Leopard Solutions which provides a leading competitive intelligence and business development  platform, has released their 2020 State of the Legal Industry Report which examines law firm hiring trends since the beginning of the pandemic.
A copy of the report is available at this link.
Webinar Today. They are also hosting  a webinar today Thursday March 4th at 12 PM. Register for the Legal Industry Annual Report Webinar at this link,
Topics will include:

The effects of COVID-19 on the legal industry
Lateral hiring at the partner and associate levels among the top 200 law firms in 2020
Law firm mergers and acquisition activity
Law firm growth trends over the past year
How law firms are doing in diversity efforts
How technology has impacted lateral hiring
Predictions for what 2021 may bring for the legal market
Insights from some of the leading professionals in the legal industry

Speakers:
-Laura Leopard, Founder & CEO
Leopard Solutions

– Trish Lilley, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer
Stroock Stroock & Lavan

– Jeffrey A. Lowe, Global Practice Leader – Law Firm Practice Managing Partner
Major, Lindsey & Africa

– Andrew Slade, Senior Manager of Growth & Analytics
Perkins Coie LLP

Moderated by Phil Flora, VP, Sales & Marketing, Leopard Solution

Laura Leopard sums up their findings:” 2020 was a tale of what could have been and what was. The year started off as a continuation of the previous years in terms of growth until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Firms reacted to market conditions and responded to the growing needs of their clients as the year ended, attorney hiring pulled backed up allowing firms to end the year in a much better position than many had expected at the start of the pandemic .”
Lexis is releasing a new Context product which they are referring to as Context Attorney Analytics.  I would describe the product as attorney insights.  Analytics are at work “under the hood,” but a lawyer will not see the  trend lines and charts of a traditional analytics tool.  When Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed  launched the Context predecessor Ravel Law in 2012, it was the first legal  product to use analytics and textual analysis  to drive insights into judges thinking on specific issues. Ravel was bought by Lexis in 2017 and over the years the product has not only been integrated into Lexis but transformed by advances in machine learning. Context Attorney Analytics like Ravel, offers a groundbreaking approach to using analytics and textual analysis to unearth insights into  a specific lawyers history of addressing specific legal issues.
 Context Attorney Analytics analyses the records of more than one million attorneys and connects their litigation documents such as motions, briefs and pleadings activity with actual written judicial opinions.   Context Attorney Analytics helps attorneys to “build stronger arguments by anticipating and neutralizing opposing counsel’s arguments based on the legal language they’ve previously used in similar cases.” Context Attorney Analytics extracts and highlights the exact language an attorney has used in briefs, pleadings, motions and arguments in cases and connects those arguments to case outcomes.
Law firms will be able to leverage Context Attorney Analytics for lateral hiring and in-house counsel will be able to use it for evaluating outside counsel and hiring.
I met with Serena Wellen, Senior Director at LexisNexis who described the painstaking process LexisNexis undertook to understand how lawyers approach research on their adversaries. Wellen described the approach used by most lawyers as  “shockingly time consuming.”  Lawyers start with a general Google search and then proceed to sophisticated tools to locate, case law, briefs, dockets and news.   Context Attorney Analytics is built on the assumption that lawyers want as much insight into the thinking of their opponents. How and why did they win a case? Lexis talked to hundreds of attorneys about how they try and get a competitive advantage in order to build the product.  Today Lexis is launching a tool to automate and streamline the process of adversarial competitive intelligence.

 

Lexis Context Attorney Analytics Search Page
Lexis search results provide an overview page with general  factual  information about each attorney such as, education, bar admissions,  law firm affiliations, court appearances and litigation issues. The analytics overview includes document types, litigation events by issue type and court.  You can filter by judge by court but the results are in arguments card. Loyal find extracts of arguments by topic and identify if it is from a complaint motion reply or order.
Lexis is leveraging the briefs submitted by specific attorneys and outlining the arguments they used on specific issues to identify the arguments a lawyer is likely to make on the same issues. Results can be filtered by area of law, court and topic.  The search results in a chronological list of all the arguments a lawyer has made. Each result is presented  on an “arguments card” which lists all the issues addressed across the top. A link to the original document is included.
The Lexis leveraged its repository of  35 million arguments included in briefs.  A team of legal subject specialists and data scientists undertook an iterative process of  developing training sets of documents, benchmarking the results and then fine tuning the results. Linguistic analysis technology looked at the text surrounding the citation and used the syntactic signals to classify the arguments using natural language processing and  a special legal taxonomy.

The press release quotes Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO LexisNexis  North America: “Knowing the language that opposing counsel has successfully used in similar court cases can give attorneys critical insights and a tremendous advantage when preparing for trial. No other analytics offering directly connects legal language argument activity and written judicial opinions for specific attorneys.”

Access Lexis Context Attorney Analytics can be purchased as an add-on to Lexis or Lexis+. Learn more about Context Attorney Analytics here.

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Here is the full press release:

LexisNexis Expands Award-Winning Context Platform with

Context Attorney Analytics

 Build stronger arguments, anticipate strategies and neutralize opposing counsel’s arguments
with legal language analytics that focus on attorney arguments linked to written judicial opinions

 

NEW YORK, March 1, 2021 – LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of information and analytics, today announced the launch of Context Attorney Analytics, the fifth module of the award-winning Context platform.

 

As the legal industry’s first and only language analytics solution, Context Attorney Analytics tracks records of more than one million attorneys and connects their argument activity with actual written judicial opinions. This enables attorneys to build stronger arguments by anticipating and neutralizing opposing counsel’s arguments based on the legal language they’ve previously used in similar cases.

 

With a few keystrokes, Context Attorney Analytics extracts and highlights the exact language an attorney has used in briefs, pleadings, motions and arguments in cases that are similar to yours and shows how well they fared in court. In addition, its comprehensive search and robust filtering capabilities can deliver relevant attorney-related content, including new stories, jury verdicts and settlements, expert witness materials, and more, eliminating hours of research.

 

“Knowing the language that opposing counsel has successfully used in similar court cases can give attorneys critical insights and a tremendous advantage when preparing for trial,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. “No other analytics offering directly connects legal language argument activity and written judicial opinions for specific attorneys.”

 

Context Attorney Analytics is also a great tool for helping law firms make lateral hiring decisions, or for legal departments in evaluating outside counsel. In addition to providing comprehensive biographical information and data on language preferences, Context Attorney Analytics provides insights into how and why an attorney’s arguments were won or lost, which cannot be gleaned from an attorney’s CV or law firm pitch deck.

 

Context is a key component of the comprehensive LexisNexis analytics solutions that provide lawyers with greater knowledge through data-driven insights. Data and analytics delivered by Context Attorney Analytics are a strong complement to leading Legal Analytics solutions, including Context, Lex Machina®, Lexis+™ Litigation Analytics and Lexis+ Brief Analysis.

 

Context Attorney Analytics is now available by subscription for users of Lexis® or Lexis+. For additional information about the Context platform and available modules, please visit www.lexisnexis.com/context.

 

About LexisNexis Legal & Professional

LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase productivity, improve decision-making and outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 10,600 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.

# # #

Media Contacts

 

Dana Greenstein
Director, Corporate Communications
LexisNexis Legal & Professional
212-448-2163
dana.greenstein@lexisnexis.com

 

Eric Sokolsky

Plat4orm PR

908-288-7201

eric@plat4orm.com

 

Today Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US is releasing a new Application Programming Interface (API) which will make Wolters Kluwer content  from their Cheetah research platform available “your way” in your digital environment.

Legal research products and in fact the very notion of legal research as a  one size fits all process has morphed dramatically in the past twenty years. Wolters Kluwer’s U.S. predecessor, Commerce Clearing House launched their first revolutionary product – the loose-leaf treatise in 1913. With the rise of the regulatory state, lawyers had to master not only caselaw but the growing mass of regulatory material issues by federal agencies such as the IRS.

Twenty first century librarians are helping lawyers design workflow processes that integrate the “best of breed” content or tool into functional workflow spaces and enterprise search engines.  Workflow portals function as real time  tutorials prompting lawyers to the next step in  process. To that end portal and workflow designers need APIs that bring content directly into the law firm environment as well as IP authentication which allows federated SSO (single sign-on)  seamless access (no passwords, no client numbers). Wolters Continue Reading Put a Cheetah in Your Pocket – Wolters Kluwer Launches API Access to Treatises and Widgets

Thanks to everyone who has contributed their views so far. If you have not yet had a chance to participate, lease take a few minutes (less than 5) to share your experience and insights with your colleagues. The survey will be open through March 1st.

Here is a link to  the original post about the survey.

Respond to the survey at this link.

 

Join our panelists Jean O’Grady (publisher of Dewey B Strategic) and Michael King (Director of Loss Prevention at Schiff Harden) to discuss the latest trends in legal technology and how advances in automation can benefit law firms by reducing cost, mitigating risk, driving new revenue, and preventing revenue leakage.
In this webinar, you will learn:1) How ECFX Notice reduces cost and mitigates risk by automating the eight (8) essential workflow steps of court notice management.
• Process ECF notices in seconds
• Control naming conventions and storage locations
• Reduce risk associated with manual errors and delays in processing
• Gain visibility into firmwide notice processing metrics2) How ZERØ drives profits and new revenue through automated email compliance and passive time capture from email review.
• Increase new revenue
• Decrease revenue leakage
• Improve email compliance
• Reduce risk associated to data loss prevention (wrong recipient detection)

ECFX Notice is an Enterprise Notice Management System using Intelligent Automation to streamline the entire ECF notice workflow with firmwide administration and analytics.

ZERØ is a ‘smart mobility’/ intelligent automation company with products that automate both the time capture and email filing workflow. Our AI technology categorizes and prioritizes emails in the professional’s inbox to the appropriate client/matter workspace while automating the time reconstruction process for time captures related to email communication.

Register here.

In light of the financial pressures the pandemic has put on businesses,  Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.  will host a webinar to explore the evolving role of legal knowledge management professionals both in private practice and within law schools. The webinar, titled “The Future Ready Lawyer – The Evolving Role of the Library and Library Staff,” will take place on February 24 at 11 AM EST, and a wine tasting seminar for webinar participants will begin at noon.

To register for “Wolters Kluwer Presents Future Ready Lawyer – The Evolving Role of the Library And Library Staff,” click here.

 

The webinar will feature a distinguished panel of legal industry leaders, including Ronald E. Wheeler, Jr., Director, Fineman & Pappas Law Libraries at Boston University, Jean P. O’Grady, Sr. Director of Information, Research & Knowledge at DLA Piper US, LLP, and Steven A. Lastres, Director of Knowledge Management Services at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. The webinar will be moderated by Wolters Kluwer’s Nicole Pinard, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Education, and Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets. The panelists will share and address trends, progress, and challenges across the legal profession both domestically and globally, with a focus on the future. All webinar registrants will be sent three bottles of wine to participate in a tasting seminar with a wine expert following the virtual roundtable.

“In view of the challenges that businesses are facing, there will be a brighter spotlight on legal professionals and the performance of law firms moving ahead,” said Crutchfield. “During the webinar, we will discuss the need for law firm librarians and library staff alike to increase productivity and efficiency, while also ensuring they deliver the highest value and ROI.”

“The current climate presents a number of unknowns for the industry, but what we do know for certain is that legal professionals will need to continue to adapt in order to succeed in the future,” said Pinard. “This webinar presents an excellent opportunity to discuss challenges and best practices for legal knowledge management professionals with some of the industry’s top thought leaders.”

To register for “Wolters Kluwer Presents Future Ready Lawyer – The Evolving Role of the Library And Library Staff,” click here.

It’s hard for me to believe that I wrote my first Dewey B Strategic  post on February 17, 2011.  My intended goal was to highlight the importance of librarians and knowledge managers as strategic assets in their organizations and to be an observer and possibly influencer in the legal publishing and legal tech marketplace. It has been a fantastically interesting ride. I have had a front row seat watching the development of dramatic new technologies. In 2011 the ground was being prepared for  the growth of AI, analytics, powerful workflow tools and the invention of new classes of research tools e.g. brief analysis.

In 2011, my first product review was about Fastcase. I covered the acquisition of BNA by Bloomberg and the collapse of Howrey, the innovative international law firm. I conducted a survey on the Best and Worst Legal Publishing Mergers. The PLL Summit was in its infancy and I covered Keynote, futurist Ester Dyson and a hilarious lunch talk by Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs the author of “The Know it All: One mans humble quest to become the smartest person in the world.” (Inspired of course by his father — obsessive lawyer, treatise writer Arnold S. Jacobs). I also railed against ebooks for legal research (the 8 track tape of legal research) – yet they survive! Links to 2011 posts listed below.

Many Thanks I want to thank you – the readers for all your feedback over the years. Thank you to my  informal posse of friends and proofreaders who  spot my mistakes. Thanks the many bloggers who inspired me, especially Ron Friedmann and Prism Legal, Greg Lambert of Three Geeks and the Law, David Lat of Above the Law and the Law and Bob Ambrogi of Law Sites.

I also want to thank the many legal tech innovators (mostly former lawyers with a dream) who sat down for interviews and shared their Continue Reading Dewey B Strategic is 10 Years Old Today! Many Thanks to My Readers

Respond to the  2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share.  Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey

HBR Consulting  just released the 2020 Benchmarking + Legal Information Services Survey (BLISS). The innovative and interactive delivery format is at least as interesting as the content. The survey focused on the core metrics such as staffing, budgets, and resources but also covered hot topics such as innovation and COVID-19 impact. The survey was undertaken during June and July 2020, three months after most law firms were two months into mandatory work from home. That enabled the  survey designers to capture some insights into how law firms were adapting legal research and knowledge services in response to the pandemic.

I asked Colleen Cable, director at HBR Consulting, to provide some insight into HBR’s goal in creating the survey. According to Cable “HBR recognized that there was a need for law firm library benchmarking data that could be utilized to support decision-making within the firm. This type of benchmarking, available by Am Law segment, is not offered anywhere else in the market, so HBR stepped in and BLISS was born.” One of the things I noticed immediately is that this report captured attorney staff ratios. This has been an elusive “holy grail” of library benchmarks that I have been begging for over the many years I have Continue Reading HBR Releases Interactive Library Benchmarking Survey with COVID Insights

Today Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. is announcing a unique collaboration with Granville Knowledge Management (Granville KM) to integrate Merger Thresholds Monitor with Kluwer Competition Law. The platform offers a unique resource for antitrust and competition lawyers needing access to worldwide merger control thresholds.

This is Wolters Kluwer’s latest enhancement to Kluwer Competition Law, the leading resource for EU, national and international competition law. The partnership with Granville KM,  provides a seamless integration of Granville KM content into the Wolters Kluwer  platform.

According to Martin English, Sales & Marketing Director at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US, International Group US companies, especially technologies companies are receiving more anti-trust scrutiny around the world and practitioners need timely insights from Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Launches Merger Thresholds Monitor in Partnership with Granville KM