Most of the exciting new products I have seen in the past year have offered visualization or analytics features. I shouldn’t be surprised that Gurinder “Gary” Sangha has resurfaced with a product that focuses on text rather than data. He has a decidedly contrarian history. In an earlier post I explored his launch of the highly successful Intelligize product at the height of the financial crisis where it was a late entry into an overcrowded market of products built around SEC filings and regulation. I nearly groaned at the prospect of seeing yet another SEC product trying to take share from 10K Wizard, Securities Mosaic and Westlaw Business…. what could possibly crack that market? Sangha had managed to develop a product driven by algorithms which untangled and sorted and paired streams of SEC correspondence, No Action Letters and comments which were painfully unintelligible using standard Boolean keyword search or normal filters. Intelligize exposed a web of relationships between documents and offered lawyers a “time rebate”- less time searching and sorting meant more time for high level analysis.
Sangha sums up LexChek’s value proposition in a single illustration. LexChek, Saves time and money while mitigating the risk of damage to the reputation of a lawyer or the firm or damaging client relationships.
What’s Next
According to Sangha LexChek is available on the market and has already been adopted by several ALM 100 firms. The cost of licenses will be scaled to the practice group size. Right now the product is ready for the transactional market. A version for litigators is under development. I can’t think of any product that combines all of the features offered by LexCheck. Thomson Reuters Transactional Drafting assistant has similar proofreading capabilities but not the ambiguity detection.
Competitive Analysis in Your Future? While the primary focus is on helping lawyers improve the quality of their own work, it is clear that this product could also have a “competitive analysis” function by identifying weaknesses in an adversaries documents or contested legislation or regulations.
Could LexCheck Have an A2J Impact?
I am a big fan of legal entrepreneurs. I certainly wish Sangha success in his venture… I also can’t help but hope that the product is so successful, it can be adopted by every legislature in the US. Access to justice is impaired by the sheer volume of litigation. If LexCheck were run on all legislation in the US, could this not have cumulative benefit on access to justice by reducing some volume of litigation? More importantly it could assure that all legislation is more comprehensible to the general public — those who can’t afford lawyers to fight over common legislative drafting errors such as ambiguities, omissions and grammatical errors which impact the interpretation of a law.