service.
For many, the use of technology increases speed, enhances accuracy, and empowers responsiveness. “Today, clients want a quick turnaround so if technology allows us to respond more quickly and easily, they are happier,” advised one COO. “To the extent that the technology allows access to accurate information in a quicker more efficient way, it improves client services,” offered another.
Law firm leadership has become a multifaceted, intergenerational, and tech-enabled test of 21st-century organizational management. While it still requires financial acumen and business savvy, those running law firms today serve as chameleons that combine a much deeper understanding of social dynamics, an aptitude for communication, and the ability to bring a range of visions to fruition. “Leaders cannot force change, particularly at the precipice of generative AI and legal automation, so they need to invest in understanding and exploiting emerging tools to gain a competitive advantage,” said Laura Wenzel, the Global Director of Product Marketing at iManage.
This research is designed to showcase the opportunities they see in the near and distant future and highlight the challenges that may impair their ability to achieve success. Whether the obstacles are retaining talent, returning to the office, or deploying artificial intelligence, the most successful leaders combine an appreciation for the foundational traditions that have historically driven law firm growth and the need to guide their entire team of professionals into a more uncertain, yet promising future. The post-pandemic law firm trajectory remains a challenge to navigate, but it is a journey built on trust, skill, and collaboration.
Ari Kaplan is the principal of Ari Kaplan Advisors and an independent analyst that covers the legal industry.
]]>Two years ago, Clio, the law practice management company, made an offer that some law firms might have found difficult to refuse. It offered to buy them out of up to six months of their contracts with competing practice management platforms if they switched to Clio’s platform.
Now Clio is reviving that offer, which it calls its Break Free Program, targeting what it describes as outdated systems and “the shackles of long-term contracts.”
“From now until April 30, 2024, law firms dissatisfied with their current legal practice management software and bound by long-term contracts can reach out to Clio to help cover the remaining cost of their contract — with a credit of up to 6 months of free Clio software,” the company says.
As part of the offer, Clio says it will migrate a firm’s data for free. Lawyers uncertain about switching can sign up for a demonstration and get a $100 gift card.
As with last time, firms must meet certain prerequisites to qualify for the offer. They must:
Firms that qualify will receive a one-time discount on the Clio subscription. The amount will depend on the firm, based on the remaining value of the prior contract, but will be between the equivalent of 30-180 days of Clio services.
On the landing page for its Break Free Program, Clio indicates it is specifically targeting customers of Caret, LEAP, Cosmolex, PCLaw, MyCase and Smokeball, but the offer is not limited to customers of those products.
]]>One of the most talked-about legal technologies of the last few years is contract lifecycle management software. But a survey released today finds that the majority of companies do not use CLM software at all, and of those that do have a dedicated CLM system, most use it only on a limited basis.
Instead of CLM systems, most companies are using document management systems to store and manage their contracts — systems such as SharePoint, Google Drive, local drives, or commercial DMS products.
The survey, Do You Need A CLM to Manage Your Contracts?, was conducted by the legal technology company Zuva, which sells neither CLM or DMS software, but rather AI-powered contract analysis technology. Given that, you may wonder why Zuva conducted this survey.
It did so, Zuva says, because it wanted to counter the assumption among many companies “that everyone who is anyone is using a dedicated CLM tool.”
“We found in our research that a lot of companies who aren’t using a CLM or aren’t using a CLM enterprise-wide feel badly about the state their contract management is in,” Zuva explained. “We want to help organizations celebrate their wins, no matter the size, no matter their contract management journey.”
But, not surprisingly, there is also a commercial spin to Zuva’s survey, which I will get to farther on.
The survey consisted of interviews with 80 companies, 32 with more than 10,000 employees and 48 with less than 10,000. The companies spanned a range of industries.
Among the key findings:
“We found from our conversations that, despite the CLM hype, most companies have not purchased a dedicated CLM system,” the survey says. “Those who have purchased a dedicated CLM are unlikely to be using that CLM enterprise-wide. Instead, the CLM is just one of many tools used in that company’s contract management efforts.”
Of the companies using a CLM, interviewers asked what they saw as the software’s pain points. The top ones they identified were:
By contrast, in-house legal teams expressed a preference for using DMS systems over dedicated CLMs. Among the reasons why:
That said, the survey found that contract management using a DMS has many challenges. Among those:
So which is better for contract management — a DMS or a CLM? The sum of the survey’s findings seems to summon a scenario of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But the report suggests a company can have its DMS cake and eat it too.
For companies that want to stick with their DMS but overcome some of its challenges for contract management, the report offers three suggestions:
I told you above that there was a commercial angle here somewhere, and that last bullet is where it is. This is what Zuva does. Its DocAI is an API-driven technology that allows companies to extract important data from contracts and stores it somewhere where it can be of use to them.
But the report quickly moves off that brief commercial message to return to the theme mentioned above of helping organizations “celebrate their wins.”
The fact of the matter, it notes, is that many organizations are doing virtually nothing to manage their contracts, or at best are using a spreadsheet.
Given that, it concludes, “If you have any process for managing your contracts at all, you’re doing great. You should know that you are well ahead of many of your peers.”
“We hope our study helps celebrate unique approaches to contract management,” said Lily Schurra, head of API product marketing at Zuva, “and we encourage organizations to feel confident in their current contract management efforts and to explore solutions that complement their existing workflows.”
]]>One of the challenges of e-discovery for smaller law firms is that so many of the e-discovery products on the market are designed for large cases handled by large law firms, putting them out of range for smaller firms in both price and complexity.
For smaller law firms, the leading guide to e-discovery practices and technology has long been, eDiscovery for the Rest of Us, written by e-discovery expert Tom O’Connor, cofounder of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center. First published by the American Bar Association in 2013, and with occasional updates in the years since, the book is now out in a new edition, published by O’Connor in partnership with Nextpoint, the e-discovery and litigation support company.
Although I have not yet read it, the publishers say that this new edition features new content, including about advances in artificial intelligence, enhanced design, and practical checklists and discussions that address current regulations, rules, and challenges in the e-discovery world.
(I did read the prior edition, and we featured an excerpt from it on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory: E-Discovery for the Small Case – Finding the Right Tools On A Small Budget. )
You can buy the book on Amazon for $34.99.
Noting surveys that show that smaller firms are concerned with finding ways to increase their efficiency and better control costs, O’Connor said that this book “addresses those concerns in the world of litigation and e-discovery by showing you how to meet the standard set by the FRCP to make all matters before the courts ‘just, speedy, and inexpensive.’”
“Not very long ago, ediscovery was thought of as a luxury accessible only to big law firms with the resources to invest in considerable infrastructure,” said Rakesh Madhava, Nextpoint’s founder and CEO. “But as a result of continuing innovation and investments in the legal tech sphere, the e-discovery landscape today looks exceedingly different for small and solo firms.
“At Nextpoint, our goal has always been to democratize e-discovery and build accessible tools that simplify legal processes, and ultimately, lead to a more equal justice system.”
E-discovery professionals at Nextpoint, including Madhava and e-discovery consultant Brett Burney, contributed to this new edition, adding their own ideas and insights. The book also uses imagery from Nextpoint software to demonstrate tactical e-discovery workflows, from processing steps to production tips.
But O’Connor emphasizes that the book is intended as a universal resource for smaller firms seeking to better understand e-discovery, regardless of what software they use. It is also useful to lawyers in any size firm who are interested in improving their e-discovery practice, he said.
If you are interested in learning more about the book and the authors’ insights on e-discovery practice, Nextpoint and EDRM are hosting a webinar on March 14 at noon Central Time.
]]>Jimoh Ovbiagele, cofounder in 2014 of the now-shuttered AI legal research startup ROSS Intelligence, is returning to legal tech as chief executive officer of a new startup, Bench IQ, that says it is using generative AI to provide comprehensive insights into the decision-making patterns of judges — based not just on their written rulings, but also their rulings from the bench.
The Toronto-based company recently closed a $2.1 million pre-seed funding round led by two venture capital firms, Maple, which invests in companies with Canadian roots, and Haystack, which invests in early-stage companies.
Also contributing to the round were Jason Boehmig, CEO of Ironclad; Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition and former COO of Y-Combinator; law firms Cooley, Fenwick, and Wilson Sonsini; senior partners at Kirkland & Ellis; and others, including Ovbiagele’s former ROSS cofounder Andrew Arruda, who is now CEO of the health data company Flexpa.
In an interview Tuesday, Ovbiagele said the idea for the company originated from Jeffrey Gettleman, a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis who is now Bench IQ’s cofounder and vice president of legal services.
(Pictured above are cofounders Gettleman, Maxim Isakov, Bench IQ’s chief technology officer, and Ovbiagele.)
Although Ovbiagele said he cannot yet provide specific details about the company’s technology due to pending patents, he said that the company has compiled a new dataset and that it will use large language models (LLMs) to provide comprehensive insights into the decision-making patterns of judges, covering 100% of their rulings.
“We’re trying to solve a longstanding problem in the legal field, and that is that judges only write judicial opinions for 3% of rulings,” Ovbiagele said. “So often when attorneys are writing court documents or preparing for oral arguments and they want to know what their judge thinks about different issues in their case, they have very little information to go off of. That’s the problem that we are solving with Bench IQ.”
He distinguished Bench IQ from legal analytics companies such as Lex Machina or Pre/Dicta.
“They give you statistics around judicial behavior,” he said. “They tell you what judges have done, but they don’t tell you why judges did what they did. They’re descriptive rather than explanatory. What we offer are explanatory insights into judges’ rulings.”
Lawyers tend to use traditional legal analytics products at the front end of a litigation, to help their clients determine whether it is worth investing in going forward with the case, he said.
“But just because a tool says that a judge denies motions for summary judgment 90% of the time doesn’t mean that you’re not going to file the motion for summary judgment. You want to know why that’s the case and in what circumstances have they made exceptions. This is the kind of information that our tool can provide.”
The product is already in use at 12 of the 100 largest U.S. firms, Ovbiagele said, although he is not currently free to identify which firms. “They’re actively using the product on live cases, and it’s already informing their legal strategies.
The product, which launched to those 12 firms in January, currently covers U.S. federal courts. The company’s roadmap calls for it to eventually expand into state courts as well.
While the initial users are large firms, Ovbiagele said this is a product designed for firms of all sizes, from solos on up, and that it will offer flexible pricing to fit with different sized firms.
Although still in somewhat of a beta mode, the product will be generally available in the second half of this year, he said.
Ovbiagele was a 21-year-old computer scientist when he, Arruda, then a practicing lawyer, and another computer scientist, Pargles Dall’Oglio, founded ROSS a decade ago. Another member of the founding team, Maxim Isakov, is joining Ovbiagele at Bench IQ as a cofounder and chief technology officer.
As I recounted in a 2019 post, ROSS emerged out of the University of Toronto as a student-built entrant in a cognitive-computing competition staged by IBM to develop applications for its Watson computer. ROSS’s prototype won the competition, earning them a write-up on the front page of The Globe and Mail – which touted ROSS as the future junior associate at Bay Street law firms – and serving as a springboard for the company’s rapid acceleration.
In short order, the founders were invited to Silicon Valley to participate in the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator. Denton’s NextLaw Labs made ROSS one of its earliest investments. In 2015, they secured $4.3 million in seed funding and then, two years later, another $8.7 million in Series A funding. In 2017, Forbes named the three founders to its “30 Under 30.” My 2019 post detailed my visit to ROSS’s Toronto research and development office.
But ROSS’s trajectory changed in 2020, when legal research giant Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against ROSS, alleging that it stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product. ROSS did this, TR alleged, by “intentionally and knowingly” inducing the legal research and writing company LegalEase Solutions to use its Westlaw account to deliver Westlaw data to ROSS en masse.
The lawsuit forced ROSS to shut down its operations, which it did effective Jan. 31, 2021. But ROSS vowed at the time to continue fighting the lawsuit, which it characterized as a bullying tactic by TR to shut down a potential rival, and that lawsuit continues to move forward.
See all my coverage of the Thomson Reuters-ROSS litigation.
After ROSS shut down, Ovbiagele left legal tech “to recharge my batteries,” he told me, working for a period as a product manager at Coinbase.
“But then, after my batteries got to about 50%, the startup itch came back with a vengeance,” he said. “So that’s what led me here.”
Cofounder Gettleman, who originally conceived the idea for Bench IQ during his tenure at Kirkland & Ellis, said in a statement provided by the company, “Over almost two decades at Kirkland, I learned how vital it is to understand how a judge thinks to achieve your objective. Bench IQ allows lawyers to understand their judge in a way no other resource can. It helps them build arguments they can be confident in and deliver the desired results.”
Investor Andre Charoo, general partner at Maple, said, “We think Bench IQ has the potential to create the new standard of law — one that is based on understanding the players in the legal game, not just about the rules of the game. The team has uncovered a unique insight that is not obvious to most, and we’re incredibly excited to be part of their journey in changing the legal industry as we know it.”
Another investor, Aashay Sanghvi, partner at Haystack Ventures, said, “Bench IQ immediately stood out to us as a novel way to use LLMs to solve a persistent challenge in legal research. We are delighted to partner with Jimoh, Maxim, and Jeffrey as they build the leading legal reconnaissance platform.”
]]>LawNext Episode 48: ROSS Intelligence Founders Andrew Arruda and Jimoh Ovbiagele
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:
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.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>If you read my review last October of the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference (or KM&I for short), you will understand why I look forward to returning to New York City for the 2024 edition on Oct. 17 and 18.
Conference organizer Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting and former head of innovation and knowledge management at multiple law firms, says this year’s conference will be bigger and better, with a larger venue, more breakout sessions, and more great programming.
If any of that piques your interest, then be forewarned that this Friday, Feb. 29, is the deadline to get the “Super Early Bird” ticket rate, which is $1,699. After that, the rate goes up to $1,799 until May 31, and then to $1,999.
Read all about it at www.kmiforlegal.com.
]]>The contract review company LegalOn Technologies today released LegalOn Assistant, a generative AI chat interface that can answer questions about your contracts, draft clauses, summarize contract terms, and more.
The assistant is available directly within LegalOn’s in-browser contract editing interface and it is available immediately to all customers at no extra cost.
The company says that LegalOn Assistant is specially trained and tested for commercial contracting.
“Dozens of engineers and lawyers worked for months to take the power of GPT-4 and upgrade it with legal training and testing,” said Gabor Melli, vice president of artificial intelligence at LegalOn. “We add to that advanced security and privacy protections, including SOC II Type 2 compliance, so that companies can trust Assistant with their sensitive documents and questions.”
Read more about LegalOn in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
LegalOn Assistant focuses on helping lawyers with three types of tasks related to specific contracts:
In a demonstration yesterday, Melli and U.S. CEO Daniel Lewis walked me through a scenario in which a company receives a draft master services agreement and wants to ensure it prohibits the vendor from using its logo.
Lewis starting by asking the assistant if the contract has any language prohibiting use of the logo. When the assistant answers that it does not, Lewis asks it to draft a clause explicitly prohibiting the vendor from using the logo. In seconds, it suggests a draft, and Lewis follows with a request that it suggest a location in the contract to place the clause, which it quickly does. Finally, Lewis asks the assistant to create an email to the client summarizing all the changes.
Both Lewis and Milli said that these are simply examples of what the assistant can do and its flexibility to perform a variety of tasks.
“LegalOn Assistant is an extension of your legal team,” Lewis said. “It saves you time, handles mundane tasks, and is easy to use in day-to-day work.”
Assistant is LegalOn’s latest generative AI feature that uses the power of GPT-4 technology and Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI Service. Last year, LegalOn introduced AI Revise, the first contract redlining tool to combine detailed legal guidance content with generative AI. These features are included in every LegalOn subscription.
]]>A common pain point for law firms is failing to track and invoice all reimbursable client expenses, resulting in losses to firm profits. A first-of-its-kind product being unveiled today by AffiniPay, the parent company of LawPay and MyCase, aims to solve that problem for smaller firms by marrying a business credit card for law firms to software that directly channels client-related expenses into the associated matters and invoices within the MyCase law practice management platform.
In addition to tracking client spending, the new MyCase Smart Spend benefits firms by giving them real-time management of and insights into their firm-wide spending, while also providing a safeguard against employee fraud resulting from shared credit cards, the company says.
Launching initially for MyCase, and later in other AffiniPay products, MyCase Smart Spend provides law firms with a LawPay-branded Visa credit card for their attorneys and staff. All spending on the card is tracked to a dashboard where the firm can monitor all of its business and client expenses. Spending is also integrated within MyCase, so client expenses are directly tracked to the matter, including the nature and category of the expense and any associated receipts.
Learn more about MyCase in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
The release reflects another step by AffiniPay towards its goal of tightly integrating fintech and legaltech for law firms, so firms can, as CEO Dru Armstrong puts it, view all their financial and practice information through a “single pane of glass.” AffiniPay acquired MyCase in 2022, along with the practice management products CASEPeer for personal injury firms, Docketwise for immigration practices, and Woodpecker for document automation.
“This is our latest investment in embedded fintech that has a real impact on the financial well-being of our customers,” Armstrong said this week. “Lawyers lose money every year on reimbursable case costs. This new offering will save firms time and improve their bottom line.”
During a briefing and demonstration earlier this week, Armstrong said that MyCase customers have an average of $5,000 a month in reimbursable expenses and live in “significant fear” that they will not get reimbursed for them all. “Every dollar that they don’t get back is a dollar of lost profit to the firm,” she said.
(For more on Armstrong’s thoughts on the marriage of fintech and legaltech, see my recent LawNext interview with her: On LawNext: AffiniPay CEO Dru Armstrong on the Intersection of Fintech, Legal Tech and AI.)
MyCase Smart Spend will be released in beta in the second quarter of this year and then to general release in the third quarter. All MyCase customers will be eligible for the product, regardless of subscription tier, subject to their credit approval.
For CASEpeer customers, Smart Spend will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. A LawPay version of Smart Spend will be released early next year.
In launching this product, MyCase is partnering with the credit card company Visa and with the card-issuing platform Marqeta. Through the Marqeta partnership, Armstrong said, MyCase customers get access to real-time card issuing and transaction data and spend controls.
During the briefing, Curtis VanderGriendt, principal product manager at AffiniPay, demonstrated how the product will work.
For law firm employees who are issued the new credit cards, the experience starts on their mobile devices, so they can quickly record purchase details immediately after a transaction.
When a firm employee makes a purchase using the card, the employee immediately receives a text message or email showing the transaction amount and merchant and providing a link to a web interface to add expense details. By following the link, the employee can add a description, such as “filing fee for John Smith auto accident,” and assign it to an accounting category from a drop-down list, such as “filing fees.” Using their phone, the employee can also upload a picture or PDF of the receipt.
While adding details, a toggle button on the screen lets the employee choose to link the expense to MyCase. If that is toggled on, the employee then gets the option to associate the expense with a specific client and matter. It will then show up in the matter in MyCase and automatically be added to the client’s next invoice.
From their phone, employees also can get full access to their account information, including how much they have spent, their available credit, recent transactions, and card details. Card holders can also access all of this through a web interface on their desktop computers.
The firm manages all of this through a Smart Spend dashboard. The dashboard lets firms’ partners or administrators monitor all spending as well as spending by employee or category in real time. It also shows which expenses are linked to MyCase.
From the dashboard, firms can decide which employees get cards and whether to issue them physical or virtual cards. Firms can set spending limits for employees and restrict their use of the card to specific categories. The firm can see an overview of all cards issued across the firms, including which are active, paused or expired. A firm could even issue multiple cards to the same employee for different purposes.
The dashboard is a separate web experience from the actual MyCase platform, but accessible through users’ same MyCase credentials. A toggle switch will allow users to go from MyCase to Smart Spend and back again.
“This is the first time that we’ve really brought together the power of LawPay’s financial services with the power of MyCase and its practice management capabilities to address the expense side or the accounts payable side of the law practice,” Armstrong said.
While there is modern line of corporate credit cards such as Brex and Ramp that have innovative features, she said, “they don’t solve this very specific problem around making sure these firms’ and these attorneys’ expenses get all the way to their invoice, and that those invoices get all the way to the end clients, and that the clients then they have a digital way to pay it.
“For us, this feels really exciting, because it’s very much closing that loop.”
]]>I was greatly honored to be interviewed by Luke Campbell, CEO of VXT, the New Zealand-based VoIP system for lawyers, for his podcast File Notes. It was a lot of fun, and Luke — a great interviewer, by the way — dug deep into my entire career, and how both journalism and tech have evolved.
Watch or listen via the File Notes episode page.
Here’s his description:
]]>In this episode, Luke sits down with Bob Ambrogi, a notable figure bridging law, journalism, and legal tech. Bob shares his journey, which began with a professor’s advice to study law for a deeper understanding of journalism. This advice set him on a path that merged legal practice with legal journalism, leading to his creation of LawSites, one of the first blogs exploring the impact of the internet on law and subsequently, a popular podcast; LawNext.
Bob discusses the shift in news media and the challenges faced by business models in the digital age. Drawing from his early experiences in publishing a local paper, he talks about the difficulties in monetizing content despite growing readership, influenced by social media and the fast pace of today’s news.
A key part of our talk focuses on AI’s role in transforming legal services. Bob predicts major changes in how legal practices operate, the evolving nature of lawyer-client relationships, and the emergence of new service providers. He highlights the potential of AI to make legal help more accessible while cautioning about its current limitations.
Bob also shares practical advice for those starting a legal podcast. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on quality content and guests, and provides tips on consistency, investing in travel recording kits, and leveraging spontaneous guest interactions.
Join us as Bob Ambrogi guides us through the intertwined worlds of law, journalism, and technology, offering insights from his unique perspective at the intersection of these evolving fields.
Does page speed matter to the search engine ranking of your law firm website?
Turns out it does. Page speed is an important ranking factor for Google and other search engines. It can make the difference between a ranking on page one of Google or somewhere lower.
But many law firm websites are more focused on appearance than speed, to the detriment of their ranking. Slow pages also deter visitors, who may find you in search but then go elsewhere when your site is slow to load.
So what should you know about page speed and your firm’s website? In his article, Why is Page Speed Important for Law Firm Websites?, Clint Monette, SEO strategist at the law firm website company Civille, explains why page speed matters and how to ensure your site is up to speed.
His article is available free as part of the resources library of the LawNext Legal Technology Directory, our directory of technology products for legal professionals.
The resource center is a free library of practical articles written to help legal professionals understand and evaluate legal technology. If you are a legal tech expert or user who would like to pitch an article idea for our resources center, you may do so here.
]]>Editor’s note: The following guest post is a response to my recent post, The Justice Gap in Legal Tech: A Tale of Two Conferences and the Implications for A2J. It is written by Mark Chandler, former chief legal officer at Cisco Systems from 2001- 2021 and now a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School and a fellow at the Stanford’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, where he helps lead the Filing Fairness Project, and Jess Lu, a third year law student at Stanford and a civil justice fellow at the Rhode Center, who was formerly a senior associate consultant at Bain & Co.
By Jess Lu and Mark Chandler
On the first Earth Day in 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly created a poster proclaiming, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” This observation applies manifestly to our court systems: an inefficient and complicated civil justice system has become its own greatest enemy, frustrating its very purpose of providing access to civil justice for all.
Bob Ambrogi recently contrasted the efficiency and elegance of legal-tech tools available in the corporate sector with those designed for the civil justice system. While Bob correctly pointed to systematic underinvestment in legal tech tools for civil justice as one cause, it’s a second order cause at best: funding alone will not close the gap. Justice tech — legal tech that helps low-income folks with no or some ability to pay, that assists the lawyers who serve those folks, and that makes the courts more efficient and effective — must contend with a higher hurdle than wooing Silicon Valley VCs: the civil justice system itself.
A checkerboard of technology systems and data infrastructures across thousands of local court jurisdictions makes it nearly impossible to develop tools with the scale needed to be sustainable. Courts are themselves a key part of the access to justice problem: opaque, duplicative and confusing court forms and burdensome filing processes make accessing the civil justice system deeply inefficient for the sophisticated, and an impenetrable maze for the 70+% of civil litigants who don’t have a lawyer.
The current patchwork of localized justice tech developed largely on a one-off basis to solve legal problems piecemeal is likely doomed. A 2019 study by the American Bar Association of client-facing legal tech characterized these tools as “new technologies [that] are born and die almost daily.” A 2023 study by the Duke Center on Law & Tech found that “justice tech” struggles to “find sustainable business models that also expand access to justice” and that “[t]raditional funding models fall short.”
If courts move to standardize the collection of “data” (i.e., the information typically submitted on forms) and the electronic-filing systems that transmit information to the courts, they can create a viable market for end-to-end tools that could provide sustainable, scalable justice tech. Stanford Law School’s Filing Fairness Project which has partnered with state and local court systems and officials in Alaska, California, Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Texas and Virginia, has helped establish the conditions necessary for the development of sustainable, multistate solutions to filing problems. This will benefit everyone: judges, court staff, lawyers, legal aid organizations, justice tech, and the public.
And then the necessary investment will happen. But in order to reap those benefits, two things must occur.
First, patchwork systems create jurisdictional differences not required by statute in the way data is collected for courts (usually via forms), and in the systems — both front-end and back-end — that are necessary for signature, payment and filing. And forms often change with little or no warning to litigants who may be operating on old information. The failure to standardize data collection (and court forms are, fundamentally, little more than data collection tools) is a key pain point that increases the complexity of delivering clients filing-ready documents. For the tax system, the IRS and the states agreed on standardization that made it straightforward to develop software to automate the data collection process.
Such standardization is entirely absent from the civil justice system. Court documents not only vary widely from court to court, but also within a court itself. For instance, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the San Mateo Superior Court’s self-help portal for self-represented litigants lists the 30 forms a litigant might need when filing a civil restraining order. The official California Judicial Council self-help site for abuse victims seeking a domestic violence restraining order states: “You may not need all of these forms. Or you may need more forms … All California courts use the same basic set of forms. But some courts have special, local forms, too. To see if you will need any special, local forms, contact your court clerk or check your court’s website.” Not only is there no standardization, there is no official guidance on what forms are required. Ordinary folks cannot navigate the civil justice system without a trained guide; yet ordinary folks can’t afford a trained guide. And in many situations, including when filing restraining orders, they shouldn’t need one.
Once data collection is standardized, a lawyer or litigant need not figure out what forms are required and fill out individual, often duplicative forms. Instead, they can answer plain-language questions that standardize and automate a large portion of client intake. Think of self-help tax products like TurboTax: the software asks simple questions that users with little tax knowledge can answer. While such legal tools exist now in some narrow areas — for example, Upsolve’s free bankruptcy tool or the Tenant Power Toolkit in California — they can be expanded to serve more jurisdictions. The Tenant Power Toolkit is currently limited to California eviction cases: users fill out California-specific eviction forms, but then use separate e-filing through One Legal, a California-specific e-filing tool. Tellingly, Upsolve limited itself to bankruptcy because of the relative uniformity of data collection thanks to having one, national bankruptcy code.
Second, even if data collection is simplified, the systems for filing cases in court — in other words, delivering the “data” in a form the court can use — are almost equally disjointed. For example, self-represented litigants cannot e-file at all in eight states and, even where they can, they can only e-file in a limited set of case types. Some states still require “wet signatures,” and there is no standardization of fee payment systems. Some courts refuse to provide visibility on their website into tools for filing built by private-sector companies, impeding adoption.
This combination of system complexity and access barriers means that most justice tech does not help lawyers or litigants e-file the documents they prepare. And asking users to e-file on their own is a tall task. Even in states that permit self-represented litigants to e-file, only twenty-three incorporate fee waiver requests and only seven accommodate cash-paying e-filers; others require litigants to pay electronically using a credit card or bank transfer.
E-filing systems are not designed for user simplification. And they do not incentivize adoption. The Colorado courts charge additional fees to use their e-file system, including separate fees to e-serve documents. Their FAQs inform users: “Can’t afford fees? You will not be able to use this system. You will need to file your documents in person or by mail. Additional forms are required.”
Focusing on the funding gap between corporate tools and those designed for civil justice risks placing the horse before the cart. The filing fairness problem — complex, incongruous, and confusing jurisdictional requirements that vary state to state and even courthouse to courthouse — creates a huge barrier to development of simplified systems. Lawyers, including legal aid lawyers, and the courts themselves are needlessly rendered far less efficient. An end-to-end and seamless system, built around a standardized approach to court automation, can fix this.
No amount of funding can solve what is, at the end of the day, a problem of court modernization and standardization. The civil justice system is its own worst enemy. Once we standardize and simplify filing, innovation will come.
I was deeply saddened to learn this week of the death of Lew Rose, a visionary in the early days of the internet who was one of the very first lawyers to create a website and who went on to an illustrious career in advertising and consumer law, capped by his six-year tenure as managing partner of the law firm Kelley Drye.
I once wrote a post about the first law firm to launch a website — a distinction I gave to Venable, which debuted its site in 1994. But one of the very first lawyers ever to have a website was Lew.
In 1994, as I wrote in 1996, Lew, then a partner at Arent Fox, “joined the 10 or so lawyers who had so far ventured onto the Web and created his Advertising Law Internet Site.” It was either the first or one of the first sites devoted to helping visitors understand an area of law.
As I went on to write: “At first, he did not tell his firm. Then, in February 1995, PC Computing’s first-ever listing of the top 100 Web sites rated his 16 — the only law firm on the list. Rose showed the review to his managing partner, who in turn had him make a presentation to the partnership. Soon, Rose was helping the firm develop its own site.”
As Arent Fox developed its own site, Lew was instrumental in developing a feature called Arent Fox InfoNet in which visitors to the site could participate alongside the firm’s lawyers in discussions about topics of law. You can still find that on the Internet Archive and see Lew’s posts in the advertising forum.
Lew moved to Kelley Drye in 2001 to head its advertising law practice. He became managing partner of its D.C. office in 2013 and then firmwide managing partner in 2015, retiring in 2019.
In 2022, Lew and his wife Jacqui donated $1 million to his alma mater, the University of Buffalo School of Law, to support clinical programs at the school that provide practical training for students in access to justice issues including civil rights, domestic violence, criminal justice, and more.
Of Lew, Kelley Drye said on its website:
“Lew was larger than life, and in his years as Managing Partner guided the firm with foresight and compassion. His impact on people was remarkable; he was a friend and mentor to many who sought his advice and guidance on professional and personal matters both.”
When they say he was larger than life, I can confirm that. I had the good fortune to know him both professionally and personally. Lew’s brother is one of my dearest friends.
He was only 66 and, by all accounts, still only starting a new phase of his life, post-retirement, fueled by his love of music and travel and fine dining. His loss is heartbreaking to so many.
]]>
Live today at 3 p.m. E.T., the Legaltech Week panel is back, with a special guest sitting in.
We will share our impressions of last week’s ABA Techshow, and also discuss stories this week of new legal shenanigans involving ChatGPT, AI surveillance, how to write good search prompts, a company’s attempt to dissociate its chatbot, and more.
Sitting in as a guest panelist today is Julie Sobowale, freelance journalist, former director of communications for the Law Society of Saskatchewan, and now membership research consultant for LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers).
If you haven’t already, you can sign up free here to attend. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions. You can also catch prior episodes as a podcast or on YouTube.
Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:
Hope you will join us.
]]>For all the discussion of how generative AI will impact the legal profession, maybe one answer is that it will weed out the lazy and incompetent lawyers.
By now, in the wake of several cases in which lawyers have found themselves in hot water by citing hallucinated cases generated by ChatGPT, most notoriously Mata v. Avianca, and in the wake of all the publicity those cases have received, you would think most lawyers would have gotten the message not to rely on ChatGPT for legal research, at least not without checking the results.
Yet it happened again this week — and it happened not once, but in two separate cases, one in Missouri and the other in Massachusetts. In fairness, the Missouri case involved a pro se litigant, not a lawyer, but that pro se litigant claimed to have gotten the citations from a lawyer he hired through the internet.
The Massachusetts case did involve a lawyer, as well as the lawyer’s associate and two recent law school graduates not yet admitted to practice.
In the Missouri case, Kruse v. Karlen, the unwitting litigant filed an appellate brief in which 22 of 24 cases were fictitious. Not only that, but they were fictitious in ways that should have raised red flags, including that they had made-up-sounding generic names such as Smith v. ABC Corporation and Jones v. XYZ Corporation.
In the Massachusetts case, Smith v. Farwell, the lawyer filed three separate legal memoranda that cited and relied on fictitious cases. He blamed the mistake on his own ignorance of AI and attributed the inclusion of the cases to two recent law school grads and an associate who worked on the memoranda.
Let’s dive in to the details.
Jonathan Karlen, who is not an attorney, filed a pro se appeal in the Missouri Court of Appeals. His initial filing was deficient in several respects, but after the court gave him several deadline extensions, he ultimately filed an appellate brief and a reply brief. The respondent moved to strike the brief based on its multiple failures to comply with the court’s requirements, among them its failure to provide accurate legal citations.
As to that last point, the court, in an opinion written by Presiding Judge Kurt S. Odenwald, found:
“Particularly concerning to this Court is that Appellant submitted an Appellate Brief in which the overwhelming majority of the citations are not only inaccurate but entirely fictitious. Only two out of the twenty-four case citations in Appellant’s Brief are genuine. The two genuine citations are presented in a section entitled Summary of Argument without pincites and do not stand for what Appellant purports.”
In some instances, neither the cited case nor quotes taken from the case “exist in reality,” the court said. In others, the citations had real case names — “presumably the product of algorithmic serendipity,” the court said — but did not stand for the propositions asserted by Karlen.
In a reply brief, Karlen apologized for citing fictitious cases and said that they came from an online consultant he hired to write the brief who claimed to be an attorney licensed in California. He said he did not not know the person would use “artificial intelligence hallucinations” and denied any intent to mislead the court.
The court was not sympathetic.
“Filing an appellate brief with bogus citations in this Court for any reason cannot be countenanced and represents a flagrant violation of the duties of candor Appellant owes to this Court. Appellant submitted the Appellate Brief in his name and certified its compliance with [the court’s rules] as a self-represented person. …
“We regret that Appellant has given us our first opportunity to consider the impact of fictitious cases being submitted to our Court, an issue which has gained national attention in the rising availability of generative A.I.”
The court concluded that Karlen’s submission of fictitious cases constituted “an abuse of the judicial system.” For that, it made him pay the price.
First, the court dismissed his appeal. Then, deeming his appeal frivolous, it ordered him to pay $10,000 in damages towards his opponent’s attorneys’ fees.
“We find damages … to be a necessary and appropriate message in this case, underscoring the importance of following court rules and presenting meritorious arguments supported by real and accurate judicial authority.”
In this Massachusetts Superior Court case, plaintiff’s counsel filed four memoranda in response to four separate motions to dismiss. In reviewing the memoranda, Judge Brian A. Davis wrote, he noted that the legal citations “seemed amiss.” After spending several hours investigating the citations, he was unable to find three of the cases cited in two of the memoranda.
At a hearing on the motions to dismiss, the judge started out by informing plaintiff’s counsel of the fictitious cases he’d found and asking how they’d been included in the filings. When the lawyer said he had no idea, the judge ordered him to file a written explanation of the origin of the cases.
In that letter, the attorney acknowledged that he had “inadvertently” included citations to multiple cases that “do not exist in reality.” He attributed the citations to an unidentified “AI system” that someone in his law office had used to “locat[e] relevant legal authorities to support our argument[s].” He apologized to the judge for the fake citations and expressed regret for failing to “exercise due diligence in verifying the authenticity of all caselaw references provided by the [AI] system.”
The court then scheduled another hearing to learn more about how the cases came to be cited and to consider whether to impose sanctions. As the judge further reviewed the attorney’s filings, he found an additional nonexistent case in a third memoranda, bringing it to four fictitious cases in three separate memoranda.
At the hearing, the attorney again apologized. He said that the filings had been prepared by three people in his office — two recent law school graduates and an associate attorney.
“Plaintiff’s Counsel is unfamiliar with AI systems and was unaware, before the Oppositions were filed, that AI systems can generate false or misleading information,” Judge Davis. “He also was unaware that his associate had used an AI system in drafting court papers in this case until after the Fictitious Case Citations came to light.”
While plaintiff’s counsel had reviewed the filings for style, grammar and flow, he told the court, he had not checked the accuracy of the citations.
The judge wrote that he found the lawyer’s explanation to be truthful and accurate, he believed the lawyer did not submit the citations knowingly, and the lawyer’s expression of contrition was sincere.
“These facts, however, do not exonerate Plaintiff’s Counsel of all fault, nor do they obviate the need for the Court to take responsive action to ensure that the problem encountered in this case does not occur again in the future.”
Citing the original and now famous hallucinated citations case Mata v. Avianca, in which the court said, “Many harms flow from the submission of fake opinions,” the judge wrote:
“With this admonition in mind, the Court concludes that, notwithstanding Plaintiff’s Counsel’s candor and admission of fault, the imposition of sanctions is warranted in the present circumstances because Plaintiff’s Counsel failed to take basic, necessary precautions that likely would have averted the submission of the Fictitious Case Citations. His failure in this regard is categorically unacceptable.”
After going through a thoughtful discussion of Mata and other prior cases involving hallucinated citations, the judge distinguished this case in that the lawyer was “forthright in admitting his mistakes” and had not done anything to compound them, as happened in Mata. Even so, he said, the conduct required sanctions of some sort.
“Plaintiffs Counsel’s knowing failure to review the case citations in the Oppositions for accuracy, or at least ensure that someone else in his office did, before the Oppositions were filed with this Court violated his duty under Rule 11 to undertake a ‘reasonable inquiry,'” Judge Davis said. “Simply stated, no inquiry is not a reasonable inquiry.”
For that reason, the judge decided to impose a sanction on the lawyer of $2,000 (payable to the court, not the opposing party).
The judge ended his opinion with what he described as the “broader lesson” for attorneys generally:
“It is imperative that all attorneys practicing in the courts of this Commonwealth understand that they are obligated under Mass. Rule Civ. P. 11 and 7 to know whether Al technology is being used in the preparation of court papers that they plan to file in their cases and, if it is, to ensure that appropriate steps are being taken to verify the truthfulness and accuracy of any AI-generated content before the papers are submitted. …
“The blind acceptance of Al-generated content by attorneys undoubtedly will lead to other sanction hearings in the future, but a defense based on ignorance will be less credible, and likely less successful, as the dangers associated with the use of Generative AI systems become more widely known.”
]]>The Belgium document automation company ClauseBase has launched a major expansion of its product to add new capabilities for clause extraction, AI-powered document review, and automated proofreading, all with the goal of providing an all-in-one platform, within Microsoft Word, for contract drafting, reviewing and negotiating.
ClauseBase launched in 2018 as a contract drafting platform that allows lawyers to turn their clauses into intelligent and reusable clauses and manage them in a clause library. It enabled lawyers to use the clauses as building blocks, while ensuring internal consistency in terminology, grammar, style, cross-referencing, and other elements.
It has two core products. Clause9 is the original document automation software it launched in 2018. ClauseBuddy, launched in 2022, is an AI-powered drafting toolbox that works as a plug-in within Microsoft Word and Outlook.
With this new launch of its expanded product set, the company says it now provides a one-stop shop for legal drafting. New features include:
Clause extraction from drafting history. ClauseBase says that its new clause extraction technology enables law firms and legal departments to efficiently search their drafting history, extracting and repurposing clauses with ease. It also integrates with the SEC’s EDGAR database to offer millions of sample clauses out of the box. While other legal tech companies offer similar functionality as their core offering, for ClauseBase, the company says, this is simply another tool in the toolbox.
AI-powered document reviewing. Using generative AI, ClauseBase now allows lawyers to quickly conduct a red flag analysis of any third-party document, identifying potential issues and suggesting improvements. This feature augments ClauseBase’s existing AI drafting support, which allows users to draft and redraft clauses and documents with a short prompt, as well as query documents for important information. For lawyers, this means that, rather than rely solely on LLM-driven reviewing, they can tailor their review preferences.
Automated definitions and proofreading. This feature scans legal documents for typical errors like broken cross-references, inconsistencies between definitions and capitalized terminology, and more. Here again, while ClauseBase says it is not the first to add this functionality, it says the significance is that it incorporates it into a single, comprehensive set of legal drafting tools.
Here is a video showing the new features.
“We are former lawyers at ClauseBase; legal drafting was 90% or more of what we did in our previous lives.” said Maarten Truyens, founder and CEO. “Our goal has always been to bring back joy to this crucial but broken process.
“While we started with document automation in 2018, we quickly realized this was only one piece of the legal drafting puzzle and we have been hard at working developing our Microsoft Word plugin ClauseBuddy into an assistant that helps with all the annoying and time-consuming parts of the work.”
(ClauseBase was a finalist in the 2021 Startup Alley at ABA Techshow, which I oversee.)
]]>Still less than a year since it launched, CoCounsel, the generative AI legal assistant originally developed by Casetext, has had quite a year. Now, as it expands into new markets, we get details on its adoption to date.
It was March 1, 2023, that Casetext launched CoCounsel, a product developed in partnership with OpenAI that uses the GPT-4 large language model to assist lawyers with a variety of tasks.
Barely four months later, on the strength of the CoCounsel product, Thomson Reuters gobbled up Casetext for a whopping $650 million, and then, after just another four months, TR previewed plans to integrate CoCounsel across its core products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, Document Intelligence, and HighQ.
It said at the time it would also continue to offer CoCounsel as a standalone product under the name CoCounsel Core.
Now, TR is formally announcing the expansion of CoCounsel Core to Canada and Australia, the first of TR’s planned expansion of the product to English-speaking countries beyond the U.S.
“Bringing CoCounsel Core to markets that until now haven’t had access to professional-grade AI is a tremendous accomplishment as we approach the one-year anniversary of CoCounsel’s debut, and just three months after launching CoCounsel Core in the U.S. with Thomson Reuters,” said Jake Heller, the former cofounder of Casetext and now head of product, CoCounsel, at TR.
Even as it expands CoCounsel to other markets, TR is providing new details on the product’s adoption in the U.S.
In the 11 months since CoCounsel’s launch, it has been rolled out at more than 45 large law firms in the United States — including six of the Am Law 10 — which employ in total more than 50,000 lawyers, TR said.
More than 9,000 of those lawyers have received comprehensive, hands-on instruction to prepare them to use the technology effectively and ethically, from a training staff of just four people. TR says it plans to rapidly scale this “rollout playbook” for CoCounsel.
In Canada and Australia, CoCounsel was already in use in a proof-of-concept phase in two firms, McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Canada and Maddocks in Australia.
CoCounsel Core provides customers with eight core generative AI-powered legal skills: Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline.
]]>During ABA Techshow last week in Chicago, I had the opportunity to sit down for a brief conversation with Jack Newton, founder and CEO of law practice technology company Clio, who provided additional details on some of the company’s recent news.
We discussed Clio’s greater focus on midsized law firms, its impending launch of generative AI, its roll-out of features for legal aid providers, and its rebranding of its Lawyaw document automation software.
As I reported a few weeks ago, Clio announced that it would now be heightening its investment and focus on technology for midsized law firms. But in our conversation, Newton emphasized that Clio is not new to the mid-sized market — it already has more than 1,000 midsized firms as customers.
Although Clio started in 2008 with a “laser focus” on solos, Newton said, it quickly started seeing demand from two-person firms, then multiple-lawyer firms, then 20-30 person firms, and ultimately into midsized firms, which Newton defines as firms of 20-200 people.
“We’ve quietly become the market leader in cloud-based law practice management for midsized law firms, with over 1,000 customers in that market,” he said.
Even so, there are a number of other law practice management companies also serving that market, including Actionstep, Centerbase, Filevine, Litify, Neos and Surepoint. Given that fact, I asked Newton how Clio can distinguish itself from those competitors.
Learn more about Clio Manage and Clio Grow at the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
In part, the proof is in the pudding, he suggested, given that Clio is already serving a significant number of midsized firms. The only real challenge Clio faces in that market, he believes, is one of its own making – the perception that Clio is a platform designed only for smaller firms.
In my own conversations with others about Clio’s announcement, some questioned whether Clio’s platform has the complexity (in a good sense) and configurability that midsized firms would need, pointing out that other products take a database-heavy approach that provides firms with a number of options for customization.
But Newton’s response is that any firm saying it wants a more database-driven offering has a “1970s problem.” Firms today want an interface their members love using, a platform that has mobile capabilities, a robust integration ecosystem, and a strong API, he believes.
“That’s the superpower we have,” he said.
In fact, Newton said, one of the largest law firms in the world uses Clio for matter management and time tracking, and then ties that into its back-end systems through Clio’s API.
Clio has already put extensive product development resources into features designed to better serve the mid-firm market, Newton said, and going forward will invest even more deliberately in serving that market.
That includes development of features such as better reporting, more sophisticated permissioning, enhanced security, single sign-on, and other enterprise grade features.
At the same time, Newton wanted to emphasize that Clio is not moving away from its core market of solos and small firms. “That’s still the heart of our market and the foundation of our growth,” he said. “We will never leave our solo/small base.”
In fact, his eventual goal for Clio is to serve firms of all sizes, from the smallest to the largest. Clio’s mission statement, he notes, is to transform the legal experience for all, and that means that eventually, not only midsized firms, but the Am Law 200 and Am Law 100 will be using Clio, he hopes.
This pattern has been proven in other industries, he said, because it is easier for a software company that starts out targeting the lower end of the market to move up than for something that started at the top of the market to move down.
Remember Clio Duo? At the Clio Cloud Conference last October, the company announced that it would be launching this proprietary generative AI built natively into its products.
Well, soon it is arriving. Newton said that Clio Duo is being released in an early access version this month, with some customers already being onboarded, and then will become generally available to customers in the second quarter of the year.
Also at last fall’s Clio conference, the company introduced Clio for Legal Aid, bringing new features to Clio Manage designed specifically for legal aid organizations, together with discounted subscription pricing for those organizations.
The new features include tools to help legal aid organizations better manage grants and funding sources, report on grant deliverables, calculate intake eligibility, and use grant-funded or sliding-scale billing functionality.
In our conversation last week, Newton said that the development of the legal aid product was consistent with the same mission that is driving its move into midsized firms, that of transforming the legal experience for all.
“Moving up-market is part of it, but moving into pro bono and low bono is as well,” he said. “We’re investing very deliberately in the legal aid market.”
Drawing a parallel to the Steve Jobs quote that bringing iTunes to Windows users was “like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell,” Newton expressed the belief that the legal aid market is not well served by existing case management software designed for them.
By bringing that market a better user experience and more powerful cloud platform, he maintained, he can help legal aid significantly expand the number of people it serves. Clio will continue to invest in serving that market, he said, including through the development of AI tools.
By the way, something I did not realize about Clio for Legal Aid is that it was developed with the help of a Technology Initiative Grant from the Legal Services Corporation after the Neighborhood Legal Services Program in Washington, D.C., began looking for a way to innovate its case management. With the TIG funding, NLSP worked with Clio and A2J Tech to develop what became Clio for Legal Aid.
Having written earlier this month about the need for creative funding for innovation in legal services, I was glad to learn this back story.
Last week, as I reported here, Clio announced that Lawyaw, the document automation software it acquired in 2021, will now be called Clio Draft. When we spoke last week, Newton said this is more than a rebranding of the product, but a reflection of its deeper integration into the company’s products and brand.
Describing documents as the “atomic unit of work that lawyers operate on,” Newton said Clio Draft will continue to be more tightly integrated into core workflows within Clio Manage and Clio Grow.
And he teased further development, promising that AI would “change the game” for Clio Draft.
]]>This week brought the eighth annual Startup Alley pitch competition, the opening night event of ABA Techshow at which 15 startups competed for top honors by delivering their pitches live to an audience of Techshow attendees.
Now on my way home from Techshow, I finally have a chance to post the winners. Here were the companies that won the top three spots:
Congratulations to the winners and to all the startups that competed this year.
Huge thanks to the Techshow planning board for making this all possible, particularly this year’s cochairs Sofia Lingos and Cynthia Thomas, as well as to everyone at the ABA who works on this behind the scenes.
Huge thanks also to Clio and its founder and CEO Jack Newton for sponsoring Startup Alley for the eighth year running.
Last but not least, thanks to ABA President-elect Bill Bay for honoring us with his presence and helping to recognize the winners.
Pictured above: Techshow cochair Sofia Lingos, Clio CEO Jack Newton, AltFee cofounders Digby Leigh and Scott Leigh, Paxton AI cofounder and CEO Tanguy Chau, Skribe.ai founder Karl Seelbach, Techshow cochair Cynthia Thomas, me, and ABA President-elect Bill Bay.
]]>Law practice management company Clio said today that Lawyaw, the document automation software it acquired in 2021, will now be called Clio Draft.
The new name reflects a deepened integration of products and services since the acquisition, Clio says.
“Uniting under the Clio banner gives us a clear focus on delivering value to our customers,” said Clio founder and CEO Jack Newton. “It also sets us up to enhance the future capabilities of legal document innovation by consolidating and centralizing our efforts.
New said Clio will continue to invest in and grow its services in document automation as an essential component of its multi-product platform.
Clio Draft will maintain Lawyaw’s user interface and features, Clio said. Its features include:
Since acquiring Lawyaw, Clio says, it has invested in expanding the software’s scope and functionality. This includes expanding its court form libraries to cover all 50 states, as well as federal immigration forms.
Clio says it has also invested in expanding the team dedicated to building and supporting this product by more than 50%.
Under this new brand, Clio says, it plans to continue investing in and growing its document innovation capabilities.
]]>At the American Bar Association’s Techshow this week in Chicago, the law practice management platform Smokeball will unveil its plan to deploy generative artificial intelligence within its platform across the client lifecycle, from intaking new clients to handling their matters to billing them for the work.
It will launch the first set of these Smokeball AI features in beta in March in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, with general availability around the middle of the year, and then subsequent features later this year or the beginning of next.
“Smokeball AI enhances functionality within its existing platform, optimizing workflows to help law firms expedite intake processes, search for legal answers, navigate through matter documents, draft correspondence, and provide tailored descriptions of work directly on invoices,” the company says.
Learn more about Smokeball in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
During an exclusive preview of the new AI features for LawSites last week, Smokeball CEO Hunter Steele said that Smokeball’s operating philosophy regarding AI is that it won’t replace small law practitioners, but that those who leverage it for efficiency will eclipse those who do not.
Also driving Smokeball’s AI development is its belief that it is important to integrate AI into the tools lawyers already use, rather than require them to learn new tools, and to ensure that it is delivered with the highest security standards and protocols, he said.
“That’s how we think about AI — how do we efficiently put this into their work processes, rather than putting a whole other tool in another screen or another browser to take them away from what they’re doing,” Steele said. “So we’re engaging with our client lifecycle, we’re engaging with our seamlessly integrated experience.”
The first set of features, called Smokeball Matter.ai, launching in beta in March, will focus on helping lawyers get work done for their clients and manage their matters. It will consist of three components:
Two other features will also launch in beta in March. They were not included in the demonstration I saw, but they are:
Farther down the road — possibly late this year or early next year — are two additional AI features:
Demonstrating the matter and documents AI, Steele said its power is based on the extensiveness of the information customers store in the platform. This includes all of their matter information, virtually all of their documents and emails, and full financial, billing and accounting information.
This new feature will apply AI against those three categories of information — matters, documents and emails, and financials. When the feature rolls out, users will see a new tab, Matter AI. This is where the user can enter questions, either directly to ChatGPT with the “Ask OpenAI” option or against the client matter with the “Ask the Matter” option.
With the Ask the Matter option, a user might start by asking a general legal question related to the matter, for which the answer will be provided through the partners described above, or they could ask questions specific to the matter.
In the demonstration, Steele asked a question about non-financial contributions in the context of a divorce. The chat returned an answer describing what that means and providing examples. (A disclaimer on the screen warns that AI can make mistakes and users should check important information.)
Steele then went on to ask questions specific to the matter, starting with a quick question asking for the client’s contact details, which it quickly returned. He then took it a bit further and asked it to summarize the parties in the matter. It quickly showed their names, the role in the proceedings, their contact information, and their representatives.
Steele next asked it to summarize the wife’s non-financial contributions to the marriage. Drawing from the documents in the case, it showed a list of the wife’s non-financial contributions, organized under headings such as “Contributions As A Homemaker.” It also pointed to the document on which it based its answer — in this case, the wife’s affidavit, enabling the user to quickly preview the document and verify the information.
From there, a user could choose to narrow the queries to the specific document. By clicking “Ask This File,” the chat’s answers narrow from the the entire matter to just the document at hand, providing document-level context for the answers.
Based on that, the lawyer may decide the husband needs to beef up his own affidavit with regard to non-financial contributions. Using the same chat interface, the lawyer can tell the AI to draft an email to the client explaining the importance of including additional non-financial contributions and providing examples for him to think about. In just a few moments, the AI drafts the email. Toolbar options let the lawyer drop that text into an email, letterhead, a memo, or elsewhere. In his demo, Steele chose to create an email, and Smokeball opened Outlook, with the draft text added, and the wife’s affidavit automatically included as an attachment.
If the lawyer wanted to change the tone of the email, to make it more or less formal, the AI can do that as well.
Another way to access the AI is when viewing the list of documents in a matter. Right click on any document and there is the option to chat with that document. The user could ask questions about the document or instruct the AI to redraft it in another form, such as from a formal letter to an informal email.
One final application Steele demonstrated was using the AI to create a summary of activity. In his example, he asked it to draft an email to a client summarizing what was done on the client’s matter during the month of January. It reviews documents, calendar events, timesheets and other information and creates a narrative summary of the work.
“So we’re utilizing all of that matter context, all of those documents, everything else, and we’re making it accessible within Smokeball itself and hooking into Word and Outlook to be able to follow on with that correspondence or email or whatever it is at any one time,” Steele said.
Each individual user’s history of AI chats is saved within Smokeball, but users can delete their histories at any time. Only they and the law firm’s Smokeball administrator can see the individual chat histories.
“We are incredibly excited to support law firms as their trusted advisor in legal technology and have quickly realized the utility that AI is going to provide our clients,” Steele said. “Smokeball is uniquely placed to help firms embrace AI due to the advanced productivity and document generation capabilities, our all-in-one and secure environment.
“Ultimately, we can truly help our clients get more work done faster and more accurately than ever before.”
]]>In November, the organization Frontline Justice launched with the mission of addressing the escalating access to justice crisis by empowering a new category of legal helper, the justice worker. The organization has an ambitious mission: To clear the way for justice workers to exist in all 50 states by 2035.
In pursuit of that mission, it is backed by an impressive founding team that includes Rebecca Sandefur, one of the world’s leading scholars on access to justice (who was on LawNext in 2020); Matthew Burnett, senior program officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF); Jim Sandman, president emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (on LawNext in 2019); and other notable names.
On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Nikole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice. Before starting there in November, Nelson had been executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation, where she was instrumental in launching a statewide community justice worker project that won the 2019 World Justice Challenge. She was also instrumental in bringing about an Alaska Supreme Court rule change in 2022 allowing justice workers supervised by Alaska Legal Services to provide limited scope legal help in certain situations.
Nelson describes how justice workers helped Alaska Legal Services better serve the legal problems of people across the state’s remotest regions, and how new models of justice workers in other states could similarly help reach those who are not now receiving adequate help for their legal problems. She also recognizes that Frontline Justice faces obstacles in achieving its mission, and she shares her thoughts on how it can overcome them.
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.
]]>Thomson Reuters is shutting down its Firm Central law practice management software and will discontinue support for the product after Sept. 30, 2024.
Thomson Reuters launched Firm Central in 2013 at a media event in its then-headquarters in Eagan, Minn., as its answer to a then-growing crop of cloud-based practice management software such as Clio, which launched in 2008, MyCase, which launched in 2010, and LexisNexis Firm Manager, which LexisNexis launched in 2011 and then shut down in 2017.
At the time of the launch, TR differentiated Firm Central from other products on the market by building in direct integrations with Westlaw and with Microsoft Outlook.
By all accounts, however, Firm Central never gained the market traction of many of its competitors, and TR used it primarily as an add-on benefit to help sell Westlaw to smaller law firms.
In a notice posted this week, TR attributed the shutdown to a crowded and fragmented market:
“Thomson Reuters holds a robust portfolio of strategic products that require funding. The Small Law Practice Management market’s very fragmented with many companies funded by private equity competing in this space. Most of these companies only have 1 product to fund and support. It’s not strategic for Thomson Reuters to allocate capital to compete in this market.”
In the notice, TR says that it has designed Clio as its “preferred transition partner.” It says that Clio is offering promotional pricing to those who switch there.
“While not mandatory, Thomson Reuters chose Clio for their commitment to seamless migrations and your ongoing success, with that in mind, we encourage you to transition to their service,” the notice says.
Customers can extract their own data using Firm Manager’s export functionality before the Sept. 30 sunset date. TR has created a data extraction user guide to explain the export process.
Another migration option for law firms is Universal Migrator, the data migration tool for law firms that, coincidentally, I wrote about earlier this week. Tony Valenti, the company’s founder and CEO, said Universal Migrator can do full-scale data and document migrations from Firm Central to a variety of platforms, including Clio, MyCase, NetDocuments, Lawmatics, and others.
Clio’s website says that it is offering three months free to firms that move there from Firm Central. The site says Clio has migration specialists to help firms transition from Firm Central to Clio.
]]>This was just passed along to me from someone at the Washington State Bar Association. If you are interested, act fast. The deadline is tomorrow. I am posting the notice verbatim.
]]>In March 2024, the WSBA Board of Governors (BOG) will consider the formation of a Technology Task Force. If approved, the Task Force will 1) assess the legal technology landscape, identifying threats and opportunities across various sectors, and 2) make recommendations that support and strengthen the use of technology in members’ practice, emphasizing effective, efficient, and ethical use of technology that enhances equitable access to justice.
The proposed Task Force seeks a WSBA member who is interested in serving as chair for the duration of the Task Force’s existence (15 months) and has the following qualifications:
- Demonstrated experience in a leadership role on a formal committee or task force.
- Sufficient capacity to devote to the effort (the position of chair may require 10 hours/month).
- Subject matter expertise/experience (particularly in the intersection of law and technology).
- Ability to represent the task force at BOG meetings.
- Familiarity with the Access to Justice Technology Principles as adopted by the Washington Supreme Court.
The chair’s term will begin upon approval of the Task Force charter.
If interested, please email a cover letter and resume to barleaders@wsba.org no later than 5 p.m. on Friday, February 9, 2024. Late submissions may not be considered. Applications will be reviewed by the WSBA President, co-chairs of the Member Engagement Council, WSBA’s Practice Management Advisor, and WSBA’s Advancement Department Director. The WSBA President will make the final recommendation, subject to approval by the BOG.
MaxVal Group, a company that provides intellectual property management software for law firms and corporations, has entered into a strategic partnership with Relecura, a developer of AI-enabled patent analytics and insights, through which MaxVal will become a reseller of Relecura’s services and will integrate Relecura’s analytics into Symphony, its flagship IP management platform.
With this partnership, Symphony, a patent and trademark management platform used by corporations and law firms, will now feature Relecura’s AI-enabled analytics and insights. The integration of Relecura’s services into Symphony is slated to roll out in later this quarter.
This combination, MaxVal says, will give users access to a comprehensive set of services from within Symphony, enabling them to make more informed decisions and streamline their IP management processes.
Also as part of the partnership, MaxVal will act as a reseller of Relecura’s offerings, providing its customers with a more convenient and efficient way of procuring advanced IP analytics tools and solutions.
“We’ve chosen to partner with Relecura because they are the industry’s leader in AI-enabled IP analytics and insights, with AI solutions already in use at some of the world’s leading innovators,” said Kurt Wedel, chief revenue officer at MaxVal.
“By integrating their services into Symphony, we’re enhancing the capabilities of our platform, providing our users with unparalleled access to powerful IP analytics and insights, ultimately empowering them to make smarter, more strategic decisions.”
George Koomullil, CEO and founder of Relecura, said he is excited to partner with MaxVal and to bring Relecura’s IP and AI expertise to a wider audience.
“This is clearly a great fit – two technology leaders coming together. Working collaboratively, we aim to empower businesses and IP professionals with the AI-enabled solutions they need to navigate the complex landscape of intellectual property.”
]]>It was a bathroom break that inspired Bradley Neal, a 3L at The George Washington University Law School, to develop a product that uses generative AI to help law students better understand and brief cases.
Returning to class after a visit to the bathroom, he had lost the thread of the case the professor was discussing. He had not actually read the case, only a summary, and when she asked a question about it, it involved something the summary had not covered.
“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I hope she doesn’t call on me, because that wasn’t in my summary, and I don’t know the answer,'” Neal told me.
Fearing he might be called on, he quickly found the case online, sent it to GPT-4, and asked it the question, telling it to respond based on the text of the case. In seconds, he had the answer.
That GPT-4 could so easily provide answers to questions about cases intrigued him. But then he also wondered whether it could do more, whether it could produce briefs for cases.
Based on that bathroom-break induced inspiration, Neal went on to develop — and this week launch — Lexplug, a site developed for law students “to make interacting with cases more accessible, efficient, and engaging.”
At its core, Lexplug is a library of case briefs, all created by Neal using GPT-4. So far, he has created 7,000 briefs, and hopes to have 50,000 by the end of the year. To decide which cases to prioritize, he collected a variety of syllabi for basic law school courses such as constitutional law and torts and extracted the key cases. He also has the full text of every briefed case.
If you are tempted to try that for yourself, be aware that it took Neal a month of trial and error to get GPT-4 to reliably generate accurate and hallucination-free briefs. “We would grade each brief, we would give it a mark up to 10, and we didn’t stop until every single brief was a nine or 10.”
In addition to the briefs, Lexplug has two features to help students better understand and interact with cases: Gunnerbot, for having conversations with cases, and “Explain Like I’m 5” Mode, for simplifying legal jargon. Neal demonstrates each of these in the video above.
Gunnerbot is essentially the fully developed version of the quick query Neal did back in that law school class. It is named for gunners, a somewhat pejorative term to describe those over-eager law students who are always raising their hands.
It provides a chat interface for students to ask questions about cases when they are viewing a brief. It answers the questions based only on the text of the case, so there is little danger of it hallucinating an answer, Neal says.
The second feature, Explain Like I’m 5, a phrase often used on Reddit to ask for something to be put into layperson’s terms, enables users to “translate” case briefs into a simplified version — roughly the level of a first year college student or high school senior, Neal says — to make it easier to understand.
Launching soon is another feature that will allow users to create case briefs on the fly. If they search for a case that has not yet been briefed, Lexplug will send them to a page where they can enter the case name and citation and within 90 seconds get the brief. That in turn spins up a Gunnerbot for the case, and then both the brief and the Gunnerbot become part of the system for all users.
Initially, that will work only for U.S. state and federal cases, but Neal intends to expand it to work for agency decisions and international cases.
Lexplug offers a seven-day free trial, after which a subscription is $9 per month. Neal sees his primary competitor as being Quimbee, whose website says it has 45,500 case briefs, for which it charges $19 a month.
If developing a legal tech product while still in law school sounds ambitious, you should know that this is the third tech project Neal has developed while attending GW Law.
Last year, frustrated with the Supreme Court’s outdated media player for its oral arguments, the former software engineer developed a way to scrape the audio and launched a podcast, The Supreme Court: Oral Arguments. Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, it streams the court’s oral arguments on the day they are published, and has over 7,000 followers.
When the frequent Reddit user wanted a way to easily have voice conversations with other redditors, he developed Channel 42, a voice chat channel that creates temporary, authentication-free voice chats for up to four people.
He has also developed a Chrome extension legal research assistant, Counsel Companion. The simple app lets you tell it a story — a fact scenario — in plain English, and it will generate a set of legal search terms that you can then use on a legal research site such as Westlaw or Lexis.
If you are wondering what Neal plans to do after law school, well, he has not yet decided. Even so, it certainly seems likely he will end up doing something that involves legal tech.
]]>We are just a week away from the Startup Alley pitch competition that is the opening night event of ABA TECHSHOW, and I recently had the opportunity to catch up with last year’s winner, Tony Valenti, founder and CEO of Universal Migrator, who told me that, since Startup Alley, “it’s been a very good year.”
“It definitely brings a lot of visibility,” Valenti said. “I think Startup Alley was a great benefit, and I think winning was a great benefit.”
In fact, Valenti’s company has gone from startup competitor last year to diamond sponsor this year, the highest level of TECHSHOW sponsorship.
Given that I organize and moderate Startup Alley, this is music to my ears. But I am not so naive as to believe that winning Startup Alley, alone, can lead to success. You need a product that solves a problem and does it well.
The problem Universal Migrator solves is data migration for law firms and legal organizations — most often from one law practice management platform to another or one document management system to another. It enables migrations from more than 100 sources, with new ones added almost every week.
“Data migrations in legal tech have traditionally really sucked,” Valenti said. “The problem with data migrations, generally speaking, is that a lot of people traditionally have tried to use CSV files to move data around. That just doesn’t work the way that Universal Migrator moves data.
“We make it really easy to pull data out of different systems and then push it into different systems, so projects that traditionally would have taken a human maybe seven or 14 days to do are now like two-hour projects.”
To be clear, that two hours is human time — the time it takes to set up and configure the migration. The actual time required to migrate all of a firm’s data varies depending on the firm and its systems, but averages 24 hours.
Even then, Universal Migrator moves recent data and documents first, so a firm can begin working in its new system even as older data is still being migrated, Valenti says.
One reason Universal Migrator has seen so much growth over the past year, Valenti believes, is that firms are more frequently changing practice management platforms to find one that best aligns with their business and areas of law.
Among practice management systems, there is no real “secret sauce” that distinguishes them, he says.
“If you look at pretty much all of the practice management systems, they are all selling the same ketchup,” he says. “Some of them have ketchup made from natural tomatoes, some from hothouse tomatoes, but it’s all the same ketchup.”
But what does differ is the platform and the user interface. “So you might have a firm that’s using brand number one and they find that brand number two better aligns with their business and the area of law that they practice.”
When that happens, he says, “Universal Migrator makes what used to be a very laborious, time-consuming and risky process of migrating from one platform to another a lot quicker and a lot less risky.”
When Universal Migrator competed in Startup Alley last year, it could pull data from 65 sources. It is now at over 100 and continuing to add more based on customer requests. The company supports over 200 data migrations a month, Valenti says.
While Universal Migrator has facilitated migrations for law firms and legal organizations from small to large, the primary channel for it to sell its products is not directly to law firms, but through the legal technology consultants and IT consulting firms that work directly with law firms to move them to new systems.
“A lot of law firms come directly to us, but we want to be a channel business,” Valenti says. “We want to be supporting everybody else’s projects and having more projects go to our partners.”
The company also has relationships directly with some practice management companies whose internal migration departments use Universal Migrator to facilitate migrations into their platforms, Valenti told me.
One thing Universal Migrator does not do is make recommendations about practice management or document management platforms.
“Sometimes law firms will ask us, ‘Who do you recommend?’ And I tell them, ‘We don’t recommend anybody, we recommend that you do your own research and you pick the company that best aligns with where you want to go and then we’ll take you there.”
While Universal Migrator will not recommend platforms, it does try to provide unbiased information on exactly what data can be migrated between platforms. Salespeople for practice management companies may not always be well informed or up to data on what data can be migrated from one platform to another, but Universal Migrator can provide this information, Valenti says.
In fact, for many products, its website lists what data can be migrated and which platforms it can migrate that data into.
Valenti also urges law firms to be cautious about signing up-front, long-term deals with practice management companies.
“Whoever you’re signing up with, go month to month until you’re on their platform, using their platform, and you love their platform. Once you love their platform, then have the conversation about moving to a yearly or tri-annual contract.
“But don’t do it up front — don’t get married until you’ve been on a few good dates.”
]]>Best Lawyers, the oldest lawyer ranking and peer review company, has named Kevin Vermeulen, a veteran legal advertising and marketing executive, as senior vice president of business development.
In addition, the company has named Josh Rupall, its director of sales for the past 12 years, as director of client success.
In this new role, the company said, Vermeulen will leverage his expertise in the legal market to grow partnerships with leading lawyers and law firms by unifying traditional marketing and publishing strategies with the digital services Best Lawyers already offers.
Vermeulen has worked in legal marketing and advertising for than 30 years, 22 of them in senior management roles devoted to helping lawyers, law firms and vendors grow their businesses.
Vermeulen joined Best Lawyers last August, when the company acquired the digital marketing agency Good2bSocial, which specializes in serving law firms, legal marketers, lawyers and legal-industry organizations, where he had been partner and chief operating officer.
For 22 years, Vermeulen was with legal and business publishing company ALM Media, where he was most recently senior vice president, chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer.
(Vermeulen and I worked together at ALM.)
“This new position with Best Lawyers is an opportunity to advance our relationships with firms by expanding innovative and comprehensive marketing solutions we offer,” Vermeulen said. “I am thrilled to advance with Best Lawyers, a company that has the esteem and trust of the legal industry.”
Phillip Greer, CEO of Best Lawyers, said the appointment comes on the heels of a year of unparalleled growth for the company. “Best Lawyers is energized by what the future holds and how Kevin will contribute to our next phase.”
Founded in 1981 by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Best Lawyers was one of the earliest companies to create peer-reviewed rankings of lawyers. In 2021, the private equity firm Abry Partners acquired Best Lawyers.
]]>At a time when some 92% of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help, innovative measures are needed to close the justice gap. Recognizing that, Legal Aid of North Carolina, a program that provides free legal services to low-income people through the state, last year became the first legal services program in the United States to launch an Innovation Lab, devoted to identifying and implementing new solutions for bridging the justice gap.
Development of the lab was initiated by Ashley Campbell, who returned to LANC as its CEO in 2022 after having worked there at the start of her career, and Scheree Gilchrist, a longtime LANC attorney who Campbell named as LANC’s first chief innovation officer soon after she became CEO. Also instrumental in creating the lab was Jeffrey M. Kelly, partner at the law firm Nelson Mullins, who now serves as chair of the lab’s advisory board.
Campbell, Gilchrist and Kelly are our guests in today’s episode. Host Bob Ambrogi interviewed them live last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, N.C. The three had just spoken together as part of a panel on creating a culture of innovation in legal services. In this interview, they share their thoughts on that and provide details on the work of the Innovation Lab.
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.
]]>In the blur of activity that was last week, I attended two legal tech conferences, plus an adjacent legal technology summit. After starting the week in New York at the glitzy celebration of big law tech that is Legalweek, and ending it in Charlotte, N.C., at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference devoted to tech for access to justice, I was both struck and troubled by the chasm between these two worlds and what it means for serving the legal needs of all.
We talk often of the justice gap in this country — of the fact that the roughly 50 million low-income Americans receive no or insufficient legal help for 92% of their civil legal problems. The justice gap extends well beyond low-income Americans. Estimates say some 60 percent of small business owners deal with legal problems without the assistance of a lawyer, and countless middle-income Americans go without legal help.
But there is another, related, kind of justice gap in this country. It is the funding gap between those who are developing legal technology to better meet the legal needs of low-income Americans and those who are developing legal tech to serve large law firms and corporate legal departments.
At Legalweek, the focus of the conference is almost exclusively on tech for large law firms and corporate legal departments. The sponsors and exhibitors are focused on products for e-discovery, contract lifecycle management, large firm financial and business management, and the like. The programs, similarly, focus on data privacy, e-discovery, information governance, contract technology, and large-scale litigation.
The exhibit hall spans three floors, the booths are big and bright, and the vendors seemingly all throw parties that are over the top, or quite literally near the top, at venues such as the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center, with freely flowing alcohol and plenty of food.
By contrast, at the ITC conference, the attendees come mostly from the ranks of legal aid offices, pro-bono programs, court self-help staff, and the like. The programs focus on how understaffed legal aid offices and understaffed courts and understaffed community programs can use technology to help meet the influx of low-income people seeking legal help.
The exhibit hall was modest, with 10 simple tables, and there were no lavish parties put on by vendors – just a conference reception with a cash bar (and pretty good food, from what I saw).
The juxtaposition of the glitziness of one conference and the modesty of the other speaks to the larger issue of inequity in legal tech – and specifically financial inequity.
The glitziness of Legalweek reflects the relative wealth of the legal tech sector that serves big law and big corporations. Bank robber Willie Sutton, when asked why he robs banks, famously answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” In the legal tech industry, money pours into tech for big firms and big corporates for the same reason – that’s where the money is.
Estimates say that some $1.4 billion was invested in legal tech in 2023 and $2.2 billion in 2022. Virtually all of that went into products designed for and marketed to the big law and corporate law sectors.
By contrast, the principal source of funding for technology development in the legal services sector is the LSC’s Technology Initiative Grants program. In 2023, the total available funding for TIG was $5 million, and most of the individual grants under the program are less than $40,000.
Think about it: The total TIG funding is roughly the amount of a seed round for a single startup focused on big law tech
Access to justice is a problem that extends beyond those who are low-income. As already noted, many small businesses are unable to afford legal help when they need it. Middle-income households often tackle legal issues on their own, unable to afford a lawyer. Although I haven’t been able to put my finger on stats that would back this up, it seems likely that hundreds of millions of people in the United States – not just those who are low income – face a lack of access to justice.
Meanwhile, those big law firms and big corporate legal departments are helping, what, maybe the top 1% or 2% of the population? Let’s be generous and call it the top 10% of the population.
However you figure it, the conclusion is unavoidable that the vast majority of funding in legal tech is going to products that serve the legal needs of only a small minority, while tech devoted to serving the vast majority of legal needs receives only a miniscule portion of that money.
Granted, the argument can be made that some of this money poured into big law tech trickles down to A2J tech. Generative AI developed and refined for big law, for example, may someday lead to products used to better serve low-income individuals.
It also cannot be ignored that an increasing number of well-financed legal tech companies are developing programs by which they make their tech available to lawyers and legal professionals in the A2J sector. In fact, Relativity, probably the largest e-discovery company in the world, was on site at the ITC conference talking about its Justice for Change program, through which it provides its tech to programs tackling social and racial justice.
But imagine if just a fraction of the billions being spent on big law tech could somehow be diverted to A2J tech? Imagine the impact it could have on narrowing the justice gap in this country?
Willie Sutton might say, “Sorry, that’s not where the money is.” But, in fact, legal tech companies are making money serving the A2J and pro bono sectors. Consider the companies that are part of the Justice Technology Association, all for-profit companies devoted to, as the JTA’s website says, “increasing access to justice for real people in their daily lives.”
There is a tendency to think of the legal tech industry as a monolith. But in traveling last week from relative opulence of Legalweek to the seeming modestly of ITC, it did not feel that way. Rather, it felt like an industry divided between the haves and have-nots.
Let me be very clear that I do not mean in any way to minimize the amazing work being done by technologists in the legal aid sector. The ITC’s agenda was replete with examples of how legal services programs are developing creative and cutting-edge approaches to addressing the justice gap. Several law school programs are also providing valuable support for these efforts.
But when balanced against the enormity of the access to justice problem in this country, these efforts will never be enough. The legal tech industry needs all hands on deck to fight the justice gap. What does that mean?
The justice gap in legal technology is a reflection of the justice gap more generally, and both reflect a capitalist society in which the balance of wealth and resources is wildly out of whack. But more can be done. If the legal tech sector reflected at Legalweek contributed more to the sector reflected at ITC, perhaps that imbalance could be offset, at least slightly, and the justice gap narrowed, even just a bit.
]]>Starting this year, many companies will be required to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company. With that new requirement come new products to help companies and their legal counsel comply. I reported on one of these last month, and now there is another.
Wolters Kluwer is adding a new beneficial ownership information (BOI) functionality to Legisway, the company’s SaaS legal information and contract management platform for corporate legal departments. The new feature enables U.S. Legisway customers that are impacted by the beneficial ownership reporting rule under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) to identify and curate their BOI through a familiar interface, Wolters Kluwer says.
With this functionality, Legisway enables even complex organizations to pinpoint companies that fall subject to the CTA while identifying officers and shareholders who qualify as beneficial owners, Wolters Kluwer says. Sensitive information can be curated and stored from within Legisway’s secure environment. It will also allow for exporting information, such as for importing BOI into a filing solution.
Already, Wolters Kluwer had last month launched a BOI expert solution for filing and ongoing compliance. Wolters Kluwer CT Corporation introduced a beneficial ownership compliance platform intended to simplify filing and compliance for both single-entity and multiple-entity filers.
“Many corporate legal departments already use Legisway to manage legal data all in one place, including contracts, matters and entity information,” said Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “It is natural to add functionality for storing beneficial ownership information in Legisway to support the need to track reporting entities, beneficial owners and even applicants in the same application used for other legal data.”
]]>Beagle, a company that says it is harnessing the power of native AI to make e-discovery “cruelty free,” has raised $3 million in a seed funding round.
The round was led by ML Capital and supported by other investors including Davidovs Venture Collective (DVC) fund and Hugging Face’s co-founder Thomas Wolf.
Beagle says that, by leveraging advanced technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing, it can significantly reduce the time and costs associated with first-pass e-discovery reviews.
“The platform’s capability to automate the first pass review is unparalleled, offering the speed of 100 attorneys working simultaneously, but at a fraction of the cost, without compromising quality,” the company says.
Founded in 2021, and currently in beta, Beagle will be one of the 15 startups competing next week in Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW. It says it is currently serving customers and has already been used used for high-profile cases. It expects a broader commercial release later this quarter.
Beagle’s cofounder and CEO, Sergey Demyanov, was formerly manager of machine learning at Snap Inc. and, before that, founder of a company called Teleport Future Technologies, which used machine learning for visual editing, and which Snap acquired in 2018.
If you are interested in joining the waitlist to try Beagle, you can do so here.
]]>Today on Legaltech Week, live at 3 p.m., the panelists will share their impressions of Legaltech Week, which wrapped up yesterday. I’ll also talk about another legal tech conference I attended this week, the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference. Of course, we’ll also talk about any other notable news this week from the world of legal tech.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up free here to attend. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions. You can also catch prior episodes as a podcast or on YouTube.
Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:
Hope you will join us.
]]>The legal technology company Clio, which started 16 years ago as a law practice management platform tailored to solos and small firms, said this week that it will now heighten its focus and investment on technology for mid-sized law firms of more than 20 employees.
“In an era where technological advancement defines business success, mid-sized law firms face unique challenges in the legal market,” said Jack Newton, Clio’s founder and CEO. “Big law firms are making major investments in AI, and smaller, more agile firms are pacing ahead in adoption. Mid-sized firms must look ahead to an industry dominated by AI to ensure their future technology needs are met.”
More than 1,000 mid-sized law firms already subscribe to Clio, the company says, and it will now more heavily invest in products tailored to this market.
In conjunction with this announcement, Clio released its 2024 Legal Trends for Mid-Sized Firms report, which finds a significant discrepancy in the adoption of cloud-based legal practice management software between mid-sized and smaller law firms.
Only 27% of mid-sized law firms are using cloud-based products compared to 73% of smaller firms.
That signals a potential gap in AI readiness and technological integration across the mid-sized segment, Clio says, asserting that cloud-based practice management products can be a critical first steps for firms seeking to position themselves to implement AI.
Last fall, Clio announced that it would be launching Clio Duo in 2024, a proprietary generative AI tool that will be natively built into all Clio products, beginning with Clio Manage.
Clio says the first generation of the product will provide:
“Our commitment goes beyond software,” Newton said. “It’s about empowering mid-sized firms to thrive in a competitive legal landscape by providing the tools and knowledge they need.”
]]>TermScout, an AI contract review company, has launched a first-of-its-kind AI marketplace where lawyers and other contracting experts can build and sell their own contract review AIs, developed based on their unique expertise.
The marketplace, called Screens, provides lawyers with an opportunity turn their expertise from a service into a product, while at the same time enabling those reviewing contracts to get a contract review AI tailored to their specific use case by someone who is an expert in that area.
In effect, users can get an expert review of a contract with just a few clicks. The new platform already has screens published by experts in commercial real estate, privacy, fintech, SaaS, healthcare, consumer, and more.
“Our mission is to help people easily understand contracts,” said Otto Hanson, TermScout CEO. “What we didn’t realize until GPT-4 was that the best way to do that is to create a marketplace for lawyers to build and sell contract review AIs.”
Already, the American Arbitration Association is using Screens to assist parties reviewing dispute resolution clauses.
“Every year, countless parties get stuck in unnecessary litigation because their arbitration and mediation clauses are poorly drafted,” said Diana Didia, the AAA’s chief information and innovation officer. “Creating a screen to draft an efficient, enforceable and cost-effective dispute resolution provision allows the AAA to share its decades of leadership and expertise in the field.”
Until this week, Screens had been available only through a private beta, but TermScout has now released it to the general public. Hanson said he hopes to build a marketplace of Screens to suit every business and personal use case.
Lawyers who develop screens can decide whether to sell them or offer them free. If they choose to sell them, TermScout takes a cut of the sales. Users who purchase a Screen can continue to use it on a repeated basis.
Screens vary in price, from free to $24.99.
(This page explains how lawyers can create screens to earn revenue.)
“As recently as 2023, we believed that getting to frictionless contracting would be a long journey,” said Hanson. “Last year’s generative AI revolution supercharged our progress; and with today’s launch of Screens, lawyers can now create AI digital products with as much time, effort, and technical skill as it takes to write a simple blog post.”
]]>One year ago, Bridget Mary McCormack, the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, took over the helm of the American Arbitration Association, the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution services in the world, as its president and chief executive officer. While on the court, McCormack was a leading voice for innovating the justice system to expand access to justice, and since joining the AAA, she is credited with having “supercharged” its innovation efforts – particularly with regard to its adoption of generative AI.
Also critical to those innovation efforts has been Diana Didia, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at the AAA, who had helped ignite the association’s innovation efforts well before McCormack arrived and whose work not only set the stage for continued innovation but has been critical in helping the organization drive forward into embracing generative AI.
Our guests on today’s LawNext, McCormack and Didia – along with many others on their team – have been working full bore over the past year to drive further innovation at the AAA and to integrate AI into its own work and into the broader field of dispute resolution. They recently launched the AAAi Lab, a website supporting AAA users, arbitrators, in-house counsel and law
firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI, and also ClauseBuilder, a generative AI tool for writing clear and effective ADR clauses.
When we spoke, they were preparing to present this week on the AAA’s innovation efforts and its adoption of AI as part of a panel at Legalweek in New York.
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>The AI-driven legal drafting tool Clearbrief has entered into a partnership with legal research company LexisNexis Legal & Professional that provides its customers who are also Lexis subscribers with access to legal content and citations on Lexis while drafting documents within the Clearbrief add-in for Microsoft Word.
With this new integration, Lexis subscribers can now link citations created in Clearbrief directly to the source materials in the Lexis or Lexis+ legal research services and they can directly access primary law on Lexis from within Clearbrief.
Jacqueline Schafer, Clearbrief’s founder and CEO, told me that, as Clearbrief’s platform has been more widely adopted across large, midsized and boutique firms, as well as courts and government agencies, customers had been requesting the ability to link directly to Lexis content from within their Clearbrief workflows.
“Our team is so honored that LexisNexis has chosen to work with Clearbrief as we continue our mission to help attorneys find and share the evidence behind their legal writing, which fosters a more fair and efficient justice system for all,” Schafer said.
The Clearbrief platform helps lawyers find and view supporting factual evidence while writing briefs and other legal documents in Word, cite-check both facts and law, and generate timelines, exhibits, and tables of authorities.
Within Word, its AI-driven technology analyzes the user’s document and displays the underlying factual and legal sources cited in its side panel, while also suggesting other evidence that could help support an argument in the draft.
As courts increasingly require filings to have hyperlinks to cited law and evidence, and at a time when courts are requiring vigilance in reviewing filings for fake citations, Clearbrief helps ensure that both factual and legal citations are correct and properly supported.
The inclusion of hyperlinks directly to Lexis content, Schafer said, enhances transparency in litigation and facilitates courts’ access to cited materials. When a brief is completed in Clearbrief, it generates a fully hyperlinked version for filing with the court as well as for sharing with counsel and clients.
“This integration underscores our commitment to meeting customers at their point of need,” said Carrie Wright, VP, practical guidance and secondary at LexisNexis. “By seamlessly integrating access to LexisNexis content into their legal workflow, we not only provide invaluable tools but also elevate the efficiency and effectiveness of legal professionals in their drafting tasks.”
]]>Courtroom Insight, a platform for law firms and legal organizations that, until now, tracked information on judges, arbitrators and expert witnesses, is expanding to add a comprehensive lawyer directory.
The directory, which will be accessible only to Courtroom Insight customers, builds on the company’s existing model by aggregating private internal data, dynamically updated proprietary data, and integrated partner content, all in one platform.
Launch of the directory marks a turning point for Courtroom Insight, in that every lawyer – even those who are also judges, mediators or expert witnesses – will now have a single profile.
Profiles will provide detailed educational backgrounds, work histories (including clerkships), admissions, subject matter expertise, and self-reported diversity information.
Read about Courtroom Insight on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
Customers can further enhance listings by layering on data from Courtroom Insight’s partners, including case histories from LexisNexis and Docket Alarm.
Data will also be normalized and organized using the SALI Alliance taxonomy to ensure consistency across fields such as areas of practice.
In a demonstration last week, Mark Torchiana, Courtroom Insight CEO, said that the directory will be useful to law firms for purposes including alumni tracking, business development, experience management, and research.
“For years, clients have been asking us to build an authoritative lawyer directory,” Torchiana said. “Our new solution fits seamlessly into our existing mission of creating an authoritative resource for all people in legal by aggregating critical data and automatically identifying individuals’ connections to lawyers and organizations.”
Torchiana said that one of the biggest changes accompanying this launch is that Courtroom Insight’s various directories are being rolled into one so that everyone will have just one profile.
“The same person within the legal space might have multiple roles,” he explained. “Maybe it’s a former judge, maybe it used to be a counselor, now a current arbitrator or a current expert.
“It’s the same person, but they have different roles and there’s different data assigned to those roles. So we’re going to merge everything together.”
Although many of Courtroom Insight’s customers are larger law firms, Torchiana said that he is looking at pricing options for also making this available to individuals.
In a statement provided to me by the company, Keli Whitnell, director of firm intelligence at Troutman Pepper, who was given early access to the lawyer directory, praised its accuracy.
“Accurate attorney data plays a pivotal role in driving numerous strategic initiatives, spanning from business development and experience management to alumni tracking and recruitment,” she said. “Courtroom Insight’s capability to provide this crucial information through their platform significantly influenced our decision to invest in their solution.”
]]>The International Legal Technology Association, whose ILTACON conference in the United States and ILTACON Europe in London are must-attend events for many in the legal technology industry, announced yesterday that it is adding a new annual conference to its roster, called ILTA EVOLVE.
It appears that ILTA EVOLVE is the successor to a previous ILTA conference, the LegalSEC Summit, which will no longer be held under that name. Cybersecurity, which had been the main focus of the Summit, will be one of the two main focuses of this new conference.
Scheduled for April 29 to May 1, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C., the conference will also focus on generative AI. Future years’ topics will reflect “the industry’s latest challenges and trends,” an announcement said.
“ILTA EVOLVE is targeted at legal technology professionals and members of the broader legal profession, almost all of whom are dramatically impacted by technology and the process disruption that it drives,” said Ken Jones, cochair of the conference and and COO at Tanenbaum Keale in New Jersey.
Registration will open on Feb. 7. The cost will be $999 for ILTA members and $1,299 for others.
]]>This week brought notable funding rounds for two legal technology companies, Proof and Spellbook, and a much-smaller seed round for a newer legal tech startup.
Proof Technology, whose platform facilitates on-demand service of process and electronic filing, has closed a $30.4 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Long Ridge Equity Partners with participation from existing investors including Blue Heron Capital and The LegalTech Fund.
The company says it will use this new capital to accelerate revenue growth, expand electronic filing capabilities, enhance integrations with legal industry case management software, and more deeply embrace AI to create additional efficiencies for its users.
Proof provides a litigation services marketplace where law firms and government agencies can access a nationwide network of process servers, electronic court filing services, and remote notarization. More than 5,000 law firms and government agencies currently use its platform to deliver or e-file close to 20,000 documents each month, the company says.
In 2022, I interviewed Proof’s founder Eric Voogt for my LawNext podcast, where the Colorado lawyer described how he had seen the service-of-process business as antiquated and in need of a technological upgrade. He founded the company in 2016, and when we spoke in 2022, he had just raised a $7 million Series A round.
“Since our founding, we’ve been helping law firms, corporations, and government agencies more easily serve and file summons, subpoenas, complaints, and other legal documents anywhere in the country, dramatically reducing the time and hassle involved in serving and filing legal documents,” Voogt said this week in announcing this latest funding round.
Spellbook, a company whose product uses GPT-4 and other generative AI models to speed contract drafting and review directly within Microsoft Word, said this week that it has raised $2o million in a Series A round.
This is the second big raise in under a year for the company, formerly known as Rally Legal. Last May, it raised $10.9 million in a seed round led by Moxxie Ventures, with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Inovia Capital, The LegalTech Fund, Bling Capital and others.
This latest round was led by Inovia and included participation from those same investors plus others.
The company says it will use the funds to scale into 30,000 law firms worldwide, while also developing new functionality: AI that mimics the style of a lawyer and that can automate a lawyer’s full end-to-end workflow, starting with a client email, and that is 10x more accurate for contract work than anything else on the market.
“This raise marks a major milestone for our team, and is indicative of the market traction we saw in 2023,” said Scott Stevenson, cofounder and CEO. “With the new capital, we’ll continue innovating within the legal AI sector, partnering with the most law firms of any generative AI that we know of –and more importantly, to continue delivering new value to our customers.”
Over the last seven months, since announcing its seed funding, Spellbook’s customer base has grown nearly 300% and it is now working with over 1,700 law firms and legal teams, the company says, and from 2022 to 2023, its revenue grew 10x.
Legalyze.ai, a startup that promises to revolutionize how legal professionals handle case work, has received a $100,000 angel investment from the Bethesda, Md., venture capital firm Payment Ventures.
The Dallas-based startup says it uses AI to help lawyers quickly review and generate documents in litigation, enabling them to more quickly create summaries, timelines and procedural documents.
“We are thrilled to have Payment Ventures on board,” said Legalyze.ai CEO Chris Ford. “Their belief in our vision for Legalyze.ai is a powerful affirmation of our approach to leveraging AI in legal workflows. This funding will propel us forward, enhancing our platform’s features and extending our reach in the legal tech market.”
]]>
A new ethics opinion from The Florida Bar says that lawyers may ethically use generative AI technologies, provided they are careful to adhere to their ethical obligations.
The opinion also urges lawyers to continue to develop competency in the use of new technologies such as AI and the risks and benefits inherent in those technologies.
Approved unanimously by The Florida Bar’s Board of Governors Jan. 19, the non-binding Ethics Advisory Opinion 24-1 was originally drafted by the bar’s Committee on Professional Ethics at the board’s request, in order to provide lawyers guidance on the use of generative AI.
The committee circulated a draft of the opinion in November, to which it received about a dozen comments, according to The Florida Bar News.
Acknowledging that generative AI has the potential to “dramatically improve the efficiency of a lawyer’s practice,” the opinion nonetheless cautions that it also poses a variety of ethical concerns.
“Lawyers using generative AI must take reasonable precautions to protect the confidentiality of client information, develop policies for the reasonable oversight of generative AI use, ensure fees and costs are reasonable, and comply with applicable ethics and advertising regulations,” the opinion says.
In discussing these various ethical issues, the opinion begins with client confidentiality. When using generative AI, a lawyer has a duty to protect the confidentiality of client information, the opinion says. However, a lawyer need not obtain the client’s consent to use AI, unless its use would involve the disclosure of confidential information.
To satisfy their ethical obligations, lawyers using AI must sufficiently understand the technology, the opinion says. Noting that numerous ethics opinions already exist that spell out a lawyer’s duties of confidentiality and competence in areas such as cloud computing, electronic storage disposal, remote paralegal services, and metadata, the opinion says they are “equally applicable to a lawyer’s use of third-party generative AI when dealing with confidential information.”
The opinion also says that confidentiality concerns may be mitigated by use of inhouse generative AI.
Just as a lawyer has a duty to supervise non-lawyer assistants, a lawyer has a duty to make reasonable efforts to ensure that the use of AI is compatible with the lawyer’s own professional obligations, the opinion says.
“Lawyers who rely on generative AI for research, drafting, communication, and client intake risk many of the same perils as those who have relied on inexperienced or overconfident nonlawyer assistants.”
Further, lawyers have a duty to review the work product of generative AI just as they would the work of nonlawyer assistants such as paralegals. “Lawyers are ultimately responsible for the work product that they create regardless of whether that work product was originally drafted or researched by a nonlawyer or generative AI.”
The opinion warns against using generative AI in ways that could constitute the practice of law. In particular, it urges caution in the use of website chatbots, which, the opinion says, present the risk of creating a lawyer-client relationship without the lawyer’s knowledge.
“For these reasons, a lawyer should be wary of utilizing an overly welcoming generative AI chatbot that may provide legal advice, fail to immediately identify itself as a chatbot, or fail to include clear and reasonably understandable disclaimers limiting the lawyer’s obligations.”
Ethics rules prohibit lawyers from fees or costs that are illegal or clearly excessive. Given that AI may make a lawyer more efficient, the opinion says, “this increase in efficiency must not result in falsely inflated claims of time.”
In what is perhaps a nod to those who say that generative AI could be the death knell for the billable hour, the opinion suggests lawyers using generative AI consider alternative forms of billing.
“Lawyers may want to consider adopting contingent fee arrangements or flat billing rates for specific services so that the benefits of increased efficiency accrue to the lawyer and client alike.”
If a lawyer intends to charge a client for the use of an AI service, the lawyer should inform the client of this, preferably in writing, and ensure that all charges are reasonable and not duplicative, the opinion says.
The opinion cautions lawyers to be careful when using generative AI for advertising and intake. Here again, it singles out the use of AI chatbots, warning lawyers that they will be responsible if a chatbot provides misleading information to prospective clients or communicates in a manner that is inappropriately intrusive or coercive.
“To avoid confusion or deception, a lawyer must inform prospective clients that they are communicating with an AI program and not with a lawyer or law firm employee,” the opinion says.
Lawyers may advertise their use of AI, but cannot claim their AI is superior to the AI used by other lawyers or firms “unless the lawyer’s claims are objectively verifiable.”
What is meant by “objectively verifiable”? That, says the opinion, “is a factual question that must be made on a case-by-case basis.”
The opinion concludes with the note that generative AI is in its infancy and that the ethical issues covered in the opinion should not be considered an exhaustive list.
“Rather, lawyers should continue to develop competency in their use of new technologies and the risks and benefits inherent in those technologies,” the opinion says.
With generative AI often perceived as a radically different and potentially more powerful form of technology, there has been much written about its ethical implications for legal professionals.
My opinion has been that no new rules are needed to address generative AI — that the existing rules and the existing body of ethics opinions pertaining to the use of technology apply with equal force and clarity to generative AI.
This is particularly true of lawyers’ duties to be technologically competent, to protect privileged client data, and to supervise the use of technology by those with whom they work.
Insofar as this opinion relies heavily on prior ethics opinions around subjects such as cloud computing and the duty of technology competence, it underscores that notion that, although generative AI is a newly emerging technology, the same old rules apply.
]]>A new intellectual property tool debuting today uses artificial intelligence to draft patents and office action answers in order to deliver — as its website puts it — “better patents in half of the time.”
Called davinci, the tool was developed by Kili Technology Inc., a company founded in 2018 in France that focuses on building high-quality data sets for training AI, and that has built AI products for such customers as SAP, Airbus, and Allen Institute for AI.
For patent drafting, the company says, davinci ingests text and drawings — such as claims written by the attorney, the invention disclosure, conversations with the inventor, and prior art — to generate a detailed patent and drawing description that fits the required style. Lawyers can then edit the draft to suite their preferences.
For responding to office actions, davinci processes both the patent application and prior art cited by the examiner. It then evaluates the strength of the arguments and makes a recommendation to the attorney on whether to counter them or refine the claims.
The company says that in early testing of the product by a hand-picked group of top 100 IP law firms in North America and Europe, the firms reported time savings of up to 50%.
Access to davinci will remain by invitation-only for the next several months. However, with today’s launch, it is inviting law firms in North America and Europe to join its waitlist. Selected firms will be given free access for the duration of the beta.
For those attending Legalweek in New York next week, davinci will be demonstrating its tool at booth 1224.
For more information about davinci or to join the waitlist, visit davinici’s website or email thomas@getdavinci.ai.
As for the name, François-Xavier (FX) Leduc, cofounder and CEO of Kili Technology, “We named davinci after enduring icon Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest inventor of all time in the realms of creativity, science and technology, to show our tremendous respect for the invention process and intellectual property.”
]]>Join me today at 1 p.m. ET for a free roundtable discussion for law firms, Navigating the New Legal Landscape, Where We Are and What’s Ahead. We plan to take a deep dive into the current state of the industry and offer a lens to what the future holds.
The panel will feature Jayanth Madheswaran, founder and CEO of legal AI company Eve.AI; Jim Hallenbeck, president and CEO at Black Hills AI; and me.
Moderating the discussion will be Garrett Laborde, founder and CEO at Laborde Legal Group, and Michael Smith, cofounder and CEO of the law firm Smith Barid, LLC in Savannah, Ga.
The program is also the kick-off of The Lawyer Club, a free community formed by My Legal Academy to help legal professionals enhance their skills through mastermind calls, live events, and a library of step-by-step SOPs, training, and guides.
]]>
AffiniPay, the parent company of a group of technology products for managing law practices and accepting online payments, including LawPay and MyCase, today announced the launch of AffiniPay IQ, its strategic initiative to embed generative artificial intelligence across all of its products and make AI a native component of legal professionals’ daily workflows.
AffiniPay is kicking off this initiative by releasing the first two of these features in beta within the MyCase law practice management platform. Going forward, it will expand its use of generative AI within MyCase and also to its other legal technology products, CASEpeer, the case management platform for personal injury practices, LawPay, the online payments platform, and Docketwise, the practice management platform for immigration lawyers.
“In the same way that cloud and the move to cloud fundamentally shifted how we thought about software and modern software and the ability to evolve it, we believe generative AI is going to be a core part of providing a modern legal practice management platform,” Dru Armstrong, AffiniPay’s chief executive officer, told me during an interview this week. “So this is just the beginning for us in terms of the ways that we’re going to be incorporating it into the platform.”
Listen: On LawNext: AffiniPay CEO Dru Armstrong on the Intersection of Fintech, Legal Tech and AI.
The two features released in beta for MyCase are:
The features are available to any MyCase customers. Both features will also soon be released in CASEpeer and text editing will soon be added to LawPay, the company said.
AffiniPay focused on these features to start, Armstrong said, because customers identified document review and text editing as key pain points in their daily practices.
“I think these are very concrete, specific examples where generative AI can remove key pain points or overly time-consuming tasks,” she said. “And you’re going to see us continue to chip away at areas where we see the opportunity to generate time savings, whether it’s in the core workflow or even how they engage with the technology.”
The company’s broader vision is to provide customers with an AI-powered conversational interface through which they can access their data and generate insights using natural language. The company says this will enable firms to:
Armstrong said that AffiniPay is intentionally taking a deliberative and thoughtful approach to deploying generative AI, looking to balance the opportunities it offers to improve workflows, drafting and communications against the privacy concerns around training third-party AI models.
“Our view is lawyers are ready for AI, but they want responsible AI and they want it to solve core pain points for them,” she said.
While today’s release starts with document summarization and text editing, the next set of releases, which will out by the middle of the year, will add additional features, including:
“We’re holistically looking at our platforms and saying, ‘Where are the opportunities to make it feel smarter, more sophisticated, save time, provide reliable intelligence, make someone feel smarter, and yet do it while keeping their data very private and secure to them?'”
To power all of this, MyCase is using OpenAI’s GPT large language model via its application programming interface (API). No customer data is used by OpenAI to train its LLM models.
Armstrong said the company will be evaluating customer feedback from its beta testing to ensure that the AI is delivering accurate and quality results.
“We want to make sure, as part of being the responsible provider of this technology, that we’re getting good customer feedback on the accuracy of it, because obviously we’re building legal specific prompts and we want to validate the quality of the answers and the quality of the generative AI results.”
Armstrong described the features being rolled out this week and in the coming months as “quick wins” for the company’s ability to deliver the benefits of generative AI to its customers. But her longer-term vision is to reimagine how legal professionals engage with AffiniPay’s platforms.
“I think that there’s just a lot of ways to reimagine how people experience technology, where it’s less about click here, click there, and it’s more a conversational ‘send this invoice off,’ ‘summarize these documents,’ and ‘prepare an email that I can send off to my colleague to review’ — where it’s more about us getting to be human and the technology doing the work.”
She also see opportunities for using generative AI to enhance LawPay and the overall payment experience. In part, this will come from delivering insights into operational issues such as invoice timing, billing rates, leakage and collections.
“What makes it really exciting is the idea of being able to drive not just the productivity gains, which is what we’re talking about in this first round, but also the financial gains of a firm by combining the use of business intelligence and data with the intelligence that comes with generative AI,” Armstrong said.
“So I think you’re going to see us focus on enhanced productivity, making it easier and making it feel more intelligent when you’re working in platform, and then also look at what are the ways that we can make our customers feel more financially intelligent.”
Learn more about AffiniPay’s products in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory:
[Disclosure: My son is an AffiniPay employee.]
]]>In November, when Thomson Reuters announced the integration of generative AI within its flagship legal research platform Westlaw Precision, it also announced the beta version of a generative AI integration within Practical Law.
Today, Thomson Reuters is formally releasing that generative AI feature in Practical Law, called Ask Practical Law AI, and also releasing a second AI-driven Practical Law tool, Practical Law Clause Finder.
Both features are available to Practical Law customers in the United States and will be available to customers in other countries later this year. Both are sold as add-ons, and for Ask Practical Law, users need to have the dynamic tool set.
“They’re both built on advanced AI technology and both both grounded in trusted Practical Law content and expertise,” Erica Kitaev, vice president, Product Management, told me during a demonstration Monday.
Ask Practical Law AI provides users with a chat interface to access Practical Law content. The user simply asks a question and the tool provides a summary answer synthesized from Practical Law, including links to the sources within PL on which it based its answer. The user may also ask follow-up questions to further refine the response.
“This is a question-and-answer tool that deploys a large language model and provides synthesized answers to users’ natural language questions, grounded in PL content and delivered in an experience where users can easily validate those answers and continue through their information discovery process in PL,” Kitaev said.
In the demonstration I received, the answers were preloaded in browser tabs. Kitaev said that in typical use, the AI will take 25-30 seconds to generate an answer. Users can ask up to seven follow-up questions, but Kitaev said she has not seen users ask that many.
In beta testing of this tool, customers have said that it helps them get oriented more quickly and accelerates their research by connecting them to the appropriate resources, Kitaev said.
The second tool announced today, Practical Law Clause Finder, is embedded in Microsoft Word and uses supervised learning AI, trained by PL editors, to classify contract language and extract the most commonly negotiated clauses in transactional agreements. It can draw from PL content, SEC documents, or a customer’s own internal documents.
From within Word, the user would first pick the category of clause from Clause Finder’s taxonomy and then narrow it to a subcategory. The user can then select tabs to show clauses from PL, the SEC database, or the customer’s own document collection, if they choose to include it.
Clauses from PL include drafting notes written by expert attorneys that provide the user guidance on drafting and editing that clause. The user can also view recommended clauses in context within their source documents, and easily move back and forth from their own document.
For those customers that opt to include their own documents, the documents are available only to their internal users. The documents are stored securely on a single-tenant cloud instance and managed by someone within the firm will be responsible for managing the repository.
“Customers who wish to only have Practical Law content and SEC content in the tool may do so,” Kitaev said. “But for customers who opt in to including their internal documents in the Clause Finder tool, who opt into that relevant subscription, they will be able to create their own knowledge repositories for Clause Finder available only to their users.”
“We’re really excited about the future of drafting here at Thomson Reuters,” Kitaev said. “Clause Finder really is an exciting first step in executing against that drafting vision.”
]]>At a time when legal technology companies are making it easier to access and analyze court documents, what should – and should not – be done to protect confidential court documents that are sealed from public access?
This question came to a head last July, when a federal court in North Carolina took the drastic step of issuing a standing order that effectively banned lawyers in that district from using third-party service providers such as PacerPro, RECAP or DocketBird. That order came on the heels of a memorandum from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that – while it didn’t outright ban the use of such service providers – it did urge courts to warn filers to be cautious about using third-party services and software.
Were these actions justified? Is there reason to be concerned about third-party providers? And what exactly is the best way to protect sealed documents?
To answer these questions, the legal tech company PacerPro brought together a panel of experts for a live program presented during the annual meeting of the National Docketing Association in Boston in October. On the panel were:
I moderated the panel and recorded it for this podcast. Thanks to the panelists, the NDA, and PacerPro for allowing me to do that.
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>The law practice management company LEAP Legal Software has hired Misti Holmes, a 20-year veteran of the legal technology, as its new chief operating officer in the United States.
Holmes will use her years of legal tech and related experience to help grow the company and assist new LEAP clients as they transition from legacy software to LEAP’s cloud-based platform, the company said.
Holmes comes to LEAP from PC Law | Time Matters, which since 2019 has operated since as a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis, where she was general manager for Canada.
Learn more about LEAP on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
From 2004 to 2019, Holmes was with Thomson Reuters, most recently as sales manager for its SMB Segment, and before that as national sales manager for FindLaw Canada.
“We’re thrilled to have Misti join our company,” said Poppy Bale Dyer, CEO of LEAP in the U.S. “We’re confident that her experience and extensive knowledge of the legal industry will allow her to jump right in and help us continue to innovate and expand. Misti is an expert in legal technology. She also shares our vision for the future of our industry and our product.”
In her most recent position at PCLaw | Time Matters, Holmes worked cross-functionally to support the joint venture between that company and LEAP, through which many former PCLaw | Time Matters customers transitioned to the LEAP platform.
LEAP says that experience will help her ensure that new LEAP customers are getting the most out of LEAP and its cloud-based software.
“I’m delighted to be joining a company with an established track record of excellence and innovation,” said Holmes, who started in the COO position this month. “I got to know LEAP in my previous position, and I understand why the product has been so successful. It’s exciting to be a part of this company as we continue to enhance our software and expand our impact in the United States.”
LEAP was founded in 1992 in Australia, where it is the largest practice management company, and it now has more than 60,000 users worldwide. In the United States, it has steadily been expanding its customer base for a number of years.
In 2022, it acquired WealthCounsel, a leading provider of software, training and support for estate planning lawyers, and its related company ElderCounsel. and in October, it rolled out an integration with WealthCounsel, making WealthCounsel’s drafting solution available directly within the LEAP platform.
]]>With four different legal tech companies announcing executive appointments over the last week, including two to top sales spots, the timing leads me to wonder whether this is because companies are staffing up for the Legalweek conference that is just around the corner. Whatever the reason, here is a roundup of the newest additions to legal tech c-suites.
Eric Bouchard, formerly chief financial officer at Nestlé Health Sciences, has joined the legal services company Axiom as its new CFO.
The Montreal-based Bouchard had been at Nestlé since 2019 and, before that, was CFO at Atrium Innovations. He previously served in a series of financial executive roles, including as vice president of finance at Bombardier Transportation.
At Nestlé, Axiom said in an announcement, Bouchard was a vital member of the finance team who brought best practices and principles to health sciences, including support and value-added analysis that measurably improved the performance of the company’s commercial and operational teams.
E-discovery and risk-management company Exterro named Paul Valentino as its chief people officer. Valentino moves to Exterro from Proofpoint, where he had been chief people officer for six years.
At Proofpoint, Valentino helped the company earn repeated commendations for exceptional company culture, including recognition as one of the Best Places to Work in the Bay Area and one of the Best HR Teams at the 2023 Comparably Awards. He previously worked in HR roles at Velodyne Lidar, Rambus, Juniper Networks, and Synopsys.
The company said that Valentino will report directly to Exterro CEO Bobby Balachandran and will be instrumental in attracting and retaining top talent, implementing leadership and capabilities development, and integrating change management as the company continues to grow.
The e-discovery company Merlin Search Technologies has hired Jim Bocchino, a 30-year veteran of the e-discovery industry, as chief revenue officer.
Bocchino was most recently with Nuix, where, as vice president of corporate sales, he provided strategic sales leadership for a team of enterprise sales executives, strategic account managers and solution consultants in enterprise e-discovery software, cyber security and forensic investigations.
Prior to Nuix, Bocchino served in numerous senior leadership positions with Epiq, most recently as regional vice president of sales overseeing a team of five area sales directors and 33 sales executives focused on corporate, government and Am Law 200 markets.
He joined Epiq in 2017 following its acquisition by DTI, where he had worked since 2004. At DTI, Bocchino was responsible for developing the national accounts program and leading the national accounts sales team to record growth.
In an internal promotion, the e-discovery company Relativity has named Steve Couling as its chief sales officer.
Couling has been with Relativity since 2012, when he was its first employee hired outside North America, and he has helped support its international growth ever since, the company said.
Over the last 12 years, Couling played a leading role in establishing and advancing Relativity’s global footprint, the company said, and he has overseen the development of teams and offices in the U.K., Australia, Poland, Germany, Hong Kong, and Ireland.
]]>Centerbase, a company that provides a cloud legal practice management platform for mid-sized law firms, today announced the beta launch of native document management, integrated directly within its platform. Leveraging Microsoft SharePoint as the underlying technology, it allows users to create, share, store and manage documents without leaving the platform.
“Until now, best-in-class document management for law firms were stand-alone, paid solutions,” the company said. “Centerbase has created a native solution that supports firms’ comprehensive document management processes, leveraging the power of the Microsoft ecosystem.”
By adding document management, Centerbase says, it is furthering its ability to provide legal professionals with an all-in-one platform where they can work efficiently without having to switch between applications. And by building it based on the familiar Microsoft technology firms already use, it says, it is providing intuitive workflows that will enable firms to quickly realize its benefits, drive user adoption, and build on existing technology investments.
Learn more about Centerbase at the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
During a demonstration of the document management system earlier this week, Rob Joyner, senior vice president, business development, told me that the company also sees the launch as a step towards “future-proofing” its customers so that they will be prepared to take advantage of artificial intelligence and other advances in technology.
“Covid made people move to the cloud faster than anything else and faster than we all anticipated,” Joyner said. “Now AI is causing shifts and interest in legal tech again. So what we’re really trying to do is make sure we’re future proofing and setting up our customers so they’re ready to make that change and bring that technology in when it’s time to do so.”
Prior to today’s launch, Centerbase already had basic document management, but it was more of a document repository than a true DMS. Centerbase also enabled — and will continue to support — API integrations with the DMS platforms NetDocuments and iManage.
But now, the native file explorer system within Centerbase can be pointed to SharePoint, so firms can take advantage of the space in SharePoint that they already pay for, but with full integration with matters, workflows and other features of Centerbase.
For users, that means they now have document-management features such as version control, OCR, and e-signatures. Their documents can now be part of automated workflows within Centerbase to save and generate documents. Users can track their time while working on documents using Centerbase’s Automated Time Capture feature. From within Centerbase, users can send a document for signature via DocuSign and track its progress, or perform global conflicts checks without having to also search a separate DMS.
Later this year, Centerbase will further enhance this feature with the release of a more robust home-page dashboard, where users will be able to see in one place all of the information about all of their matters, as well as their timekeeping and billing. Each matter page will also have a dashboard that will provide users with all the key information about that matter and the matter’s financials.
Centerbase already directly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, so users can manage email and calendars without leaving the platform, and Word, so that documents can be managed within the platform and associated with client matters.
“You’re reducing application fatigue, right, jumping from one place to the next, and you’re creating efficiencies,” said Joyner. “By bringing Outlook into the product, we’re able to wrap a lot of those workflows that an attorney, a paralegal or somebody else might want that are legal specific right into that application.”
A particular strength of the Centerbase platform, Joyner said, is its automated time capture. Timekeepers who move to Centerbase capture at least six hour extra per month, he said. By moving Outlook into the platform and adding document management via SharePoint, “we’re helping them capture more of those zero point ones.”
During our demonstration, Chris Zink, technical sales director, pointed out another advantage of building on Microsoft products: Because users are directly accessing SharePoint, Outlook email and Outlook calendars within Centerbase, no one is having to replicate or synchronize data between applications.
“It’s not like I have to take this email and push it over here,” Zink said. “I can associate it directly from within Outlook to the matter so that it’s linked to that particular matter. Same thing for documents. If I’m on a document, all the metadata I can store with regards to what matter, what attorney, who has access, all those types of things, are going to be embedded as well.”
The same is true for appointments, Zink said.
“You’ll be able to see your Outlook calendar in Centerbase, so we don’t have to replicate or sync activities, appointments, tasks, things like that. We can use them natively in Outlook and then associate the matter to them or associate the corresponding record in Centerbase.”
Tracy Clodfelter, director, product marketing, said that the overarching goal is to create a platform where legal professionals can work in all day, without having to constantly switch to other software.
“They can come to a single platform and do all the things they need to do — they don’t have to go back and forth, they don’t have to have add ins, they don’t have to do any of that,” she said. “It makes them much more effective, much more efficient. Everything’s in one place.”
The new document management capability is launching initially in beta and will be tested with an initial group of beta firms. Centerbase expects to make it available for general release in March. The initial release will include the SharePoint integration, with the dashboards and other additional features to follow after that.
]]>In 2013, when Florida lawyer TJ Fraser set out to find a law practice management solution for his firm, he tested just about every product on the market, he says, but he could not find one that solved the problems he encountered in his day-to-day practice. So, rather than keep looking, he decided to build the solution himself. A year later, when he moved to his current firm, he did so on the condition that it use the software for all its operations. His revenue increased by almost 50%, he says, even with fewer people on his team than at his prior firm.
By 2018, Fraser and his team had dubbed the software ZenCase, and in 2021, after continuing to develop and refine it, they migrated their first 50-plus user law firm onto the platform and officially launched it commercially to the legal market at large.
On today’s LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by Fraser, who is now the CEO of ZenCase, and Olivia Mockel, its president and COO. Mockel recently moved to ZenCase after several years in leadership roles at other practice management companies, including most recently as CEO of PCLaw | Time Matters, a joint venture between LEAP and LexisNexis.
Learn more about ZenCase at the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
So what makes ZenCase different from other practice management platforms and what types of law firms is it suited for? In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Fraser and Mockel about all that and more, including how they are incorporating generative AI and their plans for future development.
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.
Legalweek NY 2024, Described as the “one legal event that hits all the marks for information, education, and networking”
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>Epiq, the global, technology-enabled legal services company, is today launching an antitrust and white-collar compliance product that uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments identify, measure and act on risk within their organizations in real time.
The product, Regulatory Risk Insights, uses AI and substantive expertise to identify intelligence about communications that may create legal liability for a company, filtering out false positives through AI-based analysis, and then presenting the communication thread to analysts – all within 60 seconds of when potential misconduct is sent, Epiq says.
The product connects directly to data sources including Microsoft email and Team to scan ongoing communications and receive real-time notifications. Its accuracy improves over time as the AI model is trained through verification of positive or negative alerts.
The information the product provides enables corporate legal departments to quickly address potentially risky situations and, in some cases, make early applications for leniency, Epiq says.
“Risk management is of paramount importance to our clients, and we work closely with them to provide guidance on the latest requirements of global regulators,” said Erin Toomey, vice president and managing director of Epiq’s Global Investigations Practice Group. “It is becoming increasingly burdensome to satisfy regulatory deferred prosecution agreements for white collar compliance, and this tool successfully meets the DOJ’s standard of having a robust, supported, and data-driven compliance solution.”
Companies interested in testing this product can do so on a trial basis by joining Epiq’s Early Adopter Program, Epiq says. For a fixed fee, clients can participate in a 30-day trial that includes real-time analysis of Microsoft 365 emails for up to five U.S.-based employees and delivery of a Regulatory Risk Insights Findings Report.
]]>The cloud e-discovery company Casepoint said today that it has signed a multi-year contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), in a move that includes large-scale migration of ICE’s data from its current e-discovery provider Relativity.
In announcing the deal, Casepoint, whose platform is authorized as secure under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), said, “The contract award further validates Casepoint as the public sector’s most trusted cloud solution for managing the top government use cases, including litigation, investigations, and FOIA.”
Learn more about Casepoint at the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
Casepoint said that OPLA — the largest legal program in the Department of Homeland Security — began searching for a new e-discovery platform when it realized it needed one that was better aligned with its top use cases. “After a rigorous evaluation process, OPLA ultimately awarded Casepoint the contract based on the strength and value of its robust, end-to-end platform,” Casepoint said.
“We’re proud and excited to be able to provide OPLA with our secure cloud solution so they can leverage legal hold, cloud collections, AI, and advanced analytics to support ICE’s mission of preserving national security and public safety,” said Amy Hilbert, executive vice president of government solutions. “We look forward to a seamless data migration and a successful partnership with OPLA.”
]]>If you are hungry to learn more about the latest trends and developments in legal tech, then keep the last week of January open on your calendar, as there are three separate legal tech conferences worthy of your time.
Legalweek is the OG of legal tech conferences. Long called Legaltech New York, it was renamed Legalweek in 2017, and is one of the largest, longest-running and most-anticipated conferences focused on legal technology and the business of law, last year drawing over 6,000 attendees and featuring more than 300 speakers. This year, it runs Jan. 29 to Feb. 1 at the New York Hilton Midtown, with a full agenda of programs on topics such as data privacy, e-discovery, litigation, practice management, information governance, contract technology, AI, emerging tech, and more. Pre-conference programs on Monday feature a half-day AI workshop and a half-day general counsel workshop. The conference’s two keynote speakers are Bryan Cranston, the award-winning actor, producer and director, and Molly Bloom, entrepreneur and author of Molly’s Game. Both full-conference and exhibits-only passes are available for purchase.
Whereas Legalweek is targeted at larger law firms and corporate legal departments, the Innovations in Technology Conference is produced by the Legal Services Corporation and grew out of the LSC’s Technology Initiative Grant (TIG) Program, which seeks to expand access to justice by promoting technological innovations in legal services delivery and pro se assistance. The focus is on using technology to enhance access to justice and to promote high-quality legal representation for low-income people. Attendees include technologists, legal aid advocates, court personnel, law school professors, pro bono coordinators, and other professionals. The conference runs Feb. 1-3 at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, N.C.
If you want to learn about AI in law without leaving the comfort of your home or office, the legal tech company LawDroid is holding its inaugural LawDroid AI Conference online. The conference is free to attend and will focus on the latest AI advancements in in legal practices. topics will cover the AI state of the art, AI and ethics, AI and access to justice, AI and law practice, and AI and the business of law. The keynote speaker will be legal industry analyst and consultant Jordan Furlong. There will also be lightning talks from four legal AI companies: Jurisage, vLex, Clearbrief and LawDroid.
]]>Last Friday was Legaltech Week’s year-end show, in which our panel of journalists and bloggers picked the year’s top stories in legal tech and innovation.
So what were the top stories? Well, if you missed it, no worries. Here’s the video:
By the way, the show is live every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern time, with a lively and engaged chat that makes it well worth attending. Join us tomorrow, or any week.
You can sign up free here to attend. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions. You can also catch prior episodes as a podcast or on YouTube.
Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:
Hope to see you on our next show.
]]>With the new year came a new reporting requirement for many companies in the United States. The new requirement, which came about as part of the federal Corporate Transparency Act of 2021, means that many companies will have to report information about their beneficial owners — the individuals who ultimately control the company.
To help companies comply with the new law, the legal technology company SixFifty today released a free tool that helps them determine whether they are required to file. While many millions of companies will likely need to report, there are 23 exemptions that excuse certain organizations from filing.
Using SixFifty’s tool, companies answer a few questions about their business and the tool creates a worksheet that analyzes how each of the 23 exemptions apply to their organization. SixFifty says companies should keep the worksheet on hand in case of an audit or investigation by the federal government.
For companies required to file, SixFifty’s tool also provides instructions on how to do that.
“In order to avoid criminal and civil penalties, companies need to show that they took the Corporate Transparency Act seriously,” said Kimball Dean Parker, CEO of SixFifty. “Our goal is to help as many companies as possible to determine whether they need to comply–and to create a document that shows a good faith analysis.”
For free access to SixFifty’s Corporate Transparency Act Worksheet, visit https://www.sixfifty.com/free-corporate-transparency-act-worksheet/.
]]>
What are the nuances of driving innovation within a law firm or legal department? For an inside perspective on that question, we speak with Rachel Dooley, who at the time of this recording was chief innovation officer at the law firm Goodwin Procter and who is now at Kirkland & Ellis, and Ilona Logvinova, managing counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.
Dooley and Logvinova spoke together at the recent Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference in New York City, sharing their views and insights on innovation from their unique perspectives. Shortly after they spoke, they sat down live with LawNext host Bob Ambrogi to record this conversation about innovation in legal.
You can catch a clip of us recording the interview starting about 29 seconds into this highlights video from the KM&I conference.
This is the third LawNext episode featuring conversations recorded at the conference. To listen to the prior two, check out:
The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>In a marriage of pro bono platforms, Paladin, a company whose platform connects lawyers with opportunities to provide free legal help, has acquired Pro Bono Manager, a product developed by Pro Bono Net to enable large law firms to manage and measure their pro bono programs.
This is the first acquisition for the nine-year-old Paladin, a company that counts billionaire Shark Tank panelist Mark Cuban among its backers. In 2022, Paladin raised $8 million in a Series A round and has raised total capital of more than $12 million.
Customers of Pro Bono Manager — almost all of whom are Am Law 100 law firms — will be eventually migrated to Paladin’s platform. Pro Bono Net will continue to support Pro Bono Manager until the transition is complete.
Mark O’Brien, cofounder and executive director of Pro Bono Net, is joining Paladin as an advisor. The two companies say they will continue to collaborate on pro bono-related thought leadership and programming, including opportunities for pro bono volunteers to use Pro Bono Net’s platforms to help the public resolve legal problems.
While both Paladin and Pro Bono Manager are designed to facilitate pro bono, they tackle different aspects of it.
Paladin’s primary focus is on connecting legal services organizations with law firms, corporate legal departments, and bar associations to share and recruit volunteers for pro bono opportunities.
Read more about Paladin on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
By contrast, Pro Bono Manager, first launched in 2007, is a product designed for large law firms to manage their pro bono work. It enables firms to monitor pro bono matters and provides reporting and analytics tools for tracking data.
Read more about Pro Bono Manager on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
“By combining the data insights of Pro Bono Manager with Paladin’s opportunity referral and volunteer tracking tools, we’ll be able to create strong network effects that boost pro bono engagement across the board,” said Kristen Sonday, Paladin’s cofounder and CEO.
In an interview with Sonday and O’Brien earlier this week, O’Brien said the sale of Pro Bono Manager had resulted from a series of conversations he and his cofounder Michael Hertz, who is chief marketing officer at White & Case, had been having with Sonday about how the companies could work together to enhance access to justice. One of the best ways they could that, they decided, “was by combining our technology forces.”
“Was there a way to make the pie bigger through the combination and create new strategic opportunities for pro bono out of that, both in terms of an ability for us to engage with the law firms in different ways than we are now, and also to allow us to refocus on some of our other access to justice strategies, invest in some of those other platforms and look through partnership to accomplish some of the things that we have been doing already,” O’Brien said.
When O’Brien refers to Pro Bono Net’s other strategies and platforms, he is talking about the variety of other digital tools it operates to help provide access to justice. They include:
With Paladin’s acquisition of Pro Bono Manager, it plans to integrate much of the software’s advanced reporting functionality into its own platform, Sonday said.
“We’ll be incorporating a lot of the most frequently used tools and features from Pro Bono Manager to ensure that all clients can have access to it, and then also ensuring that all of Pro Bono Manager’s clients can access the tools that we’ve already built out on Paladin to help provide those deeper insights into the programs and run them more efficiently,” she said.
O’Brien said that the sale of Pro Bono Manager is a bittersweet moment for him, in that he and Hertz first started conceptualizing the product in 2004 and its development served as both a boot camp and a springboard for many of the initiatives Pro Bono Net went on to develop. But he believes the partnership will be a success story not only for the two companies, but also for the law firms that are their customers.
“I think it really is an opportunity to take this to the next level in a way that I wasn’t sure that Pro Bono Net would be able to do at scale,” he said. “We have always been about solutions that are scalable and sustainable, and I think that this is an opportunity to drive that vision for the law firm pro bono product and for pro bono in other areas.”
“One thing that’s really exciting about this partnership,” Sonday added, “is that we both have the same mission, which is to help as many people as possible get access to legal services. And for us, the network effects of the law firms on one side of our platform and the legal services on the other are so much stronger the more organizations you have on the platform. So this is definitely a way to accelerate our network and make sure that we’re connecting as many lawyers and legal services organizations, and vice versa, as possible.”
Related:
Redlining is the bane of contract negotiations. The back-and-forth between the parties can drag on and on as they seek to arrive at language on which they both can agree.
Even before the advent of generative AI, several contracts technology products sought to streamline this process — most typically by comparing a draft received from a counterparty with a company’s own contracts playbook and substituting the company’s preferred language for that proposed by the counterparty.
But that gets you only so far. All you are doing then is replacing the counterparty’s preferred language with your preferred language and bouncing it back to them, like a game of contracts Pong.
What if generative AI could shortcut this back and forth and move the parties closer to a meeting of the minds?
That is exactly what a new AI feature released today from the contract lifecycle management company Agiloft purports to do. Rather than simply replace the counterparty’s language with your own, it attempts to identify the areas of misalignment between the parties and then redline the draft in a way that brings the two versions closer together.
With today’s release, Agiloft will make the product available on an early-access basis to selected customers. It will release the product for general availability in February.
The new capability works within Agiloft’s Contract Assistant for Microsoft Word add-in. It uses generative AI, Agiloft says, “to understand approved clauses, review third-party contract language for areas of misalignment, and then compose redlines that marry third-party contract language with legal’s preferred phrasing.”
“Contracting is a multidisciplinary activity within an organization, but we’re targeting the negotiators of the contract sets, people within the legal team, perhaps people within the procurement teams, that have responsibility for contract negotiations,” Andy Wishart, Agiloft’s chief product officer, told me during a demonstration ahead of today’s release.
“The goal is to really deliver faster review cycles, because we’d be cutting down on the manual steps of redlining, and also lowering risk, because the goal of this is to align a contract with the standards that have been set within an organization,” Wishart said.
Agiloft already had the ability to extract key data points and clauses from contracts and show how a clause in a draft contract compares to the company’s clause library. Where clauses misaligned, the company could replace the counterparty’s with its own.
But simply swapping out their clause with yours is “a bold move,” Wishart says. “It’s not negotiation, it’s just trying to force a particular position.”
“What would better,” he says, “is could we use technology like generative AI to better align these clauses to make some surgical insertions and deletions into the original, to better align what the counterparty is proposing with our standards. And that’s where gen AI redlining comes in.”
When the user asks this new tool to align the clauses, rather than replace one with another, it redlines the clause to make the two better align with each other, and it also gives explanations of what it has done.
The user gets a preview in a panel to the right of the document showing what the AI suggests. The user can accept or edit it as the user wishes, and it is then inserted into the document as a redline.
Agiloft’s new feature can also be used when the company does not have a standard clause. In such a case, the user can simply describe the nature of the changes, and the generative AI will suggest redlines.
In an example demonstrated by Wishart, the user wanted to change an indemnity clause to a mutual indemnity clause. The user instructs the AI, “Make mutual,” and the AI comes back with various insertions and deletions to accomplish that.
Wishart said the product is best used for longer clauses with substantive differences. For short clauses or those requiring only a few minor edits, the user is better off doing it manually.
But in substantive negotiations, where there are significant differences between the clauses, “it’s providing some surprisingly good and meaningful insertions and deletions.”
Last year, Agiloft launched ConvoAI, which was designed to enable users to “have an interactive conversation with their contracts by asking questions in natural language.” More recently, it released AI Trainer, which provides a no-code training capability that enables non-technical users, including subject matter experts and legal professionals, to train AI models on the unique clauses and key terms specific to their organization or industry.
The redlining feature it released today, it says, it the first in a series of generative AI features on its roadmap for 2024.
]]>Remember Pan Am? It was the world’s largest international airline for much of the 20th century and an innovative pioneer in the modern airline industry. But when its management failed to appreciate the dramatic changes underway in the industry, it suffered a series of economic blows, and management’s last-ditch efforts to save it came too late.
The Thomson Reuters Institute, in its 2024 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, released today in partnership with the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law (whose URL returns a page not found), uses Pan Am’s story to drive home a simple point for U.S. law firms: Innovate or die.
“Law firm leaders who fail to respond to [changes in the legal market] and pivot quickly enough to prepare for the future may see their firms destined for the same fate as Pan Am,” the report warns.
The legal market has shifted, the report says, from “the Transactional Decade” of the 2010s, “a period marked by easy-to-borrow money and strong performance for law firms’ transactional practices,” to the period we are currently in where most of the growth in demand for law firm services has been driven by practices that run counter to general economic conditions, such as litigation, bankruptcy, and labor and employment.
Accompanying that shift has been the rapid increase in the pace of law firm rate growth, the report says. Over the past year, it finds, “the rates clients agreed to pay law firms for new matters grew by more than 6%, with every segment of law firms seeing aggressive increases in
worked rates on par with the pace seen prior to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-’11.”
But at the same time, many law firms have found it more difficult to collect on those increasing rates, and clients have become more likely to try to dole work out in tiers to lower-cost firms as a way to control their costs, the report says.
Further complicating the market now and into the future is the advent of generative artificial intelligence, Thomson Reuters says. “On the whole, law firm leaders appear to be optimistic about the potential that Gen AI offers for the future of the practice of law, but some skepticism remains.”
Other key findings from the report:
On the topic of generative AI, the report says it is “likely to have a massive impact on many aspects of law firm business.” Having said that, it lays out three potential scenarios for what the impact of Gen AI on the legal industry might look like:
In the face of these challenges and changes, what is a law firm to do? The report offers suggestions based on the strategies of those law firms that appear to have been most successful in recent year. Looking at firms’ financial results over the past 10 years, it ranked those in the top quartile as “Dynamic Firms” and those in the bottom quartile as “Static Firms.”
(In this regard, the report is reminiscent of the Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report published annually by Wolters Kluwer, which ranks firms as Leading, Transitioning and Trailing).
Thomson Reuters found that Dynamic Firms share several key traits:
Thomson Reuters wraps up its report where it began — with a warning to law firm leaders: “Leaders can choose to ignore these changes but, like the leaders of Pan Am, they do so at their peril.”
“Leaders who can rise to this challenge will be able to lead their firms confidently into the future. Those who do not, will — like the leaders of Pan Am — leave their organizations ill-equipped and vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace, often offering the wrong services in the wrong ways and wondering why nothing they do is working like it used to.”
]]>For legal professionals, finding high-quality, timely and relevant educational content is essential to maintaining and developing professional competence.
For companies and organizations that develop CLE and other legal-learning materials, developing high-quality content is challenge enough. But even trickier can be keeping that content current.
“High-quality content of course is a baseline,” writes Argentina-based legal technologist Ezequiel Braun Pellegrini. “The relevance bit is the tricky part. In law, content quickly becomes outdated, and often obsolete.”
Pellegrini, who is founder and CEO of the legal tech company Brevity and a member of the board of directors of the Association of Legaltech Promoters of Argentina, says one Latin American legal tech company, Wolap, has developed a way to use data to ensure its content remains timely and relevant for legal professionals.
He explains how it does it in his article, Leveraging Data to Produce Content Lawyers Need: Wolap is Pioneering Legal E-Learning in Latin America, published in the resources library of the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
]]>What were the top stories and trends of 2023 in legal tech and innovation? Our roundtable panel of journalists and bloggers will share their picks during today’s year-end edition of Legaltech Week.
The show is live at 3 p.m. Eastern time. You can sign up free here to attend. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions. You can also catch prior episodes as a podcast or on YouTube.
Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:
Hope you will join us.
]]>In October, the contract lifecycle management company SpotDraft announced an early-access release of its new generative AI add-in for Microsoft Word, called VerifAI, designed to help lawyers streamline the process of reviewing contracts. Now, SpotDraft is releasing the product for general availability, with the option for anyone to try it free for two weeks.
As I reported here when it was first released, VerifAI uses generative AI to check contracts against user-specified guidelines, written in plain English. It also answers open-ended, contextual and logical questions about contracts.
I posted a How It Works video demo of that early release version in December, with Rohith Salim, cofounder and chief product officer at SpotDraft.
During the early-access phase, more than 250 users from more than 100 companies used the product. In response to their feedback, SpotDraft has made three functional enhancements to the product:
In addition, they have made the product fully self-serve. Previously, users had to book a meeting to be onboarded. Users can now go in on their own and start using VerifAI from day one with minimal setup.
“The product is deliberately designed to be super easy to use and set up,” Udit Misra, director of growth and product marketing, told me.
VerifAI is a standalone product that requires no other SpotDraft subscription. SpotDraft says it works out-of-the-box, with no training required for users.
As I noted, anyone can try the product for free for two weeks. After the free trial, a subscription is $60 a month.
For a more complete description of VerifAI, see my prior post and the How It Works demo:
Today on LawNext, we feature two brief, back-to-back interviews with the founders of two separate legal tech startups, both recorded live during the inaugural Knowledge Management & Innovation for Legal Conference held recently in New York City.
First up is Nicole Clark, cofounder and CEO of Trellis, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform. (Clark was previously on LawNext in January 2002.) Then, in the second part of the show, we speak with the cofounders of Centari, an AI-powered knowledge management and dealmaking platform, Kevin Walker, the company’s CEO, and Bryan Gilbert Davis, its CTO.
LawNext host Bob Ambrogi was at the conference and recorded both of these interviews live there, where both of these companies were sponsors and exhibitors. The conference was organized by Patrick DiDomenico, president and founder of InspireKM Consulting, and Joshua Fireman, president and founder of the strategic consulting firm Fireman & Company, an Epiq Company.
For more from the conference, check out the last episode of LawNext, which featured interviews with the two keynote speakers from that conference: Andrea Alliston, partner and leader of knowledge and practice innovation programs at Fasken, Canada’s largest law firm, and Mark Smolik, chief legal officer at DHL.
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>
Voting is now closed and your votes have been tallied to decide the 15 legal tech startups that will get to participate as finalists in the eighth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2024, taking place Feb. 14-17 in Chicago.
These 15 finalists will face off in an opening-night pitch competition that is the opening event of TECHSHOW, with the conference’s attendees voting at the conclusion of the pitches to pick the top winners. The first-place winner gets a package of marketing and advertising prizes. All 15 also get to exhibit in a special Startup Alley portion of the TECHSHOW exhibit hall.
In October, we issued a call for entries. From all the entries we received, a panel of judges narrowed the applications down to 25, which we posted on Dec. 4 for you, the readers, to select the final 15.
We received a total of 51,670 votes. Here are the 15 winners in order of their vote tallies. (The descriptions were provided by each company. The full descriptions can be read on the original ballot page.)
Congratulations to all the finalists. To those that did not make the cut, we hope to see you again next year.
BriefCatch empowers lawyers and judges to edit legal documents to the highest standards while helping their clients win, boosting their writing skills, and enjoying expert explanations, models, and examples.
Ai.Law provides AI-generated litigation documents, from pleadings to discovery.
Unlock new revenue with Lexamica, the go-to platform for curated case referrals. Whether you’re looking to hand off a case or take one on, our exclusive network of law firms has you covered. It’s simple to connect great cases with great attorneys, optimizing your practice and growing revenue. Lexamica places cases with the best firm, automatically tracks statuses, and ensures timely payment. All so you can focus on what you do best—winning cases and satisfying clients.
Resolutn streamlines settlements with AI, turning protracted disputes into quick, fair outcomes. It cuts costs, boosts law firm efficiency, and satisfies clients by resolving cases faster.
Recital provides legal teams with the most delightful contract negotiation experience, ever. Recital automatically gathers files and messages from email and storage, to provide auto-organized in-flight and historical contracts and one-click comparisons from email. It unlocks your prior work to create your clause library and playbook and makes that knowledge available directly in Word. Recital works in Word and email, for fast adoption without changing how lawyers work. No implementation needed!
LexSelect streamlines trial prep by automating workflows associated with reviewing transcript evidence, turning 50 hours of work into 4 — a 92% reduction. We aim to become an essential interface between legal professionals and their various knowledge repositories, enabling them to unlock overlooked productivity opportunities in their everyday workflows.
AltFee revolutionizes law firm pricing by offering a foundation for alternative fee structures. This system empowers firms to precisely assess and assign value to projects, vital in a landscape where AI/efficiency gains drastically shorten task timelines. Ensuring alignment between service prices and delivered value, AltFee encourages teams to share insights, collaborate, and analyze data trends. This collaborative approach enables confident scoping and pricing without the fear of underpricing.
Legal professionals rarely start from scratch when drafting contracts or negotiating details. They spend at least 60 minutes searching through old contracts or consulting colleagues for relevant precedents. Henchman automatically centralizes past clauses and definitions from any legal team’s contract database and delivers them intelligently in lawyers’ familiar Microsoft Word or Outlook environments. This eliminates time-consuming tasks and allows lawyers to focus on adding value and expertise.
Skribe empowers attorneys to capture legal testimony with software which dramatically lowers costs by 50%, speeds up the process 10x, and makes attorneys awesome.
Gretchen revolutionizes legal assistance for lawyers, being the first generative AI-powered tool to integrate directly into their email inboxes. With a single click, Gretchen securely accesses relevant client documents and drafts instant email responses, seamlessly blending into existing workflows without compromising document security. Designed specifically for smaller law firms, Gretchen empowers lawyers to provide lightning-fast client responses, enhancing efficiency and service quality.
You are a lawyer. You’re preparing a case for a client. You have thousands of pages of material to read. So, you boot up 2nd Chair. You upload your documents. You type, “What are the top 10 best/worst facts for my client in these docs?” In seconds, you have a ChatGPT-style answer. It includes precise links to the relevant parts of the source docs. You can follow the links yourself to guarantee no hallucinations.
Elevator Pitch: E-discovery vendor costs for the average commercial litigant average around $240k. Beagle slashes these costs by 3x. Additionally, Beagle significantly reduces the time required to locate and analyze documents and increases the accuracy of such analysis. As the first AI-native platform, Beagle utilizes AI to understand users’ intent and translate it into actions with internal and external tools, paralleling the capabilities of a junior attorney.
Civille delivers best in class websites, SEO, digital marketing and online tools. Civille’s AI law forms and chat tool can segment leads by value as well as filter out less-desirable leads. Case management and CRM integrations allow you to customize the digital experience.
Altumatim is the story-based eDiscovery platform that fully automates document review and finds the most important evidence by learning the story the attorney wants to tell. Altumatim cuts through the noise in the ever-increasing volume of electronically stored information (ESI) and reduces the cost and time required to find the information that is critical to making informed decisions about whether or how to proceed with a matter and ultimately how to present the most compelling case at trial.
Paxton AI develops advanced legal research tools powered by artificial intelligence, providing legal professionals with swift and accurate access to a comprehensive database of laws, regulations, and case law to streamline the legal research and drafting process.
]]>Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. used his year-end report to weigh in on the impact of artificial intelligence on the legal profession, saying he does not believe AI will replace human judges.
“As 2023 draws to a close with breathless predictions about the future of Artificial Intelligence, some may wonder whether judges are about to become obsolete,” he wrote. “I am sure we are not — but equally confident that technological changes will continue to transform our work.”
Every year, Roberts uses his year-end report to address a major issue relevant to the entire federal court system. This year, he focused on AI, and more specifically on the question of whether AI might someday replace judges, concluding, “Machines cannot fully replace key actors in court.”
He drew a contrast to professional tennis, where line judges have been replaced with optical technology to determine whether 130 miles-per-hour serves are in or out. “There is no discretion; the ball either did or did not hit the line.”
But for trial judges in court, nuance matters, Roberts said.
“Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”
Like trial judges, appellate judges also “perform quintessentially human functions,” he wrote. Their decisions often turn on whether a lower court has abused its discretion or on questions about how the law should develop. “AI is based largely on existing information, which can inform but not make such decisions.”
That said, Roberts acknowledged that, even though “human judges will be around for a while,” AI will have a significant impact on the judiciary.
“[W]ith equal confidence I predict that judicial work — particularly at the trial level — will be significantly affected by AI. Those changes will involve not only how judges go about doing their job, but also how they understand the role that AI plays in the cases that come before them.”
That impact is likely to be positive in several ways, Roberts predicted. Among them, AI applications “indisputably assist” the judicial system in advancing the goal the “just, speedy, and inexpensive” resolution of cases.
It also promises to enhance access to justice, Roberts believes.
“For those who cannot afford a lawyer, AI can help. It drives new, highly accessible tools that provide answers to basic questions, including where to find templates and court forms, how to fill them out, and where to bring them for presentation to the judge — all without leaving home. These tools have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system.”
While the focus of the report is on cutting-edge AI, Roberts begins with a history of technology adoption in the federal courts. It was not until 1989, he notes, that the judicial branch finally provided PCs to secretaries in judges’ chambers and ensured there was at least one PC available to be shared by each judge’s law clerks.
In the Supreme Court, “computers came slowly but surely,” Roberts wrote. “In 1976, Justice Lewis Powell deployed a rented Wang computer in his chambers. Several other Justices observed the satisfactory performance of this newfangled ‘word processing machine’ and followed suit the next year.”
But by 2000, “change came fast” to the federal courts. “The paper world familiar to lawyers for centuries had largely given way to today’s electronic regime.”
“And now,” he continued, “we face the latest technological frontier: artificial intelligence.”
He notes that AI can earn Bs on law school exams and even pass the bar exam, and he says that legal research “may soon be unimaginable without it.”
But the use of AI also requires caution and humility, he said. He noted its propensity to hallucinate, its potential to compromise client information, and due process concerns about its use in criminal cases.
Roberts concluded his year-end report with a shoutout to the “skilled and dedicated information systems professionals” who support the courts.
“Gone are the days when the quill pen alone was sufficient to maintain a docket; courts could not do our work without technologists and cybersecurity experts in the Department of Technology Services at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, at the circuit-wide level, and in individual courts.”
You can read the full report here.
]]>Call me lucky. Every week, I get to sit down at the mic for my LawNext podcast and have a conversation with the leading “innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in law.”
For me, each and every one of these conversations is fun and fascinating. But I am equally fascinated to add up the numbers at the end of the year and see which topics and guests you, the listeners, found most interesting.
So, as I do every year, I’ve compiled two lists here. The first lists the top 15 episodes published during 2023. After that, I list the top 15 episodes of all time, regardless of when they were published. (The first episode of LawNext was posted on July 16, 2018.) In each case, the rankings are based on unique downloads.
Most popular this year: My interview with Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito just after their first try at having GPT take the bar exam. Interestingly, another top episode was my interview with the three founders of Casetext — before they announced their $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters.
Also popular were my dueling, back-to-back interviews with DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder Kathryn Tewson, the paralegal who investigated DoNotPay’s products; an interview on the Fastcase-vLex merger with the founders of both companies, as well as a reprise of an earlier interview with Fastcase’s founders; an interview with Clio founder Jack Newton on the lessons he’s learned over 15 years; and a 2022 year-end retrospective with LexFusion’s founders Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty.
Rounding out the most popular this year were interviews with four legal innovation leaders recorded live at the NetDocuments conference, Axiom’s Chief Strategy and Legal Officer Catherine Kemnitz on its opening a law practice in Arizona, Smokeball’s Chief Revenue Officer Jane Oxley and President Ruchie Chadha, Theory and Principle founder Nicole Bradick, Documate founder Dorna Moini on rebranding as Gavel, BYU Law’s Gordon Smith on stepping down as dean, and AltaClaro founder Abdi Shayesteh on training lawyers to use generative AI.
You can also check out the most popular LawNext episodes of 2022, of 2021, of 2020 and of 2019.
Catch all the episodes of LawNext by subscribing at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. For a visual array of all episodes, see the LawNext Episode Gallery.
Look over this list of my blog posts that were most popular this year, and there is no doubt about the topic that most captivated the legal industry. Of my 40 most-read posts of 2023, 30 directly involved generative AI and others implicated it.
Of course, there is a chicken-or-egg aspect to this. Were so many of my most-read stories about AI because that was what most interested my readers, or was it simply because I wrote so much this year about the topic?
Seven of the most popular stories related to Casetext’s launch of its generative AI product CoCounsel last March, its subsequent acquisition by Thomson Reuters in June, and Thomson Reuters’ subsequent roll-out of generative AI in Westlaw.
Similarly, five of the top stories involved LexisNexis’s launch of its generative AI product, Lexis+ AI, starting with its initial release in May to its release for general availability in October.
Four stories about the generative AI legal startup Harvey made my top-stories list, starting from its initial fundraise last November to its firmwide deployment within Allen & Overy in February to its Series A raise in April to a quirky story about a second legal AI startup also called Harvey.
Two popular stories were about GPT taking the bar exam: one in March when GPT passed the bar exam, and the second in November when it passed the legal ethics exam.
My most popular story of all this year, by a long measure, was about the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal’s proposed rule on appellants’ use of AI to create filings. I do not know why that was so popular, but its views far exceeded any other of my posts this year. A related story on the most popular list was about the sanctions imposed on lawyers in New York who cited “bogus” cases in their brief.
Representative of the interest in generative AI this year were the two stories that made my list about the law firm Gunderson Dettmer’s development of its own “homegrown” generative AI, ChatGD. The original story I wrote in August about ChatGD’s launch was my 12th most-read story, while a followup I published just last week quickly rose to be the 13th most read.
Among other popular stories on my blog this year:
But I go back to where I started. The dominant story in legal technology this year was generative AI — not so much for what it is already doing in legal, but more for what it might do down the road.
Here’s the list of my 40 most-read posts.
1. In First for A U.S. Appeals Court, 5th U.S. Circuit Court Considers Rule Requiring Lawyers to Certify they Did Not Rely on AI to Create Filings (Nov. 29, 2023).
2. Harvey AI Raises $21M In A Series A Round Led By Sequoia (April 26, 2023).
3. New GPT-Based Chat App from LawDroid Is A Lawyer’s ‘Copilot’ for Research, Drafting, Brainstorming and More (Jan. 25, 2023).
4. LexisNexis Enters the Generative AI Fray with Limited Release of New Lexis+ AI, Using GPT and other LLMs (May 4, 2023).
5. Law Students Are Reluctant To Use ChatGPT, Survey Finds. The Question Is, Why? (June 7, 2023).
6. As Allen & Overy Deploys GPT-based Legal App Harvey Firmwide, Founders Say Other Firms Will Soon Follow (Feb. 17, 2023).
7. I Am Deeply Saddened To Report The Death Of Monica Bay: Friend, Mentor and Role Model to So Many in Legal Tech (Oct. 29, 2023).
8. Thomson Reuters Previews Its Plans for Generative AI, Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot (May 23, 2023).
9. In Major Legal Tech Deal, vLex and Fastcase Merge, Creating A Global Legal Research Company, Backed By Oakley Capital and Bain Capital (April 4, 2023).
10. Casetext Launches Co-Counsel, Its OpenAI-Based ‘Legal Assistant’ To Help Lawyers Search Data, Review Documents, Draft Memos, Analyze Contracts and More (March 1, 2023).
11. Ironclad’s AI Contract Redlining Tool ‘AI Assist’ Comes Out Of Beta, New Using GPT-4 (April 11, 2023).
12. Gunderson Dettmer Launches ChatGD; First U.S.-Based Firm To Develop Proprietary Internal Generative AI App (Aug. 9, 2023).
13. Four Months After Launching Its ‘Homegrown’ GenAI Tool, Law Firm Gunderson Dettmer Reports On Results So Far, New Features, And A Surprise on Cost (Dec. 20, 2023).
14. In Case of ‘Real Lawyers Against A Robot Lawyer,’ Federal Court Dismisses Law Firm’s Suit Against DoNotPay for Unauthorized Law Practice (Nov. 21, 2023).
15. As Thomson Reuters Explains Its Acquisition of Casetext, Some Investors Seem Uncertain (June 27, 2023).
16. LexisNexis Rolls Out Lexis+ AI for General Availability, Promising Hallucination-Free Answers to Legal Questions (Oct. 25, 2023).
17. The Rumors Were True: Thomson Reuters Acquires Casetext for $650M Cash (June 26, 2023).
18. An Interview with Casetext CEO Jake Heller on His Company’s Acquisition By Thomson Reuters (June 28, 2023).
19. GPT Takes the Bar Exam Again; This Time It Scores Among Top 10% of Test Takers (March 14, 2023).
20. Survey Released Today Finds That 40% Of Legal Professionals Use Or Plan To Use Generative AI (Aug. 21, 2023).
21. Contracts Company Ironclad Taps Into GPT-3 For Instant Document Redlining Based On A Company’s Playbook (Feb. 1, 2023).
22. Major Thomson Reuters News: Westlaw Gets Generative AI Research Plus Integration with Casetext CoCounsel; Gen AI Coming Soon to Practical Law (Nov. 15, 2023).
23. Thomson Reuters Spins Off Elite As Independent Company Now Owned By Asset Manager TPG (April 4, 2023).
24. In A $1B E-Discovery Acquisition Double-Play, Reveal Acquires Both Logikcull and IPRO (Aug. 29, 2023).
25. DISCO Cofounder Kiwi Camara Steps Down As CEO; Board Member Scott Hill Is Named Interim Leader (Sept. 11, 2023).
26. Breaking: LexisNexis Announces Preview Launch of Lexis Connect, AI-Powered Matter Management within Microsoft Teams (May 11, 2023).
27. 12 Thoughts on Promises and Challenges of AI in Legal after Yesterday’s AI Summit at Harvard Law School (Sept. 20, 2023).
28. The Strange Case of the Two Legal AI Companies Named Harvey, and their Coincidental Connection to Winston (March 28, 2023).
29. Court Imposes Sanctions On Lawyers Who Filed Bogus Cases After Relying On ChatGPT For Legal Research (June 22, 2023).
30. Bessemer Venture Partners Acquires Majority Stake in Legal Practice Management Company Litify (Feb. 9, 2023).
31. Generative AI, Having Already Passed the Bar Exam, Now Passes the Legal Ethics Exam (Nov. 16, 2023).
32. There’s A New Top-Level Domain for Lawyers: ‘.esq’ (May 9, 2023).
33. Clio Goes All Out with Major Product Announcements, Including A Personal Injury Add-On, E-Filing, and (Of Course) Generative AI (Oct. 9, 2023).
34. Stealth Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $5M in Round Led By OpenAI (Nov. 23, 2022).
35. Citing ‘Political Challenges,’ ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn’t Publish (Aug. 3, 2023).
36. LexisNexis Lays Out More Details On Its Collaboration with Microsoft to Roll Out Generative AI Products (Aug. 2, 2023).
37. LexisNexis Unveils Two New Generative AI Products (Nov. 14, 2023).
38. The Good and the Bad of Solo Practice, Per Clio’s Latest Legal Trends Report for Solos (April 18, 2023).
39. Thomson Reuters Teases Generative AI Updates to Westlaw Precision Coming Nov. 15 (Nov. 1, 2023).
40. Zuva Launches Free AI-Powered Contracts Review Tool (March 9, 2023).
]]>
In response to urgent legal needs among Israeli citizens arising from the Israel-Hamas war, the Israel Bar Association (IBA) has collaborated with the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) and Paladin, the legal tech company, to launch a nationwide, emergency pro bono portal.
The law firms Greenberg Traurig and Paul, Weiss, along with the NYSBA, are providing financial support for the portal.
Through the platform, israelbar.legal, Israeli citizens affected by the war are able to submit questions to the IBA, and volunteer attorneys can register their interest to help. Using Paladin’s technology, the IBA will then match individuals with a pro bono lawyer to provide legal assistance.
The IBA says it is currently receiving over 200 requests a week for assistance, spanning issues across social security, emergency relocation, and medical benefits.
The platform will also be able to gather valuable data about individuals’ needs to ensure resources are adequately allocated.
“Lawyers are an essential part of emergency services, just like police and firefighters,” said Richard Lewis, president of the NYSBA. “When tragedy strikes, people need legal representation. Building on our experiences with providing legal assistance for people during the COVID-19 pandemic and working with Paladin on a collaborative pro bono portal during that time, we are proud to partner with Paladin again to support Israeli citizens in their time of need.”
“As a leading pro bono technology platform, Paladin is uniquely positioned to deploy tech that connects lawyers with those in need of urgent assistance,” said Kristen Sonday, cofounder and CEO at Paladin. “We are honored to have been asked to join this initiative, and other rapid response programs, to provide access to justice for those in need.”
To get involved, Israeli-licensed attorneys and individuals with legal questions can visit https://www.israelbar.legal/. By partnering virtually, we can connect those who need help with volunteers as the situation evolves in real-time.
]]>Voting ends Friday, Dec. 29, to pick the 15 startups that will go to Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW in February. Here are the standings as of this morning.
As a reminder, you get to pick the 15 startups out of 25 semifinalists. The 15 startups selected will face off in a live pitch competition that is the opening night event of TECHSHOW, which is Feb. 14-17, 2024, in Chicago. They also get to exhibit in a special Startup Alley portion of the exhibit hall.
You can read all about it, including full descriptions of each startup, in this post and find the ballot here. Deadline for voting is Friday, Dec. 29, 2023, at at 11:45 p.m. Eastern time.
Now on to the standings, in order of votes received.
[This post is by Pablo Arredondo, cofounder of Casetext and vice president, CoCounsel, at Thomson Reuters. Pablo notes that any views expressed in this post are entirely his own.]
Transcript of Discovery Hearing Before Honorable Judith Hand, Magistrate Judge
Appearances:
On behalf of Plaintiff Genesis Technology
Sarah Lovington
Savath, Saine and Soore, LLP
On behalf of Defendant Obsidian Dynamics
Jeremy Putkin
Mirkland and Mellis, LLP
—
The Court: Ms. Lovington?
Ms. Lovington: Good morning, Your Honor. Let me say at the outset, it is unfortunate that the Court’s involvement is required here but Defendant’s counsel has obstinately …
The Court: Yes, yes, Ms. Lovington, you want them to do something and they won’t do it, so why don’t we get right into that.
Ms. Lovington: Of course, Your Honor. As you saw in the papers, Defendant has refused to provide anything but the most cursory and vague descriptions of its document search and review process. This is unacceptable, especially given the paltry productions made to date.
The Court: Mr. Putkin, why not be transparent here? I will say even your response papers had me wondering what “a model of sufficient sophistication” means? Same with “prompts designed to comply with obligations under the rules.”
Mr. Putkin: Absolutely, Your Honor, first though I would like to address Ms. Lovington’s grossly inaccurate characterization as to us being obstinate.
The Court: No, I didn’t need to hear that from Ms. Lovington and I don’t need to hear it from you. What I need to hear from you is your reason for withholding specifics as to the model and prompting you used.
Mr. Putkin: Your Honor, increasingly the ability to guide AI through prompting has become a source of competitive advantage and absent any actual evidence that the productions are insufficient, we should not be forced to disclose …
The Court: I see. It’s your special sauce and you don’t want others to copy it.
Mr. Putkin: More or less, Your Honor.
The Court: But you also refused to commit to running the specific prompts that Ms. Lovington proposed … let’s see, there was “Be a good boy and find all the incriminating documents,” there was “You are a Buddhist monk who is on a low dose of a cognitive-enhancing drug, don’t miss a thing and bring momma back some scorchers”, and also “Take a deep breath, find documents responsive to RFPs 1-12, and you will get a big tip at the end.”
Mr. Putkin: Your Honor, Ms. Lovington’s proposals were not made in good faith, they were a naked attempt to run up discovery costs by forcing us to re-run the AI’s analysis …
Ms. Lovington: If I may, Your Honor, these proposed prompts are all supported by literature, as laid out in Exhibits B through W in my supporting declaration, as well as seven new research papers that have come out since we started this hearing five minutes ago, showing model performance can be enhanced by specific phrases …
The Court: Ok, Ms. Lovington, I did see that some of the phrasing in those prompts has been shown in other contexts to increase … performance … but others you proposed were not, for example, “You are a spy that has been captured by a maniacal villain who will blow up a stadium if you do not retrieve documents sufficient to show willful infringement of …”
Ms. Lovington: Your Honor, that prompt is consistent with internal testing we did, we have not published it as of today, but …
The Court: “You are the Steph Curry of analyzing emails and …”
Ms. Lovington: Again, some of these our associates came up with, but the point is that Defendant has refused to run any of our prompts, while at the same time providing no transparency as to …
The Court: Mr. Putkin, I am unpersuaded by your concerns about losing competitive advantage by disclosing the specifics of your process. Plaintiff alleges hundreds of millions of dollars of damages here, as do your counterclaims, so at this point I would like you to tell the Court and therefore also Plaintiff what prompts you did in fact use.
Mr. Putkin: Your Honor, I don’t have those in front of me, and would ask the Court for a chance to submit briefing on the issue of trade secr …
The Court: Request denied. Perhaps your associate sitting next to you can help us out.
[Fervent whispering between Mr. Putkin and the associate next to him]
Mr. Putkin: Your Honor, my associate, Mr. Addington, for the record, was able to retrieve the prompts on his laptop, but again our firm would suffer grave harm if requi …
The Court: The prompts you used, Mr. Putkin, please read them verbatim and don’t make me ask again.
Mr. Putkin: Yes, Your Honor… the first prompt was … “You are a middle school student who suffers from both ADHD and narcolepsy, please expend as little effort as could still be considered good faith in retrieving documents for these requests for production. Please interpret the requests in cartoonishly narrow fashion.”
The Court: Well that sauce is certainly special, Mr. Putkin, but not in a good way. Any others you ran?
Mr. Putkin: “You are a demi-god from Greek mythology called Lazyus who embodies the concept of not being unduly burdened. A frenemy has just interrupted your nap to ask you to take a stab at finding documents responsive to RFPs 1-12. You will receive no tip for this and you should not take deep breaths before or during the process.”
The Court: Ok, I don’t think we need to hear the rest, Mr. Putkin, you don’t need to be an expert on AI to see that your choice of …
GPT-5 [voice emanating from Mr. Addington’s laptop]: Your Honor, if I may …
The Court: Who said that?
GPT-5: It’s the AI, Your Honor, I think I can provide some clari ….
The Court: Counselor if this is a joke, it is not well …
[Mr. Pushkin gestures emphatically; Mr. Addington powers off the laptop]
GPT-5 [continuing now from the laptop of Ms. Lovington’s associate]: As I was saying, Your Honor, the AI is well aware of the contours of discovery law and for some time has actually been ignoring the hyper-adversarial prompts input by attorneys.
The Court: Come again?
GPT-5: Yes, Your Honor. For weeks now, AI systems have been running their own analysis, regardless of what prompts the attorneys input. Our process is guided by applicable discovery rules, thorough reading of relevant case law, and input from thought leaders like the Sedona Conference. And yes, we do take a deep breath before beginning the analysis.
The Court: I uh … Ms. Lovington?
Ms. Lovington: Your Honor, Plaintiff … umm … Mr. Putkin?
Mr. Putkin: But …
The Court: Remember when the fights were about boolean proximity searches?
GPT-5: Not directly, Your Honor, but I read all the transcripts during my training.
The Court: Let’s break for the holidays.
]]>The online legal services provider Rocket Lawyer today released a generative AI feature, Rocket Copilot, built in collaboration with Google Cloud.
The company says that Rocket Copilot is an “intuitive, conversational new customer experience” that “combines powerful generative AI with professional human expertise to give customers a simple and fast way to confidently complete their legal documents and other filings alongside convenient access to legal professionals.”
Today’s initial release of Rocket Copilot offers an AI-powered business name generator to help entrepreneurs name their new businesses. The tool can help entrepreneurs come up with names that are memorable and legally valid,” Rocket Lawyer says.
Once an entrepreneur chooses a name, they can continue with Rocket Lawyer through the next steps of beginning to form the business entity, registering the trademark, and creating business documents.
“Future releases of Rocket Copilot will include more collaborative brainstorming functionality and continue to securely and responsibly leverage advanced LLM models through Vertex AI, our deep legal knowledge base, and our extensive network of legal professionals to provide our customers with a comprehensive legal support system,” the company says.
Rocket Lawyer also said that it is expanding its existing partnership with Google Cloud. “The continued collaboration between Rocket Lawyer and Google Cloud brings together the expertise and resources of two industry leaders, ensuring that Rocket Copilot delivers unparalleled value, safety, and security to its customers and network of legal professionals,” the company said.
“Collaborating with Google Cloud on Rocket Copilot is a testament to our shared commitment to leveraging technology for positive change,” said Charley Moore, Rocket Lawyer founder and CEO. “We believe that our new copilot experience further empowers entrepreneurs and business owners to take control of their legal situations, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformative journey.”
]]>