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.
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%

Continue Reading Lexis 2022 CounselLink Report: Partner Rates and Panel Consolidation Continue to Rise

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, Continue Reading Legal Research Platforms Customer Service Survey – Customer Support in a Freefall

ALM has released a new trend detection feature  on Law.com Radar  which combines their deep editorial experience with algorithms and litigation data to help lawyers identify emerging trends in federal litigation. New features including trends and surge indicators  will automatically appear for all existing Law.com Radar premium subscribers who have active alerts. Vanessa Blum the Director of Newsroom Innovation described  trend detection as an “open beta.” Law.com Radar was released in November 2020 and providing breaking alerts called “blips” for practitioners in litigation and corporate practices.

What is  Radar Trend Detection? The trend detection system analyzes new federal lawsuits and their case attributes and then applies Continue Reading Thinking Ahead of the Curve – ALM Releases Law.com Radar Trend Detection

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 traditional tasks which in the past took hours of time.

During this period clients have also demanded that law firms leverage tools to make them more efficient. I have outlined below seven important new tools that can help a junior lawyer improve their work product while also saving time and avoiding errors. Read the full story here and learn about seven powerful research and workflow tools.

 

Lex Machina  pioneered the introduction of interactive litigation analytics for the law firms with the launch of the Intellectual Property product in  end uses. It launched as a project at Stanford Law School. Now a LexisNexis product, they offer  one of the most sophisticated analytics products in the legal market and  cover all types of federal, They are also expanding their coverage of state litigation.

Today Lex Machina is releasing the 2021 Patent Litigation Report which analyzes all federal patent litigation.

Register here for a copy of the report:  https://pages.lexmachina.com/2022PatentLitigationReport.html

Patent Report Webcast

Lex Machina is hosting a webcast to discuss the report on May 19, 2022 at noon ET/9am PT with Michael Flynn (Partner at Morris Nichols), Elaine Chow (Lex Machina’s Patent Legal Data Expert), moderated by Joshua Harvey (Manager of the Lex Machina’s Customer Success Team). Register for the event or view a recording: https://pages.lexmachina.com/20220519-PatentLitigationReportWebcast_LP.html

Here are some key findings

  • W.D, Tex., D Del., and E.D, Tex. have the highest number of patent filings in 2021

  • Patent case filings are consolidating more into the top three courts, from 47% in 2019 to 57% in 2021.

  • Federal PTAB appellate case filings fell 40% between 2020 and 2021.

  • 23% of federal PTAB appellate cases that terminated from 2019 to 2021 were ultimately reversed.

  • 34% of federal patent appellate cases that terminated from 2019 to 2021 were ultimately reversed.

  • Samsung, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon  were the most active patent defendants in 2021.

  • WSOU Investments LLC ( a patent monetization company) was the most active plaintiff in patent litigation last year.

  • Judge Albright was assigned to 23% of all patent cases filed in 2021.

  • Fish & Richardson top the list of defendant firms representing 669 defendants in  38 districts between 2019 and 2021.

Data and Methodology – I have to confess my favorite part of this report was the two pages explaining how the data was collected, Continue Reading Lex Machina Releases 2021 Patent Litigation Report and Hosts Launch Webinar

 

Lawyers always want to have an edge. Sometimes that edge comes in the form of a news alert,  a breaking court case or even a breaking docket complaint. Add to this – clients’ expectations that lawyers follow developments in their business and industry.  No lawyer wants to get breaking news from their clients.
Librarians – the original knowledge managers – have been introducing lawyers to alerting systems for the past three decades starting with Lexis Eclipse and WESTLAW’s Westclip. With the explosion of web content and specialty newsletters librarians were challenged to tame the firehose of daily news using sophisticated aggregation platforms. There are specialist electronic services librarians who live and breathe alerts and aggregation platforms.
Osmosys  entered the legal market almost 20 years ago.  In the past decade founder, Eric Gr Gross  focused on expansion in  financial services market. Ozmosys has come roaring  back into the legal market with a new AI enabled alerting system which Gross describes as being powered by their propriety AI or “lawyer brain.” I talked with Gross about the latest developments at Ozmosys.
Osmosys is on its fourth generation analysis engine. Gross, no stranger to hyperbole, claims that his new technology will “leave old AI in the dust.”  According to Gross the  Ozmosys “lawyer brain“ was trained on legal concepts and terminology by ingesting over 1 million legal memos in every area of law. The system is powered by 300+ “no code,”  “no train.” neural networks which produce highly relevant results..
After a targeted alert is set up the  “lawyer brain” identifies relevant stories and uses advanced contextual search technology to filter the results and deliver alerts. Over the past decades we have all learned the limits of keyword search.
 What matters is context.  The Ozmosys AI “lawyer brain” discerns the relationship between words and concepts  in order to generate relevant results, even if the specific words searched for don’t actually appear in the relevant article:
● AI Topical Neural Networks: 300+ neural networks trained to think like attorneys can determine specific relevance to virtually any practice area, even to specific entities
● AI Company Disambiguation: distinguishes between a company vs an object with the same name, e.g. Apple
● AI Trust and Relevancy: removes irrelevant articles
● Advanced De-duplication against all content sources
Mines Social Media for Business-Critical News, Removing the Chatter. Ozmosys Social captures and analyzes the notices, announcements and press releases now published on social media, including LinkedIn, instead of traditional newswires.
Improving Alert Management and Control.  The platform allows Librarians to organize and manage third-party subscriptions and news alerts in a central platform. Ozmosys ingests all subscriptions, email newsletters, alerts and external content from disparate sources into a centralized repository. The more content sources that flow through Ozmosys, the smarter the system gets. It promises to be a virtuous circle of improving results.
ROI – My Favorite Topic
According to Gross the Ozmosys management dashboard will provide accurate usage and ROI analyses of paid subscriptions . In addition, it uses analytics to identify the content each lawyer has been reading in order to enhance future alerts. The usage data will not only advise librarians about the impact of the search results but will provide powerful analytics on the “open rates” of stories delivered from high ticket news sources. This type of data is critical in making renewal and cancellation decisions.
The Competition –  Ozmosys will be faced with a fair amount of competition in the legal market. LexisNexis Newsdesk, Manzama, Bloomberg Law Convergence ( no longer being sold  – but well liked) and Vable (formally branded as Linex) each have some share of the legal market. Moving to a new aggregation platform takes a lot of planning, a thorough RFP process and a careful migration plan if alerts need to be moved from a legacy platform. Based on my experience, overall cost, the ability to ingest the majority of the alert sources and a powerful management platform are among the most critical factors weighing into the product selection decision. Will the AI enabled “lawyer brain” results give Ozmosys an edge?  We shall see…

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. has launched additional analytics and visualization in  IPO Vital Signs on RBsource Filings. The  new features offer interactive tables and graphics for  the visualization of IPO metrics. The interactive graphics  enable users to drill down to subsegments of the market or activity by specific law firms.

“The IPO market continues to show strong activity in 2022, and as new regulations and disclosure requirements are emerging and impacting the space, we want to provide our customers with efficient access to actionable information to enable a seamless IPO Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Bulks Up IPO Vital Signs With Analytics, Visualizations and SPAC Insights

Lex Machina has launched a new module of Legal Analytics for federal courts of appeal (“Appellate Analytics”). The module adds nearly 400,000 circuit court cases from across all 13 federal circuits. Until now the majority of federal analytics products have covered  trial courts — federal district courts. Litigators will be excited to learn that there is finally a source for federal appellate analytics.

Appellate Analytics offers standard Lex Machina interface and features as well as new Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches Federal Appellate Analytics

Today Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.  relaunched the Manual IP within Kluwer IP Law. Manual IP is  a powerful “how to” guide for compliance explaining the IP procedures and laws  for Intellectual Property application in 238 jurisdictions. The innovative redesign of Manual IP  allows IP professionals to quickly locate specific procedural answers.

“For IP professionals, having access to the correct information in a quick and efficient manner is crucial, and as a customer-centric organization, we are committed to delivering resources and content at the point of need,” said David Bartolone, Vice President and Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Launches Manual IP for International IP Filings and Compliance

 BriefCatch, an award-winning, patented legal writing tool,  is  launching  of BriefCatch 3 today. BriefCatch now offers over 11,000 legal focused edits and performs realtime rescans of new edits. The software is now compatible with Mac,  Windows and Word Online software.  BriefCatch 3 offers a rebuilt rules engine, which is enhanced with Natural Language Processing and AI.

During a recent demo founder Ross Guberman, walked me through a demo and I was impressed. Law is a language intensive deadline driven profession. Associates often face tight deadlines. I know what it is like to become blind to editorial mistakes. Using Brief Catch is Continue Reading BriefCatch 3  Offers 11,000 AI and NLP Enabled  Editorial Suggestions to Streamline and Tighten Legal Writing