Earlier this year I wrote a post about Pre/Dicta a new legal analytics product which “breaks all the rules” followed in the legal analytics market. Today Pre/Dicta announced the availability of predictions for new motion types, a new dashboard and additional interactive features. Unlike other analytics products which focuses on “the law.” Pre/Dicta focuses on profiling judges personal characteristics in order to predict how they will rule on a motion based on the characteristics of the cause of action, the parties and the attorney. It runs the predictions based on one piece of data – the Docket number! It doesn’t read the complaint, and it ignored the facts and defenses.

Founder Dan Rabinowitz built a methodology and an algorithm that is correct 85% of the time. Pre/Dicta has collected, enriched and analyzed more than 35 million docket entries, over 3.5 million cases, and 5.5 million parties and firms. This enables Pre/Dicta to generate a unique fingerprint or ‘DNA’ for each case and predicts judicial decisions. The availability of data-centric forecasts for the entire litigation timeline, from filing to trial, provides attorneys and their clients with a strategic edge and facilitates a more highly informed litigation strategy.

Continue Reading Pre/Dicta Adds 3 New Motion Outcome Predictions and “Doppelganger” AI Capability

Less than a month ago LexisNexis announced the launch of Lexis+ AI which launched with Conversational search, document drafting, summarization and analysis features. Today they are announcing the availability of two new features designed to speed up workflow and deliver insights from within two very different contexts: CourtLink and Microsoft Word.

Lexis Snapshot
The new Lexis Snapshot will summarize complaints filed in U.S. Federal District Court cases. It uses Generative AI to identify the nature of suit, summarize the complaint, identify parties, harms, and remedies in the complaint. CourtLink subscribers can add Snapshot to their subscription. There are also plans to expand the service to additional product and documents within the “Lexis ecosystem.”

All CourtLink Customer can preview the Snapshot service for free though the end of 2023.
At launch, the Lexis Snapshot service can be added to CourtLink. They also plan to expand the
service to additional products and document types “within the LexisNexis generative AI-enabled legal product ecosystem in future releases.”Continue Reading Lexis+AI Suite Of Tools Expanded with Lexis Snapshot and Lexis Create

The 2023 Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report includes insights from 700 legal professionals across the U.S. and nine European countries – namely Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary. The survey shows noteworthy differences between the countries surveyed.

The report documents the broad awareness of Generative AI’s promise and an expectation of a speedy adoption of Gen AI solutions over the next twelve months. The responders don’t seem to recognize the “headwinds” which are likely to slow both adoption and impact. Top of mind is the ongoing economic uncertainty combined with firms’ need to address the ethical, IP, security and privacy issues associated with using GenAI in legal practice.

Although the key trends below include many issues which have been around for decades, I can’t help but wonder how many of these challenges will be improved or resolved was GenAI matures and becomes pervasive across the business and practice of law.

Key trends expected to have a significant impact on legal in the next three years:

  • Growing complexity of compliance areas
  • Increasing importance of legal technology
  • Ability to recruit and retain talent
  • Increased demand for specialization and a decline in generalist work
  • Law departments moving more work in-house (insourcing)
  • Greater price competition/new and alternative fee structures/cost-containment pressures
  • Growing impact of generative AI/ChatGPT
  • Coping with increased volume and complexity of information
  • Meeting changing client/company leadership expectations
  • Emphasis on improved efficiency/ productivity
  • Growth of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), including expansion of Big Four into legal services

I thought the two most interesting sections of the report dealt with Generative AI and ESG.Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Releases 2023 Future Ready Lawyer Report

(Chicago, IL) November 2, 2023 – The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has officially launched its new Sponsor Directory, a white-labelled version with enhancements of the Legaltech Hub (LTH) directory.

Earlier this year, ILTA announced its partnership with Legaltech Hub (LTH) and the intention to white-label a version of the LTH directory to replace ILTA’s

As the 2024 budget planning season ramps up, we all look to both internal and external intelligence to support renewal, cancellation and acquisition decisions.

In August many of my readers participated in the annual Start/Stop survey which was open during the month of August 2023. I partnered with Harbor to conduct the survey and present the results On Thursday, September 14, 2023, at the third annual Legal Information + Knowledge Services Conference (LINKS)— a full day of virtual thought leadership conference.

As in the past, this survey was intended to  gather feedback on both products and projects which readers started or stopped during the past year or plan to start or stop in the near future. For this years survey I added new questions related to the emergence of generative AI. Thirty-tree organizations participated in the survey (93% were law firms)

Some overall trends – Generative AI trending up. Analytics Market Shaking out.

Generative AI although legal publishers have been embedding and utilizing AI in their products for decades, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has captured the market in a rather feverish way. There are firms out on the bleeding edge, but most are  holding back and struggling to create an AI policy and select from the ever expanding galaxy of products. Vendors are plunging ahead with AI offerings.

The most dramatic “shape shifting” market event was Thomson Reuters acquisition of Casetext, less than a year after the launch of WESTLAW Precision. The move was clearly designed to catapult TR  over competitors, who are developing  muti-modallarge language models  based AI products internally.Continue Reading The 2023 Start/Stop Survey: CoCounsel Best New Product, Analytics Segment Shakeout.

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional has announced that Lexis+ AI™ is now available to U.S. customer’s Given the legal market skittishness about both the security and reliability of Generative AI, (GAI) the Lexis + AI launch meeting for the legal press focused on how Lexis+ AI will deliver encrypted, secure and reliable results. Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, North America and UK, provided the overview an demo.

Reliable research results. Pfeifer explained that the new AI solution is designed to deliver trusted results because the system relies on Lexis authoritative primary and secondary materials combined with Shepard’s citations which provides direct links to supporting authorities for all GAI based answers.

Lexis announced its commercial preview program back in  May 2023. This provided a living laboratory where Lexis could get feedback from users across all segments of the legal market (global law firms, corporate legal departments, small law firms, and U.S. courts).

The Lexis+ AI press release asserts that Lexis+ AI answers offer the fastest GAI  “answers” solution in the market.” The “conversational dialog” can respond to up to five sequential questions.

Hallucination Free At the time of launch Lexis+ AI is the only legal generative AI solution with citations linked in its responses, “providing trusted legal results backed by verifiable authority.” This  minimizes the risk of invented content, or hallucinations, and checks all citations against Shepard’s to ensure citation validation. The solution also offers users the ability to input specific citations to verify accuracy and flag when a citation might be wrong. Customers can give instant feedback within the product to continually improve product performance, content relevance, and overall product accuracy.Continue Reading Lexis+ AI Launch Promises Secure, “Hallucination Free” Generative AI Solution With Linked Legal Citations

Today vLex  is announcing a suite of AI tools in its research assistant platform Vincent AI. Since the merger with Fastcase in 2023, vLex has offered the “world’s most comprehensive AI legal research platform.”  vLex has launched an invitation-only beta which includes a suite of large language model (LLM) tools. The beta will be offered to additional users in the coming months.

This announcement ratchets up the already feverish competition taking place in the legal research market. Thomson Reuters recently purchased Casetext CoCounsel for 650 Million and is expected to launch an integration with Westlaw Precision before the end of the year. LexisNexis is testing AI tools with customers and Bloomberg Law has made AI tools available in an Innovation Studio. All are expected to launch LLM enabled AI tools in the near future. I anticipate that we are in for a year (or maybe a decade) of leapfrogging AI technology launches. .

“AI tools are only as good as the data they rely on,” said vLex CEO Lluís Faus, “and the vLex law library is one of the largest collections of structured law on the planet, including leading expert commentary. That leads to unprecedented insights for legal tasks. For legal LLMs, this release is a major improvement. It is as big as the jump from ChatGPT to GPT4. The results are astonishing.”Continue Reading vLex Launches First Global AI Legal Assistant: Vincent AI for Research and Drafting

Lexblog, which was founded in 2003,  is the brain child of Kevin O’Keefe, a lawyer who has been on a mission to encourage  legal thought leadership through blogging. (Dewey B Strategic is published on Lexblog) Lexblog offers legal bloggers, lawyers and law firms a worldwide audience. Lexblog currently supports over 40,000 bloggers.

According to the press release “Lou is not designed to replace the lawyer as a writer—Lou amplifies the lawyer’s unique expertise, writing style and voice.”  Lou is powered by OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT technology,  and is designed to make lawyers and marketing professionals “quicker, more efficient and more effective communicators.”

Here’s How it Works I was given an overview of the new functionality by Colin O’Keefe. Lou is no substitute for authorship but is more like a really smart admin assistant who can write summaries, suggest titles and section headings, or perform routine updates on social media. It an also “play with style” by turning the tone from formal to informal.

Lexblog bloggers will get access to a Lou dashboard which lists a menu of functions it can assist with. Lout is built on Chat GDP 3.5 and 4, so bloggers will still need to check their own facts.

Here’s how Lou transforms the legal publishing experience:Continue Reading Lexblog Offers Early Access to Lou – AI Enabled Publishing Assistant

On Thursday, September 14, 2023, Harbor is hosting the third annual Legal Information + Knowledge Services Conference (LINKS)— a full day of virtual thought leadership content especially curated for law firm information professionals.  Register and see full agenda HERE.

The conference is dedicated to exploring emerging issues, trends, and best practices to advance