legal technology

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Bringing Neural Nets to the Law 
Casetext opened 2020 with the launch of a revolutionary new motion-drafting tool called Compose. Compose dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes lawyers to draft a motion or brief by serving up the arguments and standards appropriate to the motion type in a specific jurisdiction.  Compose also included a powerful new search functionality called “Parallel Search,” which was the first legal research tool to leverage breakthrough technology called transformer-based neural nets.  Parallel Search proved to be so popular with attorneys that in June of 2020 Casetext made that search capability available as a stand-alone product and an upgrade to their Casetext research platform. More than a decade ago, major legal research platforms Lexis and Westlaw freed their subscribers from Boolean search by introducing natural language search. But freedom from Boolean search did
Continue Reading What’s New at Casetext: Parallel Search and “Do it yourself” Neural Networks

Today Reynen Court – an innovative software company supported by a consortium of 20 global law firms announced that they had hired law librarian, legal technologist and innovation provocateur Sarah Glassmeyer  for the role of Legal Tech Curator. The press release describes this as ” a  lynchpin role in generating contact and strategy for the Solution Store which is at the heart of the Reynen Court Platform.”

Reyen Court allows participating law firms to test innovative, new, cloud based technologies. The platform is designed to speed up the historically, lengthy testing and evaluation time normally associated with the implementation of new technology. One of the hottest new
Continue Reading Law Librarian, Visionary, Provocateur Sarah Glassmeyer Joins Reynen Court in Strategic Legal Tech Curator Role

LexisNexis has just released there inaugural Law360 Pulse 2021  Legal Technology Survey. In January and February 2021 they conducted  a survey  of corporate and law firm technology decision makers. The survey was focused on assessing law firm and in-house  technology investments, goals and fears during the COVID-19 pandemic.  A big clue to the results

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Legal News One of the most surprising developments of 2020 was the new focus on Legal News. ALM launched an innovative new alerting services called Law.com Radar which originally launched as (Legal Radar). Here are links to the posts I wrote about  Law.com radar in February and November 2020. Westlaw although owned by the Thomson Reuters news organization had ignored the legal news market they launched Westlaw Today in 2020.  (The predecessor company West Publishing had made short lived attempt  with a product called Westlaw News sometime in the 1980s.) Fastcase which bought Law Street Media began publishing legal news which leveraged data harvested from their Docket Alarm analytics product. ( A new Lexis News offering Law360 Pulse which launched  in January 2021 was not included in this survey but will be included in the 2021 survey.)

Best Legal News Product: ALM’s Law.com Radar

Legal Marketplaces It has become nearly impossible to test and track all the new legal technology tools that flood the market each year. In addition, existing tools are transformed with powerful new functionality. Enter the legal marketplace – a new category of legal resource
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not 2020-21 Survey: ALM Law.com Radar Voted Best Legal News Product and Thomson Reuters Legal Home Best Marketplace

Join our panelists Jean O’Grady (publisher of Dewey B Strategic) and Michael King (Director of Loss Prevention at Schiff Harden) to discuss the latest trends in legal technology and how advances in automation can benefit law firms by reducing cost, mitigating risk, driving new revenue, and preventing revenue leakage.
In this webinar, you will learn:

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Respond to the  2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share.  Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey

Today Bloomberg Law is launching enhancements to their Draft Analyzer tool which streamlines the  M&A drafting process. The Draft Analyzer was launched in 2015  as a “what’s market” tool which I reviewed in an earlier post.  The Draft Analyzer streamlines transactional workflow by leveraging a proprietary algorithm to benchmark a clause  to similar provisions…

This past fall,  husband and wife tech team Chris Ford and Nikki Shaver launched an important new technology resource: Legaltechnologyhub.com. Legaltechhub (LTH) is a curated database of legal technology tools, which is enhanced with extensive and careful tagging and taxonomy. The founders are well known throughout the legal tech community. Ford is CMO at the tech company Zero, and Shaver is a former practicing attorney and renowned KM and innovation thought leader. According to Ford and Shaver, LTH took almost a year to build. It was clearly a labor of love in which they made a large personal investment of both time and money. LTH currently includes descriptions of 1,621 products from 84 countries. The database can be searched, filtered, and browsed.

This is a platform that makes me slap my forehead and shout, “Why didn’t I think of that!”

The press release described LTH as “addressing a need for an updated, user-driven resource to find the right legal technology anywhere in the world. LTH is a free resource for users and offers free listings to vendors. Tech companies can opt for fee-based enhanced listings which will include more descriptive content and even  videos.”

Yes, there’s Google, but a Google search for legal technology will deliver a hideously bloated and imprecise list of “hits.” I searched for ‘legal project management” software on Google and in .53 seconds it serviced up a truly useless 811,000,000 results which were both repetitive and unreliable. A similar search in LTH delivered 18 product descriptions which I was able to refine by applying additional filters.
Continue Reading Legaltechnologyhub.com: Find The Right Technology Tool Fast

The financial crisis of 2007 triggered a convulsion in the legal industry which continues to offer aftershocks exacerbated  by “economic, demographic, regulatory, technology and competitive demands.” And then  as we know, the COVID-19 pandemic  triggered new a new crisis. Wolters Kluwer was analyzing the legal marketplace back in January 2020. Today they are releasing the survey results in the 2020 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer: Performance Drivers and Change in the Legal Sector” which was designed “to assess the future-readiness and resilience in the legal sector.”

The survey gathers feedback from an international group of 700 legal professionals working in law firms and as in-house counsel.. The full survey is available at this link.

The report is 29 pages long but is full of graphs and data illustrating various trends as well as the disconnects between law firms and in-house counsel priorities. Both law firms and in house counsel share an awareness of technology as a critical success factor but the majority of both organization types are f ailing overcome obstacles to implementation.

I spoke with Dean Sonderegger, head of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S about the survey results. Sonderegger predicts that the COVID pandemic will accelerate all the trends identified in the survey.

Top Trends and ReadinessContinue Reading Wolters Kluwer 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey–Tech Aspiration vs. Tech Implementation