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We were all blindsided as 2020 unfolded, yet the momentum of technological change and innovation assured a steady stream of new products. I have identified five trends, which I have divided into three categories: unforeseeable, continuing and surprising.

The trends I believe are worth noting — Unforeseeable: COVID-19 impacts; Predicable: state court analytics and innovative workflow tools; Surprising: legal news re-emerges as a competitive focus among major legal publishers and tech marketplaces emerge.

Unforeseeable: COVID-Related Trends

COVID alone triggered four subtrends:

  • The emergence of local law and ephemeral publications. Major legal vendors were no more prepared to track county level health department issuances and Governors’ executive orders than the average law firm. To make things worse these “documents” were issued in a myriad of social media formats, texts, tweets, Facebook pages … . What’s a law firm to do?
  • Librarians and KM professionals stepped into the vacuum and established protocols for locating and harnessing the untidy universe of COVID-19 ephemera.
  • Law firms became publishers of original COVID-19 resources (leveraging the local documents harnessed by librarians).
  • Legal publishers turned out an unprecedented number of free legal resources covering COVID-19 issues. I covered this trend in an earlier ATL post.

Continuing Trends: State Court Analytics And Workflow Tools

Workflow ToolsContinue Reading 5 (Unforeseeable, Predicable, And Surprising) Legal Tech Trends In 2020

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is releasing a new Practical Content Dashboard within their flagship Cheetah and Cheetah for Corporate Counsel platforms. The Cheetah platform includes over 20,000 practical content tools and documents  spread across twenty seven practice areas. The practice content will now be easier to locate with addition of the dashboard. Ken Crutchfield the vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Law & Business US is quoted in the press release: “The new features will give our customers fast access to all of the applicable tools needed for their day-to-day work saving valuable
Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer  Releases Practical Content Dashboard

Last month, Feit Consulting released a new report on the state of the market for major legal vendors Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and Wolters Kluwer. Over the past 30 years, what was once known as the Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALR) market has been dramatically transformed by the integration of workflow, drafting, brief analysis, and analytics tools into knowledge-enabled insight platforms.

My interview with Michael Feit, founder of Feit Consulting, reveals how major legal information vendors have failed to adjust their pricing models to reflect the collapse of cost recovery following the Great Recession of 2008, when law firms faced a buyers’ market and CALR costs became almost 100% overhead.

According to Feit, the response of the two dominant players, Lexis and Westlaw, was to protect their revenue by eliminating “all usage-based pricing and published retail rates. From that point on, pricing from Lexis and Westlaw went rogue.”

As law librarians and knowledge managers prepare their firms’ post-pandemic budgets, Feit has shared insights and
Continue Reading Managing The Post-COVID Knowledge Resources Budget In An Era Of ‘Rogue’ Pricing: Insights From Michael Feit of Feit Consulting

Today Feit Consulting is releasing a new report on the state of market for major legal  vendors: Thomson Reuters. LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer. I hesitate to even refer to the market as the legal research market because that completely ignores the dramatic integration of workflow, drafting, brief analysis and analytics into the 21st century progeny of the foundational case law research systems.The 2020 Legal Information Vendor Market Survey  was conducted between June and August 2020 and is targeted at law firms with 50+ attorneys. There were 104 responses: 26%(<100 attorneys), 56% (100-499 attorneys) and 20% >500 attorneys.The  The report provides context by comparing results to the 2018 survey results. These results will be include in an upcoming book Optimizing Legal Information Pricing which will be published this fall.

The one criticism I have of the report is that the report collects data on the importance of various products by vendor. Westlaw Edge is listed but not the prior Westlaw platform – which many respondents appear to still have. Since the time when the study was conducted Lexis has announced it’s new platform Lexis+ which will surely be a platform analysed in the next version of the study.Although Westlaw enjoys the greatest market share they are declining in customer satisfaction. Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer are stand outs in improving customer satisfaction with 35% and 15%  improvements respectively.
 This is a must read for librarians, knowledge managers and C-Suite executives in law firms. Under the chart there is a link where you can click through and see customer comments.The report examines the following issues:

Continue Reading Read It and Weep: Feit Report – Which Major Legal Research Vendor is Plummeting in the Market?

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. has announced significant upgrades to to RBSourceFilings with RegReview,drafting tool which streamlines the SEC filing preparation process. Wolters Kluwer has been tracking securities rules and regulations for decades. Their Federal Securities Law Reporter was transformed into the Cheetah platform in —-. The company has continued to expand their securities practice offerings with additional innovative products that provide new insights and improve workflow including: M&A Clause Analytics, Capital Markets Clause Analytics 

 In case you cant remember what is included in RB Source Filings and RegReview, here is a breakdown:

 RBSourceFilings is a sophisticated research tool which provides advanced search and filtering of publicly filed SEC documents.  The solution introduces point-in-time redlining technology, integrated checklists, practical guidance, and workflow tools to help law firms and in house counsel to meet the challenges of rapidly changing regulations and ensure securities disclosure compliance. According to the press release RegReview is the “first [product] of its kind to integrate
Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Turbo-charges SEC Filing Process with RBSource with RegReview

Tax lawyers want it all. And the more granular and up-to date the better. Today  Wolters Kluwer  Legal and Regulatory released a new alerts feature in digital Tax Reporters Plus Suite on Cheetah that will enable tax lawyers to track alerts for changes in the tax code, regulations, explanations and other code related documents.

Alerts in a Time of COVID

New legislation is always followed by a raft of regulations and administrative materials.Since the passage of the CARES Act PL 116-123 and the Families First Act PL 116-127 in response to the COVID pandemic tax lawyers have been on high alert monitoring the implementing regulations and interpretive materials.

With the Tax Reporters Plus Suite’s new Alerts feature, users can set alerts to monitor tax code sections they are
Continue Reading Tax Law Alerts in a Time of COVID — Wolters Kluwer Cheetah Adds Powerful New Tracking Tool

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

Today the Association of Corporate Counsel and Wolters Kluwer  Legal and Regulatory  are releasing the 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmark Report. The report is over 80 pages long and  is exploding with scatter graphs and bar charts which assess  how well corporate legal departments have adopted various initiatives, such as knowledge management, strategic planning, innovation, technology and information governance. The press release states that the report offers some of the first numerical data to support key findings about legal operations Including:

1) Despite increasing focus on legal operations, most organizations, on average, still do not have a mature legal department.
2) A legal operations professional on staff makes a measurable improvement to a legal department’s maturity rate across ALL 15 functions tested.
3) Although legal operations functions have been shown to reduce costs and increase efficiency, many legal departments continue to face a diversity of challenges in the maturation process.

The full report will be available for download here.

How Innovative Are Corporate Legal Departments? Law firms that have done a lot of hand-ringing about developing their own innovation in the past five years will be comforted to learn that innovation is not as pervasive in corporate legal departments they have feared. In house legal departments have their own innovation and change management challenges. The report documents a spectrum of innovation across industries. For example, legal departments in ecommerce and real estate have the highest operational maturity scores. One can’t help but wonder what similar charts comparing the Amlaw 100 law firms would reveal.

The Survey Survey respondents were from 316 legal operations organizations across 29 countries and 14 industries. The report
Continue Reading ACC and Wolters Kluwer Release Legal Operations Study – Legal Operations Leaders Drive Change But Innovation Lags in Legal Departments