Today, Thomson Reuters, and the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law has released the 2024 Report on the State of the US Legal Market.

The report opens with the sobering tale of the collapse of Pan American Airways because leaders stuck with an old strategy and failed to pivot as more nimble competitors emerged and an oil embargo changed the economics of international travel. We have seen this executive paralysis and  failure to  recognize the emergence of a market disruptor repeatedl: Kodak, Blockbuster, Swiss watchmakers … the theme documented in Clayton Christensen’s book  “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”  

The report continues the warning by noting how several fundamental shifts in the market threaten to upend traditional law firm business models, most notably the emergence of Generative AI. Law firms continue to inflate the rates balloon and clients wield market power in demanding higher discounts to deflate the increases.

Shifting market factors include:

Continue Reading Thomson Reuters 2024 Report on the State of the Legal Market — Cloudy With a Chance of Disruption?

In case you missed any of the top stories of 2023 I have compiled a list of the “most read” stories of 2023. Here are links to the most popular Dewey B Strategic stories of 2023:

Breaking-News-Thomson-Reuters and Microsoft Announce Microsoft 360 copilot partnership

Breaking News: Thomson Reuters to Acquire Casetext

 Lexis+ AI Launches with Two Customer Initiatives: Commercial Preview and AI Insider Programs

vLex and Fastcase Merge to Form World’s Largest Global Law Library (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)

The 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market — Yup It’s Bad

Lexis+ AI Launch Promises Secure, “Hallucination Free” Generative AI Solution With Linked Legal Citations

Thomson Reuters $650M Bet on Casetext CoCounsel. Did They Buy Market Dominance or Just Time?

Bloomberg Law is Doubling Down on Legal News– Starts Hiring Spree to Bulk Up Legal Coverage

LexisNexis Adds Extractive AI Deal Analysis Tool to Lexis+

LexisNexis Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot/Generative AI Solutions

 Move Over ChatGPT — Casetext Debuts AI Legal Assistant “CoCounsel” on “Morning Joe”

Thomson Reuters Launches Generative AI-Powered Solutions  for Research and Workflow – Previews Generative AI Strategy

Thomson Reuters Releases Report on Impact of AI of Future of Legal Professionals.

Lexis+AI Suite Of Tools Expanded with Lexis Snapshot and Lexis Create

ECFX Should not be Impacted by Federal Judge Meyer’s E.D.N.C. Standing Order 3

 I was “Righter” Than I Realized: Anthropic is Hiring a Prompt Engineer/Librarian and it Pays Serious $$$

The Lost Art of the Vendor Business Review – Checklist and Survey

Don’t Kill the Golden Goose – Survey on 30 Years of Legal Publishing Mergers

NetDocuments Announces “Responsible AI” for Legal with ndMAX and PatternBuilderMax

Lexis Launches InterAction+ with Outlook and Analytics Integrations, New Dashboard and Security Options

Budget Busting, Bundling & Bungling: The Worst Legal Information Mergers & Acquisitions

 vLex Launches First Global AI Legal Assistant: Vincent AI for Research and Drafting

Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)

I have lived through legal technology revolutions before. The conversion of legal research from print to online moved though law firms like slow rolling train.  Lexis, the first commercial online  legal research product launched in 1970. Many firms did not fully embrace online research and abandon print until the pandemic drove the profession to remote work, nearly 50 years later. Analytics in legal research provided dramatic new insights into the behavior of judges, courts, attorneys and clients. It took less than ten years following the launch of Lex Machina in 2013 for legal analytics to move from esoteric to essential. The promise  of, if not the practice  with  Generative AI swept like a wildfire through the legal information market. When ChatGPT launched it took only five days to reach a million users and by January 2023 (2 months later) it had a 100 million users. Enter the “hype cycle.”

While OpenAi dominated the commercial market, Casetext, which had early access to GTP 4 dominated legal industry news headlines in 2023. Read the full post at Legal Tech Hub

Continue Reading Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)

Today Casetext announced that a new feature called Timeline is available in CoCounsel. Timeline makes it easy to assemble “clear, comprehensive, and accurate chronologies” from large volumes of documents by using AI to extract events and arrange them into a chronological series. Timeline enables attorneys to manipulate the results through filtering, editing and focusing. Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters earlier this year.

Time Saving with Timeline

According to the announcement, TImeline :”enhances attorneys’ thoroughness and inaccuracy saving hours of painstaking, manual work and achieving better results.” Timeline eliminate the risks of manual review by reading “every word” in every document in the collection being analyzed. The Timeline report includes citations supporting its findings to enable quick review and validation.

Timeline features

Continue Reading Casetext CoCounsel Launches Timeline Feature

On December 7, 2023 Wolters Kluwer released the following announcement:

Legal & Regulatory division continues to redefine the landscape for legal professionals

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory (LR) today announced an innovative feature for legal professionals: Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT)-generated summaries of court rulings. GPT summarization harnesses generative AI (GenAI) to simplify legal research, eliminating the need to read through multiple court cases, saving valuable time. This innovation in beta will initially serve legal professionals using the Wolters Kluwer Online research platform in Germany before being rolled out to other products.

Martin O’Malley, CEO of Wolters Kluwer LR, said: “We recognize our customers’ need for efficiency and accuracy in legal research. With the integration of GPT-generated summaries into our legal research products, we’re transforming the way in which legal professionals assess and interpret case law. This innovative feature is a testament to our commitment to empowering our customers with our deep domain knowledge, the highest editorial quality and the latest in GenAI technology, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the legal field.”

Wolters Kluwer’s GPT summarization feature significantly reduces the time spent on legal research by:

  • Providing more than tens of thousands of GPT-generated summaries for quick understanding of court decisions.
  • Enabling easy categorization of relevance with comprehensive summaries that encompass the facts and history of the case.
  • Reducing the volume of documents requiring in-depth review through efficient content assessment.

Redefining the legal landscape

Wolters Kluwer LR is redefining the landscape for legal professionals by harnessing artificial intelligence into its software and expert solutions, including natural language processing and GenAI. This aligns with the increasing need for legal tech and AI-powered solutions by legal professionals, a trend highlighted in Wolters Kluwer’s recently published Future Ready Lawyer 2023 report, which found 73% of lawyers expect to integrate GenAI into their legal work

Wolters Kluwer LR tools and expert solutions such as Legal Assist, LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer and Legisway are powered by AI to enhance legal research workflow, invoice management, and streamline contract lifecycle processes. The solutions help ensure that Wolters Kluwer LR customers are fully prepared to transform their practice, save time, and achieve superior outcomes.

Commitment to data protection and AI principles

Utilizing only internal data from Wolters Kluwer, the GPT algorithm operates without the need for external data, ensuring high standards of data integrity and security. This commitment reaffirms Wolters Kluwer’s dedication to upholding stringent data protection protocols and AI principles for its customers.

The American Arbitration Association (AAA) and its international division, the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) have announce the release of the AAAi Lab, “a web center supporting AAA users, arbitrator, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI in alternative dispute resolution.”

I met with Bridget McCormack, President and CEO and  Chief Legal Officer, Eric Tuchmann, to discuss this exciting new initiative..

Continue Reading AAA Launches New AAAi Lab to Prepare for the Transformation of ADR Processes

Yesterday I attended a press event hosted by Thomson Reuters where they announced an demoed a  suite  of four GenAI products and initiatives. Only three months after completing the acquisition of Casetext they are launching a suite of tools which are driven by the integration of Casetext and CoCounsel technologies with TRs legacy AI infrastructure.

Standing on the Doorstep of Change I have spent forty years watching legal research evolve, so my focus in this post will be on the Westlaw Precision AI functionality. During yesterday’s demo, I had to remind myself “we are not in Kansas anymore.” My default is to expect the product to be more like the research experience am used to in Westlaw Edge. This reminds me of the early days of Westlaw – it started out being a system which could only search the West headnotes and the key number system. It delivered efficiencies over print research but didn’t at all suggest the completely transformed and unimaginable changes that would come. No one was thinking about legal analytics in 1980, but now they are an essential part of legal strategy and legal research. I feel that we are in that same place with AI Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, It offers a foundational move toward a new way of performing research and integrating research into workflow. I need to remind myself that there is a future of legal research I can’t yet imagine.

The new products include:

• AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision – Better, faster answers to complex research questions drawn from the industry’s most comprehensive collection of editorially enhanced content.

 • A new GenAI assistant connects all Thomson Reuters generative AI products, building on innovation from Casetext

• Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform – A common development platform to design, build, and deploy GenAI skills with unparalleled speed • New GenAI capabilities for Practical Law – Customers to benefit from AI chat-type interface

• CoCounsel Core – Announcing the commercial offering of CoCounsel skills as part of the Thomson Reuters portfolio

“Thomson Reuters is redefining the way legal work is done by delivering a generative AI-based toolkit to enable attorneys to quickly gather deeper insights and deliver a better work product. AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel Core provide the most comprehensive set of generative AI skills that attorneys can use across their research and workflow,” said David Wong, chief product officer.

AI Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision is now available to Precision customers in the United States. It is described as offering a “best of” approach which combines the technology from both Casetext and the Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platforms. .AI-Assisted Research allows customers to ask complex legal research questions in natural language and  receive synthesized answers, with links to supporting authority from Westlaw content and links to further examine that authority. During a pre-launch event Mike Dahn, Head of Westlaw Product  pointed out that although AI is an important component of the new product, the technology is rooted in and enhanced by “more than 150 years of Thomson Reuters classification, analysis, and editorial expertise contributed by subject matter experts and attorney editors”.

A few observations:

Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches Generative AI-Powered Solutions  for Research and Workflow – Previews Generative AI Strategy

Earlier this year I wrote a post about Pre/Dicta a new legal analytics product which “breaks all the rules” followed in the legal analytics market. Today Pre/Dicta announced the availability of predictions for new motion types, a new dashboard and additional interactive features. Unlike other analytics products which focuses on “the law.” Pre/Dicta focuses on profiling judges personal characteristics in order to predict how they will rule on a motion based on the characteristics of the cause of action, the parties and the attorney. It runs the predictions based on one piece of data – the Docket number! It doesn’t read the complaint, and it ignored the facts and defenses.

Founder Dan Rabinowitz built a methodology and an algorithm that is correct 85% of the time. Pre/Dicta has collected, enriched and analyzed more than 35 million docket entries, over 3.5 million cases, and 5.5 million parties and firms. This enables Pre/Dicta to generate a unique fingerprint or ‘DNA’ for each case and predicts judicial decisions. The availability of data-centric forecasts for the entire litigation timeline, from filing to trial, provides attorneys and their clients with a strategic edge and facilitates a more highly informed litigation strategy.

Continue Reading Pre/Dicta Adds 3 New Motion Outcome Predictions and “Doppelganger” AI Capability

Less than a month ago LexisNexis announced the launch of Lexis+ AI which launched with Conversational search, document drafting, summarization and analysis features. Today they are announcing the availability of two new features designed to speed up workflow and deliver insights from within two very different contexts: CourtLink and Microsoft Word.

Lexis Snapshot
The new Lexis Snapshot will summarize complaints filed in U.S. Federal District Court cases. It uses Generative AI to identify the nature of suit, summarize the complaint, identify parties, harms, and remedies in the complaint. CourtLink subscribers can add Snapshot to their subscription. There are also plans to expand the service to additional product and documents within the “Lexis ecosystem.”

All CourtLink Customer can preview the Snapshot service for free though the end of 2023.
At launch, the Lexis Snapshot service can be added to CourtLink. They also plan to expand the
service to additional products and document types “within the LexisNexis generative AI-enabled legal product ecosystem in future releases.”

Continue Reading Lexis+AI Suite Of Tools Expanded with Lexis Snapshot and Lexis Create

The 2023 Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report includes insights from 700 legal professionals across the U.S. and nine European countries – namely Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary. The survey shows noteworthy differences between the countries surveyed.

The report documents the broad awareness of Generative AI’s promise and an expectation of a speedy adoption of Gen AI solutions over the next twelve months. The responders don’t seem to recognize the “headwinds” which are likely to slow both adoption and impact. Top of mind is the ongoing economic uncertainty combined with firms’ need to address the ethical, IP, security and privacy issues associated with using GenAI in legal practice.

Although the key trends below include many issues which have been around for decades, I can’t help but wonder how many of these challenges will be improved or resolved was GenAI matures and becomes pervasive across the business and practice of law.

Key trends expected to have a significant impact on legal in the next three years:

  • Growing complexity of compliance areas
  • Increasing importance of legal technology
  • Ability to recruit and retain talent
  • Increased demand for specialization and a decline in generalist work
  • Law departments moving more work in-house (insourcing)
  • Greater price competition/new and alternative fee structures/cost-containment pressures
  • Growing impact of generative AI/ChatGPT
  • Coping with increased volume and complexity of information
  • Meeting changing client/company leadership expectations
  • Emphasis on improved efficiency/ productivity
  • Growth of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), including expansion of Big Four into legal services

I thought the two most interesting sections of the report dealt with Generative AI and ESG.

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Releases 2023 Future Ready Lawyer Report