At the dawn of the digital information age, I learned an exotic research tradecraft “Selective Dissemination of Information” (SDI). Platforms such as Dialog and Orbit contained dozens of databases which included abstracts and descriptors for scientific and business
articles and reports. Curated topical updates could be harvested by using a set of complex commands and
Daniel Lewis Co-Founder of Ravel Law Joins LegalOn Technologies
LegalOn Technologies (“LegalOn”) a leading legal technology company from Japan, has announced its expansion into the United States
and the appointment of Daniel Lewis as US CEO. Daniel Lewis is well known in the U.S. legal tech community as the co-Founder of Ravel Law (later acquired by LexisNexis). Ravel Law completely reimagined the delivery of caselaw research results and was the first platform to offer Judge’s “Precedential Behavior Analysis.”
According to the press release “LegalOn has built the world’s leading AI contract review solution for in-house teams and law firms. The company has over 3,000 law firm and law department customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent funding. LegalOn was founded in 2017 by two corporate lawyers and the company is backed by leading investors
Nozomu Tsunoda, CEO is quoted in the press release: “We have over 3,000 customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent fundraising, and now we’ve added an experienced executive, Daniel Lewis, to lead our US expansion.”
Lewis joins LegalOn as US CEO after five years at LexisNexis leading practical guidance businesses serving 100k+ attorneys. He previously founded and led Ravel Law, a legal analytics software company. “One of the biggest challenges that general counsel and in-house teams face is providing timely review on urgent, high-volume contracts like NDAs and purchase agreements,” says Daniel Lewis, US CEO.
I recently interviewed Lewis and JP Biard, the Head of Global Strategy. Lewis described how the drag and drop feature provides complete contract analysis in lightning speed. The product provides clause by clause analysis and guidance. Another unique feature is that the product supports “point of view” analysis meaning that it provides guidance based on the position of the party. There are currently over 60 Japanese agreements supported. LegalOn is in the process of building up the U.S. corpus of contracts it will support by using Natural
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Lex Machina Launches Legal Analytics for New Practice Area: Internet Law
Today Lex Machina and LexisNexis announced the official release of a new topical area of analytics — Internet Law. This new federal
practice area includes data for any case with one or more claims brought under one of the following federal statutes: (i) the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), (ii) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), or (iii) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which includes the Stored Communications Act (SCA). It is an important area of law in which transparency and understanding provide a crucial edge. The new
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Post-Pandemic Legal Research Procurement Survey – What’s Hot and What’s Not?
On September 15th I presented the results of my “2022 Dewey B Strategic Start Stop Survey” at an HBR-sponsored LINKS program. I co-
presented the results with HBR Managing Director Kris Martin. The Dewey B Strategic “Start Stop Survey” was launched in 2013 but was suspended during the pandemic. The 2022 survey was intended
Lex Machina Launches Bankruptcy Chapter 11 Module.
Lex Machina and LexisNexis announced today that it has officially released a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module, which provides Legal Analytics for over 115,000 Chapter 11 proceedings. It’s been a long time coming. Ever since they launched their Bankruptcy Appeals Analytics in 2017, customers have be wondering when Chapter 11 analytics would launch. Hooray! That day is here.
Excellent timing given the fragile state of the economy. Recessions has historically been a boon for Bankruptcy and Finance practices. The Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module includes the entire docket in any bankruptcy proceeding filed after 2009 in a United States Bankruptcy Court under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. Like other Lex Machina modules, the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module provides insights into judges, courts, debtors, creditors, creditor committees, and trustees involved in Chapter 11 proceedings over the last 13 years.
The Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module incorporates special features such as filters for cases involving business debtors, voluntary petitions, and confirmed plans. It also incorporates an extensive collection of practice bankruptcy specific document tags to filter
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Lexis API for Courtroom Insight Adds LexisNexis Context Analytics to Judge and Expert Profiles
Courtroom Insight today announced a collaboration with LexisNexis® Legal & Professional. LN will enable customers who have both Courtroom I
nsight and LexisNexis to automatically access select Lexis Context Analytics and Lexis+ information about expert witnesses and judges. The new data will appear with within the Courtroom Insight Knowledge Management platform profiles of judges
Associates Flailing in the “Abyss of Information” – Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder Promises Relief
Earlier this week, LexisNexis Legal & Professional unveiled the upcoming availability of Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder, at the American Association of Law Libraries conference . This new feature enables litigators to identify caselaw relevant to the specific facts and issues of their client’s case. The new offering covers six litigation practice areas – Personal Injury, Labor & Employment, Insurance, Real Estate, Intellectual Property, and Business & Commercial – with additional practice areas planned.
I met with Jeff Pfeifer, LexisNexis Chief Product Officer during the Conference to get an overview of the Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder. Pfeifer alluded to a “abyss of information” which practically paralyses an associate faced with so much precedent and so many research tools. The Fact & Issue Finder is focused on helping lawyers locate the most factually relevant cases quickly. According to Pfeifer the product grew out of an attempt to completely deconstruct the research process. The developers used feedback from more than 1,000 customer interactions in order to understand the research experience and address specific pain points. One important goal is to eliminate the “fractured” research process by delivering a set of unified results in a single dashboard.
Fact & Issue Finder is designed from the ground up to mimic the exact processes that legal professionals perform when researching
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Lexis 2022 CounselLink Report: Partner Rates and Panel Consolidation Continue to Rise
Today Lexis is releasing the 2022 CounselLink Enterprise Management Trends Report. When it was established in 2013 the report
included six key metrics. In recognition of the increasingly global legal market, the study now includes a seventh metric which covers hourly billing rates for Partners in countries located outside the US. The insights in this year’s trends report are based on data derived from more than $49 billion in legal spending covering more than 350,000 time keepers in more than 1.2 million matters.
included six key metrics. In recognition of the increasingly global legal market, the study now includes a seventh metric which covers hourly billing rates for Partners in countries located outside the US. The insights in this year’s trends report are based on data derived from more than $49 billion in legal spending covering more than 350,000 time keepers in more than 1.2 million matters.Key takeaways
- 2021 was a block buster year for M&A legal fees. The median partner rate was $878 an hour… A 6.1% increase over the prior year median.
- Law firms continue to increase hourly rates and in-house legal departments are paying them. 2021 partner rates increased 3.4% over 2020.
- Alternative for your arrangements are increasing but not disrupting the market. Only 14.8% of matters had even a portion of their billing rate set at some thing other than hourly. Only 9.6%
Legal Research Platforms Customer Service Survey – Customer Support in a Freefall
60% of DBS Survey Responders Say Legal Research/Tech Company Customer Support Has Declined in Past 10 Years.
In March I conducted a reader survey to explore the current state of customer service in the legal publishing and technology market. The
Survey was open from March 3rd to March 11th. The reader response was somewhat overwhelming. Not only did 169 readers respond to the 5 question survey but the majority of responders took the time to provide thoughtful responses to open ended questions about the improvement or decline in service.
I was inspired to conduct this survey by my own observations of and participation in the legal information and technology market from its infancy in the 1980’s when online caselaw was an adjunct to print — through today’s market where text has been transformed into data,
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Power Tools for Summer Associates: Seven Research / Workflow Tools You Didn’t See in Law School
Law Schools in the United States have been historically focused on teaching students using caselaw research tools and techniques. In
real practice, lawyers need to add a few more tools to their toolkit. During the past decade, there has been an explosion of new tools, powered by algorithms and analytics which streamline a variety of