I have the honor of being the Chairperson of the 2018 Gillard Lecture which is sponsored by the St Alumni  of . John’s University Division of Library and Information Science.  I will be introducing this year’s speaker, Brian Kuhn, the Founder and Co-Leader of the IBM Watson Legal. Brian is responsible for defining the intersection of legal artificial intelligence and blockchain for law for IBM– two of the hottest issues in legal tech.

This years lecture will take place at St. John’s NYC Campus on Astor Place at 6 pm on May 31st. The event is free but pre-registration is required. Click this link to register.

 

Today Courtroom Insight, Daubert Tracker and Expert Witness Profiler  are releasing the  results of a new survey which was “developed to better understand commonly used expert witness research and retention techniques among litigation professionals.” Every law firm with a litigation practice is aware of the pain points associated with identifying, researching and validating experts.

The nationwide survey was conducted by email in late 2017 and early 2018.  Thousands of litigation professionals, including attorneys, law librarians and paralegals, were invited to complete the survey, with 580 actual respondents.  Although advanced technology solutions have been developed for legal research, ediscovery and case management; expert witness research is still a feral and largely untamed workflow. There is no shortage of vendors hawking a “magic bullet” solution – but the survey below indicates that the market is Continue Reading Surprise -Your Expert Witness Has a Rapsheet – New Survey Examines the Sorry State of Expert Research Workflow in Law Firms

This week Lex Machina added Remedies Analytics to their platform. Lawyers can now investigate the trends on grant and deny rates for permanent injunctions. Preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Grant/deny rates can be analyzed for specific judges and districts for the types of litigation currently covered by Lex Machina. These include antitrust. Commercial, copyright, employment. Patent, securities and trademark. In addition, the new data will provide insights into the timing for grant or denial of these remedies for specific judges and districts. According to Lex Machina’s  General Counsel and Chief Evangelist, Owen Byrd,   Lex Machina is continually enhancing the product based on customer demands and remedies was the most recent response to customer needs.

Lex Machina Remedies Timing
Lex Machina Remedies

The  Data About the Data  Lex Machina shows the power of the data by inserting macro trends extracted from their product into the press release. According to the press release 27,500 of 1 million+ federal district court cases involves orders for permanent or temporary injunctions or TROs. Overall 88% of injections on the merits are granted and 125 are denied. However, the regard deny rates overall vary for specific types of cases such as trademark and labor.

 

Special remedies. The Lex Machina analytics platform also includes remedies data for specific types of litigation. Employment cases include remedies for reinstatement and promotion; antitrust remedies cover divestiture; commercial remedies include replevin and specific performance and trademark remedies include “termination of a mark.”

All of the Lex Machina data includes a wide range of filters for case types, tags and timing options which can be applied to develop custom insights. Read the full press release here.

Tom Wolfe, the “founding father” of ” the New Journalism” died yesterday.  I can’t remember a time when Wolfe, t was not my favorite writer. I have read all of his books from the Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965) to The Kingdom of Speech (2016), … as well as  every article I could chase down. In the early 1980’s I started to compile the ultimate Tom Wolfe bibliography.  I confess, it is a project I did not complete, but I had boxes of index cards and a primitive software called Biblio-file. I remember the disappointment of tracking down the archive of his early writings at the defunct New York Herald Tribune. The librarian at the Queens Borough Public Library reported that although they still had the  Herald archive, the Tom Wolfe “clipping” folder was missing.

After  meeting Wolfe at a lecture and explaining my bibliography project, I sent him a letter asking for help tracking down his works which had appeared in lesser known publications. Instead of getting a form letter from his agent I received something that was more like a work of art from the author.

I guess it’s time to get my Tom Wolfe “art works” framed. So sorry to see him go!

 

I wrote about the launch of Gavelytics in October 2017 which offered judicial analytics for two of the largest California county courts: Los Angeles and Riverside. They recently added data for San Francisco County. The number one  analytics solution demanded  by respondents to my annual Dewey B Strategic Start Stop Survey is a comprehensive 50 state court docket and analytics product. Well the 50 state solution is still a pipe dream, but the folks at Gavelytics have continue to  use AI and machine learning to build out an analytics solution for California lawyers who litigate in county courts. Rick Merrill the Founder and CEO of Gavelytics, described Gavelytics as being a product “developed by lawyers for lawyers,” and designed to address the fact that most lawyers have very little insight into the behavior of state court judges.

The Use Cases Continue Reading Gavelytics Expands California Judicial Analytics with Rulings Research Capability and adds Arbitrator Archive

I will be speaking at these upcoming events:

 Driving Adoption of AI Enabled Research Tools and How the New Technology Will Affect the Role of the Information Professional, SLA New York Chapter, May 8, 2018. Panel also includes Steve Lastres, Director of Knowledge Management, Debevoise & Plimpton, Nicole Dupras, Director Legal Research Division at Chase Cost Management, Robyn Rebollo, VP at Chase Cost Management:.

It Takes More than A Dumpster to Build a  Digital Law Library, Webinar , Sponsored by Lucidia. May 16, 2018, 2 pm est.

Knowledge Management: Generating Interest and Adoption, Webinar, Sponsored by International Legal Technology Association, May 22, 2018. Register here  Panel also includes: Steve Lastres, Director of Knowledge Management, Debevoise & Plimpton and Marlene Gebauer, Director of  Knowledge Solutions, Greeberg Traurig.

Today Casetext is launching CARA AI which offers significant changes to both the CARA and Casetext research experience. Today CARA  is being transformed from a citation analysis tool into a full fledged legal research engine.

I had a chance to talk to Casetext co-founders Jake Heller and Pablo Arredondo about the launch . Heller, the CEO of Casetext describes these enhancements as “helping attorneys at any phase of their research find better authorities faster.”  Arredondo, who is the Chief Legal Research Officer described  CARA AI as offering a solution like Google, Apple and Amazon Prime — “CARA AI gives you only what you need.”

CARA AI

Key features include:

  • Seamless integration of CARA AI contextual search into the traditional research workflow.
  • The ability to execute searches by loading briefs, motions, complaints and answers.
  • An enhanced user interface, upgraded algorithm and increased speed.

Speed  The press release  states that  these enhancements make Casetext the “fastest research platform.” They did not provide any data to back this statement up,  but the demo I saw showed the new platform delivering near immediate search results and document retrievals. I have to agree –CARA AI is lightening fast. Continue Reading CARA AI: Did Casetext Just “Drop Kick” Keywords Out of the Legal Research Process?

A small patch of Silicon Valley thrives in downtown DC. I have the good fortune to work one block from the Fastcase headquarters — a modest brick building off a street book-ended by the National Archives and the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery. I spent a recent afternoon surrounded by the hipster and need I say young Fastcase editorial team. Although Fastcase pioneered visualization tools for case law research; is currently promoting an AI sandbox and recently acquired analytics start-up Docket Alarm, I was in their office to discuss PRINT. Yes –Books and Journals made of paper.

Fastcase co-Founder and CEO Ed Walters, not only runs Fastcase, but he also teaches robotics at Georgetown Law and is a regular on the the Legal Tech innovator speakers circuit. He is also what I like to call a “font geek!” He can go into a swoon over a great type font. He found a sort of soulmate in Steve Errick, the new COO of Fastcase,  who is the son of a typesetter, a former legal publishing exec (Thomson Reuters, Lexis, Wolters Kluwer), who owns both a private publishing company Twelve Tables Press and a country bookstore Book and Leaf in Brandon, Vermont. Continue Reading Full Court Press and AI Sandbox: Fastcase and the Art of the Game Change – A New Era in Fair Pricing in Legal Publishing?

Dear Colleagues and readers you must be asking yourselves:

What is a Blog-o-zine? It is word I made up to describe a print publication which includes  “best of” selection of  Dewey B Strategic  blog in 2017.

Why a print blog-o-zine?”  I, who have been an unrelenting advocate for digital information consumption have now pivoted to embrace a print representation of my 2017 blog posts?  The bottom line is that  I want to make my content accessible to more readers and to put it into a format which more easily “browse-able” for lawyers, researchers and legal information innovators who want to review a recent snapshot of the legal information landscape.

What inspired this? I had two epiphanies on the print versus digital issue in 2017. After 7 years of blogging it has become more difficult for me to locate my prior Continue Reading Dewey B Strategic Blog-o-zine Pre-publication Sale Ends Tuesday May 1st

Here are the results of the 2017 Start/Stop Survey questions related to processes and projects which are being cancelled or launched.

Print Decline Continues

The decline of print in law libraries continued to dominate the workflow changes in law libraries. Libraries are shrinking. Workflow is changing to focus on digital resources and KM support. Almost all the processes and projects being terminated by respondents related to print resource maintenance or management.

New Initiatives 2017/2018

The top 2017 and 2018 initiatives were focused on AI and competitive intelligence alert enhancement.Artificial Intelligence was the top technology mentioned by respondents. AI is being examined as a feature of commercial products from the major vendors (Lexis, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg Law) as well as start ups, Fastcase,CARA, Ross. It is also being examined as a technology for internal Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence Projects. Enhancing Competitive intelligence workflow and resources ranked second in the new projects undertaken  by respondents.

Specific initiatives include: Continue Reading Start/Start Survey for Processes and Projects: AI and Algorithms Lead New Initiatives, Print Libraries Continue to Shrink