Today vlex and iManage,  are announcing a new partnership which will integrate and enhance their customer’s workflows and access to firm’s knowledge base. Subscribers to the two services will be able to simultaneously query their firm “know how” in their iManage DMS and the vLex public law library and generate an answer. In addition, the firm’s state and federal litigation filings will be identified in DocketAlarm,  and loaded into the correct client matter folder in iManage.

Here are more details on the two initial integration points:

Continue Reading vLex and iManage Announce Workflow Integrations to Enhance Law Firm Knowledge and insights.

Today Thomson Reuters announced the “Buy Now Program” which will enable law firms and legal departments to lock in pricing before the official rollout of their new CoCounsel Drafting solution.

 Rawia Ashraf, VP, Product, Legal Technology at Thomson Reuters provided a product walkthrough. She described the product as an end-to-end workflow solution for both transactional lawyers and litigators. The beta version of the transactional tool is currently available to 20 law firms and legal departments.

According to  a recent Thomson Reuters survey,  lawyers spend 40 to 60% of their time drafting and that 96% are dissatisfied with their drafting tools.

The CoCounsel Drafting tool is grounded in Practical Law content and will also allow firms to access their own Sharepoint document. The tool does not currently integrate with document management systems but that linkage is being developed.

Integration with Other TR products – the full functionality of the Drafting Tool  requires customers to also have subscriptions to Practical Law, Deal Proof and Westlaw when the litigation drafting tool is launched. WestKM, Thomson Reuters knowledge management solution was not mentioned as a potential component. Since many law firms still have not built workable KM solutions, is there an opportunity to address the KM gap by creating an AI enabled version of WestKM?

The Knowledge Management Gap.  many firms have not yet developed their own playbooks or curated precedent repositories, TR is prepared to help firms develop their own playbooks. As AI is integrated into the DMS products these new features should help firms identify and tag their precedent documents.

How it works.  Workflow is driven by CoCounsel drafting tool.

Continue Reading Thomson Reuters announces the “Buy Now Program” for New CoCounsel Drafting end-to-end Solution.

I have been following Fastcase since 2011 when I wrote a blogpost, highlighting their innovative approach to legal research which included visual timelines and a feature called “foresight” that identified relevant precedent without relying on keywords. Fastcase was the brainchild of co-founders  Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, former big law associates who were driven by a passion to “democratize the law.”

Since 2011, I have written an astonishing 49 stories on my blog tracking Fastcase’s various upgrades, acquisitions and alliances.  Acquisitions include: Casemaker, Loislaw, Docket Alarm, Judicata’s “Legal genome,” TopForm, Next Chapter and Law Street Media. They expanded business intelligence, legal treatises, expert witness profiles, and corporate content by entering alliances with a host of companies, including Courtroom, Insight, JurisPro, the ABA, TransUnion, James Publishing , The Practicing Law Institute, Littler, Wolters, Kluwer, and Association of Immigration Lawyers and Matterhorn.

A year ago this month cast Fastcase merged with vLex,  the international research platform. I was really excited to talk to Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex and get his take on the vLex merger as well as the state of the legal tech market, advice for entrepreneurs and teaching robot law to next generation of lawyers.

O’Grady: It is a year since Fastcase merged with vLex. Has it been a win-win for both companies?

Walters: Fastcase was very successful as a 24-year-old bootstrapped company. We had not gotten a lot of outside financing, and we had grown Fastcase incrementally and responsibly as a profitable company. At the beginning of 2023 it was pretty clear, that we were coming into an age where “speed to market” and artificial intelligence were going to be more important than ever, and candidly, we just didn’t have the resources to compete as an independent, slow-growth company.

Continue reading on LegalTech Hub

Continue Reading The Fastcase/ vLex Merger – A Talk with Ed Walters on the State of the Legal Tech Market, Advice for Start-ups, Generative AI and Robot Law in Legal Education

Corporate legal professionals can now scale management of the entire outside counsel experience from start to finish

Houston, TX — TBD — Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions today announced the launch of LegalCollaborator, a breakthrough legal engagement and competitive bidding software that marks the next evolution in the company’s innovative approach to Total Legal Spend Management. The solution integrates seamlessly with ELM Solutions’ TyMetrix 360° and Passport platforms to not only capture early law firm engagement information and competitive pricing insights, but also provide enforcement of pricing agreements for full vendor transparency and cost management.

“With the launch of LegalCollaborator, Wolters Kluwer continues to lead the way for innovation in comprehensive software solutions empowering corporate legal departments and their law firm partners,” said Raja Sengupta, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions. “Our market-leading combination of deep domain knowledge, insights mined from industry’s deepest and broadest datasets and comprehensive enterprise legal management software help legal professionals to maximize value in every phase of their engagements.”

For the first time, legal professionals will have access to an efficient, scalable and transparent process for initiating single law firm engagements and competitive bids. LegalCollaborator removes subjectivity from law firm selection, providing a series of pre-defined templates that allow users to efficiently collect and view critical matter details such as conflict waivers, strategy, staffing and pricing structure side-by-side. A user-friendly interface will provide corporate legal teams with more transparency into their matters, driving an unparalleled ability to accomplish the desired outcome at the best possible cost. Meanwhile their law firm partners can use the solution to demonstrate the unique strategies and crucial differentiators paramount to successful matter outcomes. This generates a more competitive bidding environment that brings only the best firms to the top.

By integrating LegalCollaborator with TyMetrix 360° and Passport, Wolters Kluwer is helping organizations streamline the disconnected matter planning and competitive bid management systems that have traditionally made it difficult to successfully track spend throughout the life of a matter. For example, users can leverage AI-powered spend management tools such as ELM Solution’s LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer, as well as the $180+ billion in historical performance data found in the LegalVIEW database, to both set as well as enforce strong billing guidelines to tightly control spend. For more information about Wolters Kluwer’s please visit: www.wolterskluwer.com

This week Lex Machina   reached a significant state court analytics milestone with the addition of the 100th state court. Lex Machina .launched as a patent litigation analytics project out of Stanford. in 2008 . Since acquisition by LexisNexis, it was expanded to cover business litigation in all federal trial courts. The company took on the challenges of taming the  disparate and unruly world of state court litigation. with the inaugural state court launch of Delaware Chancery in 2018. T

Valuable New Tranche of Corporate Litigation. The reached the 100 state court mark recently with the addition of litigation analytics for Suffolk County Supreme Court and Westchester County Supreme Court (the “New York Courts”) and Oklahoma County District Court (the “Oklahoma Court”).  They previously launched the five counties within the boundaries of New York City (New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond and the Bronx) in 2020. As a former New Yorker I am astonished that it took four years to reach these two suburban boroughs.  These counties are home to some major corporate players. Westchester is home to companies much as Mastercard, Pepsi, IBM and Regeneron. Suffolk is home to the likes of Canon USA, Estee Lauder, Lenovo and Nikon USA – not to mention the Hampton’s “gold coast.” This is a valuable new data tranche.

The Filters. The enhanced state court analytics offer the standard Lex Machina benchmarking data on judges, courts, law firms, individual attorneys. Notable features of this enhanced

Continue Reading Lex Machina Now Offers 100 State Courts With Enhanced Analytics

Today LexisNexis Legal & Professional®,  is unveiling its second-generation legal generative AI Assistant on  the Lexis+ AI platform. The new AI Assistant was developed based on user feedback. And now offers a more personalized experience All existing Lexis+ AI customers will have access to the enhanced AI Assistant. The AI Assistant features enables conversational search, insightful summarization, intelligent legal drafting, and document upload and analysis capabilities in an intuitive user experience.  

Recently launched and upcoming enhancements include: 

Continue Reading LexisNexis Launches 2nd Gen Legal AI Assistant on Lexis+ AI

I will be moderating a lively panel discussion including three experts exploring recent KM trends. We will also discuss the challenges an opportunities arising from the emergence of Generative AI.

Program Description: Join us for an insightful webinar on the evolving landscape of Knowledge Management. This session will delve into the dynamic trends shaping the legal industry, like AI and automation and the pivotal role of adopting the most effective technologies. Gain valuable insights into emerging trends, innovative strategies, and the evolving landscape of legal knowledge management. Our expert panel will provide valuable insights, practical strategies, and best practices for adapting to these trends and optimizing KM initiatives.

SPEAKERS:

  • Saskia Mehlhorn, Norton Rose Fulbright
  • Anne Stemlar, Goodwin
  • Stephanie Walker, Continuing Education of the Bar

When: Liive Web Event on 04/23/2024 at 11:00 AM (CDT)

AALL members can register on the AALL eLearning portal.

Today Thomson Reuters is announcing a new Generative AI vision. Central to this vision is a new Generative AI Assistant branded as CoCounsel. There was no press conference and no demo to provide context or a Q&A around this announcement. Here is a link to the press release so you can read it for yourself.

The CoCounsel Vision in the press release says that “CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience. CoCounsel will function like a team member handling complex tasks with natural language understanding and completing tasks at superhuman speeds.” Over time CoCounsel will link the entire suite of Thomson Reuters products and will bring together multiple skills and workflows from different products.

What is Happening Today?

Thomson Reuters is repositioning CoCounsel as the brand name for their new Generative AI vision and strategy. This is a spectacular “slight of hand” because this new Generative AI Assistant will not be leveraging the legacy CoCounsel Large Language Models (LLMs) which they acquired from Casetext. This CoCounsel assistant will be based on GPT4 LLMs which have been developed in-house at Thomson Reuters. The CoCounsel suite of workflow tools which were acquired from Casetext last year will now be designated at CoCounsel Core.

The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant is not launching a legal product in the US today, but they are launching a US tax product will be available in Summer 2024.

The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant will be available as follows:

  • Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel available today
  • Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel (expected to launch in the US in Summer 2024)
  • CoCounsel integrations with Microsoft 360 five are expected to be available in beta to customers in the US and the UK in summer of 24.
  • There will be additional rollouts of Co counsel skills during 2024 and beyond
  • Thomson Reuters included a video which illustrates how Co counsel will be designed as ‘”a professional grade Gen. AI assistant which will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across legal tax risk & fraud and media.” Here is a link to the video.

2024 Generative AI in Professional Services Report is being released and will be available at this link.

The Thomson Reuters Space Shot. The Thomson Reuters Generative AI Vision is certainly ambitious. TR owns a lot of data  which is embedded in products with disparate functionalities. The press release indicates that the AI Assistant is not only for the legal suite of products – which alone would be a significant stretch — but this vision covers the whole universe of TR products across legal, risk, tax and news.

As far as I know Westlaw Precision with AI which launched last year, does not yet include all of the data and functionality in Westlaw Edge. With that in mind, one has to  pause and wonder  what the real timeline is for the fulfillment of a grander vision.

The bigger question is “Can the market be moved by a vision without a concrete deliverable?” One has to assume that TR is trying to expand the number of subscribers to their existing suite of AI products today ( Westlaw Precision with AI , Ask Practical Law, Precision, CoCounsel Core) , based on a promise of “workflow Nirvana” tomorrow.

Every legal information company is tackling the unified workflow challenge. vLex and Bloomberg Law both announced significant workflow enhancements this week.. LexisNexis announced the Lexis Create workflow solution in November. The stakes are high and it is anyone’s guess who will be able to simultaneously deliver an AI enabled and optimized workflow at a price that can dominate the market.

Today vLex  is announcing the launch of a powerful suite of generative AI-backed document analysis tools for litigators and transactional attorneys  Vincent AI platform.  vLex occupies a unique space in the legal research and workflow space since it is the only truly multi-national research platform which has now expanded into an AI enabled

Vincent AI Document Analyze The new product called Vincent AI Document Analyze is a workflow tool designed to streamline and enhance  the drafting of contracts, motions, pleadings, and other legal documents. vLex is the only legal research and drafting platform offering  AI tools with multi-national capabilities “built on top of the world’s most comprehensive global library of legal information, with more than 1 billion documents from around the world. “

vLex Labs  vLex is also announcing the availability of  vLex Labs. This will be offered to select Vincent customers and will enable them to team up with a vLex implementation team and in order to create proprietary AI-powered workflows.

Beyond Legal Research The most important sentence in the press release indicates that this is  a milestone marking  vLex’s commitment to drive innovation into their products and take the lead in developing legal research solutions “that go beyond information retrieval to revolutionize the way that legal professionals work.”

“With Vincent AI, you no longer have to choose between innovative technology and comprehensive content,” said vLex CEO Luís Faus. “Our platform offers a seamless integration of both, setting a new standard in efficiency, customization, and effectiveness across all legal practices.”

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Vincent AI Document Analyze

Vincent AI Document Analyze offers customizable GenAI-backed workflows that enable legal professionals to interrogate complex legal documents and use Vincent’s legal reasoning and analysis abilities to begin drafting strategic responses, harnessing the power of structured data. Users achieve benefits such as:

Continue Reading  vLex Expands Vincent GenAI Toolset, and Launches AI-Focused Co-Development Lab 

Bloomberg Industry Group has announced that the acquisition of Dashboard Legal, a project management and collaboration solution designed for law firms and in-house counsel. Like the majority of legal tech startups, Dashboard Legal by developed by a former ALM 100 attorney Mat Rotenberg, in a “there’s got to be a better way” moment.

I had a chance to talk with Rotenberg and Joe Breda, president Bloomberg Law.  I was particularly fascinated to hear that Rotenberg had participated in  large law “technology committees” which means not only felt the frustrations of of fragmented workflows as a practitioner, but understands the mechanics of legal tech decision making. Dashboard Legal was built to enable collaboration and to simplify and clarify workflows as well as maximize efficiency.

Dashboard Legal is positioned in the legal project management space. It provides team level, real-time visibility into the projects and tasks attorneys are responsible for executing. The acquisition expands Bloomberg Law’s presence within the legal workflow market, which it entered last year with the introduction of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, its AI-powered solution for storing, searching, drafting, and negotiating contracts. Although the founder was a transactional attorney the tools can be using across of wide spectrum of use cases including litigation projects.

Only two prior acquisitions. Bloomberg Law has done most of their development in-house. They have previously acquired only two other companies. The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) in 2011  and . Exemplify in 2016, the technology that underpins Bloomberg Law’s Draft Analyzer.

The BNA acquisition aligns well with the Dashboard Legal workflow tools. BNA brought Bloomberg a deep mine of secondary material including treatises, newsletters and practical guidance materials. I like to remind people that BNA was the first company in the U.S. to

Continue Reading Bloomberg Industry Group Dives into Workflow and Collaboration Market with the Acquisition of Dashboard Legal