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I have ranked the most popular 15  Dewey S Strategic posts of 2020.It is no surprise to me that posts about the release of specialty COVID resources by major legal publishers dominate – 4 of the 15 stories. My annual “Hits and Misses” survey results  were covered in 3 of the 15 top posts. The…

Today Casetext is announcing the availability of a Microsoft Word plug-in for the Compose brief drafting technology. It makes sense to put a valuable drafting tool right in place where lawyers spend their time drafting. Compose enables  attorneys to locate and add arguments, legal standards, and precedent without ever leaving Word.

According to the press release, the Word version of Compose includes all the motions and features available in the original Compose application: a menu of click-to-add arguments, legal standards customized to the attorney’s side and jurisdiction, and Parallel Search, a powerful form of concept-based legal search which uses a sentence to find matching case law, even if it includes none of the same language.

The Promise of Dramatic Efficiencies .“Compose already increases efficiency in brief-drafting by 4x,[1] in part because it cuts out the need for attorneys to bounce between templates, treatises, case law databases, and a DMS in order to
Continue Reading Casetext Offers Dramatic Drafting Efficiencies With New Compose Word Plug-in

Today Casetext is releasing The first  Compose employment law collection:
Wage and Hour. In my original Compose product review I noted that “Compose does not promise to replace lawyers – it offers to make lawyers more efficient by automating the first draft of a motion or brief. It can also function as a tutorial for a new lawyer who is assigned with drafting a motion for the first time.” Compose launched
Casetext released their groundbreaking drafting tool in conjunction with Legal Tech in January with three  collections: Federal Discovery, Federal Motion to Dismiss, and Federal Core Civil Procedure.  Since that time they have continued to expand their library of motions. Compose enables a lawyer to select a motion type in specific jurisdictions, add arguments from a menu for the jurisdiction, select legal standards customized to the arguments and jurisdiction, add facts and authorities using the powerful Parallel Search technology and then customize the draft.  In July,  Casetext released  a report “Increasing Law Firm Profitability using Compose Brief-Drafting technology”  which documents the dramatic efficiencies delivered by the Compose drafting tool.
16 New Wage and Hour Motions  Casetext interviewed labor lawyers and examined court dockets in order to determine the  16 most commonly filed motions in labor law litigation. The motions included in the Compose Wage  and Hour collection are tailored to the substantive legal issues arising in this type of litigation. The motions are  available for the three jurisdictions where 75% of all the wage and hour litigation in the US is filed: the federal courts California and New York. Motions include:

Continue Reading Casetext Compose Expands Automated Motion Drafting With Employment Law Collection

Thomson Reuters has released new version of HighQ, its cloud-based productivity solution, with significant new features and integrations.  The new version, HighQ 5.4, offers powerful document automation with a new native Contract Express integration, AI-driven contract analysis, new mobile applications, Legal Tracker integration, and much more. When I saw a demo of HighQ last year – my first question was “when are you integrating it with Contract Express.”  The two products were meant to be merged and today they are. 

The HighQ 5.4 Dashboard

Thomson Reuters acquired HighQ, in July 2019.  Irish McIntyre, head of Legal Software and Workflow for Thomson Reuters is quoted in the press release: “Now, just a little over a year later, two market-leading Thomson Reuters software products are integrated with HighQ and we are introducing the most significant HighQ release to date. There are more than 100 new features or enhancements in the latest version to solve our customers’ biggest challenges and to help them work better virtually.”  The seamless Integration of Contract Express HighQ 5.4 brings the best of Contract Express and HighQ into a single solution. Contract Express now powers HighQ’s Document Automation. Contract Express templates can now be associated with HighQ sites and accessed to generate documents. These documents and associated data are stored natively in HighQ, enabling the user to integrate and establish workflows, collaborate, co-author, and utilize new data-visualization capabilities.  
Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches HighQ 5.4: AI Contract Analysis, Visualization and Integration with Contract Express and Legal Tracker 

Today Lexis is announcing Lexis is launching a significant new platform called Lexis + . I had a call with Jeff Pfeifer,   chief product officer at LexisNexis and David Ganote senior director of product strategy at Lexis Nexis. Lexis+  is being positioned as a premium solution which has been in development over the last 18 months.  Pfeifer described the release as improving the user experience and delivering insights though integration across all elements of the platform. There are a total of 11 new features which will only be available in Lexis+:

  1. Updated, Modern User Interface visual styling including a new Experience Dock to navigate to integrated elements of the product​
  2. Practical Guidance content fully integrated in “Search All​” experience of Legal Research
  3. Lexis Practice Advisor application also fully integrated in Lexis+ and all subscribers will have access to at least one module of practical guidance content
  4. Brief Analysis
  5. Expanded Search Term Maps, now covering 35 Content Types
  6. ​Enhanced Ravel View, including new ‘anchor’ capabilities to better navigate the visual map
  7. Shepard’s At Risk
  8. Code Compare
  9. Lexis Answers, fully redesigned in Lexis+
  10. Missing & Must Include​
  11. Search Tree

One of the most fascinating aspects of the new platform is rebuild of the Lexis Answers feature. According to Pfeifer the newest version of Lexis Answers was built at Lexis Labs where the team worked with a machine learning technology from Google  referred to as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT was smart but not smart enough to master the complexities of legal concepts and the idiosyncrasies of legal writing and syntax. According to Pfeifer “Lexis sent BERT to law school.” Lexis was able to train BERT using the Lexis taxonomy and headnotes which had been developed at Lexis decades ago. Yet another example of human machine collaboration. 

The Insight Wave. The signature visual identity is called the “insight wave” a net-like swath of color which arcs and turns across the screen. According to Pfeifer,  the  new image represents the flow and inter-connected-ness of information. This is appropriate since the new platform offers a  tighter integration of research, analytics and practical guidance tools.

Voluntary upgrade. I’m going to cut to the chase for my librarian and knowledge management colleagues. Lexis Advance is not being phased out. Subscribers can continue to purchase Lexis Advance or choose to upgrade to Lexis+.

The Dashboard. The main Lexis dashboard includes an “experience dock” on the left side of the screen which allows users to select between legal research, practical guidance or brief analysis. 

 “What would you like to research today?”  hovers over the prominent search bar. The single search feature will search across all Lexis content. Users can enter queries using natural language or Boolean.

Lexis Answers in Lexis+ was developed from the ground up.  Today, it answers from questions from caselaw but the
Continue Reading Lexis Rides the “Insight Wave:” Launches  Lexis+ with New Look, Brief Analyzer, AI Search, Codes Compare and Loads of New Features

Thomson Reuters continues to build out features in Westlaw Edge. Today they have announced  a new  A.I. enabled quote checking feature which resides within the brief analysis tool Quick Check which was launched at the  American Association of Law Libraries meeting last July. Quick Check allows lawyers to upload a brief and quickly identify missing

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Gentle readers— in a distant era (January) when no one was thinking about facemasks and hand sanitizer, I posted the annual Dewey B Strategic Hits and Misses Survey. In an attempt to “carry on” as if everything were normal, today I am reporting on the survey results.Thanks to the  87 readers who  responded to the survey between January and March 15th. Compared to 2018, 2019 was a fairly slow year for the launch of new products and features. As a result this years survey has fewer questions and fewer categories of new products. But this year the survey covered new analytics tools, analytics documentation, workflow tools, law comparison tools. The survey also asked
Continue Reading Hits and Misses Readers Choose Best New Analytics, Workflow and Law/Reg Comparison Tools

LexisNexis has dominated litigation analytics since it’s acquisition of Lex Machina and Ravel Law over the past decade. Ravel has been integrated into Lexis Advance, under the Context brand. Today Lexis Nexis announced the launch of Context Company Analytics. The original Context Judges analytics product uses language analysis to gain insights into judges precedential behavior. With the Company Analytics launch they are using language analysis to visualize insights derived from business news, company financials and litigation. Lexis has historically been strong in both company
Continue Reading LexisNexis Launches Context Company Analytics –Language Analysis and Insights for Competitive Insights