I have ranked the most popular 15  Dewey S Strategic posts of 2020.It is no surprise to me that posts about the release of specialty COVID resources by major legal publishers dominate – 4 of the 15 stories. My annual “Hits and Misses” survey results  were covered in 3 of the 15 top posts. The emergence of new legal news products is also covered in 3 of the top 15 posts. The remaining posts cover new product launches and survey results.

I have also compiled a list of the top 15 posts  from the Dewey B Strategic archive which were the most read in 2020. This list appears after the 2020 popular posts list.

The Most Popular Dewey B Strategic Posts of 2020:

  1. Lexis Rides the “Insight Wave:” Launches  Lexis+ with New Look, Brief Analyzer, AI Search, Codes Compare and Loads of New Features
  2. Legal Publishers Roll Out Covid-19 Resources, Toolkits, Documents, Advice (Some Even Free)
  3. ALM Launching Legal Radar – Law350 Prepare for Incoming !
  4. Read It and Weep: Feit Report – Which Major Legal Research Vendor is Plummeting in the Market?
  5. Hits & Misses Part Two Top Cancellation Candidates: Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Spending Under Scrutiny
  6. Hits and Misses Readers Choose Best New Analytics, Workflow and Law/Reg Comparison Tools
  7. Fastcase Brings Down the Legal News Paywall With Relaunch of Law Street Media – Market Disruption to Follow?
  8. A Major Legal Publisher Adds Local COVID-19 Ordinances and Orders
  9. FREE and Powerful: Wolters Kluwer Launches  Suite of COVID-19 Smart Charts Outside the Paywall.
  10. Data Wants to be Free (of Platforms) Thomson Reuters Releases APIs for Litigation Analytics and Practical Law
  11. Hits and Misses Part 3 – Blue J Legal AI Product Tops 2020 “Must Have” List
  12. Today Lexis+ Launches Lexis Announces Rebrands
  13. Casetext’s Compose AI Powered Drafting of Briefs and Motions – Lawyers Still Required
  14. New Covid-19 Resources From Fastcase, PacerPro, Tax Notes and PubK Law. Free Covid Resources From Westlaw and Bloomberg Law
  15. Westlaw Today – Thomson Reuters Launches a Legal News Platform –Offers AALL Program

Most read stories in 2020 from the Dewey B Strategic Archive:

  1. Bloomberg Law Returns to Predictable Pricing Model – Enhances Customer Cost Management  (July 8, 2019)
  2. Hits and Misses Part 4: Westlaw Edge — Hit, Miss or Hold Off? Customers Respond – Show me the ROI! (May 1, 2019)
  3. Bloomberg BNA Announces BIG Name Change Now: Bloomberg Industry Group (Sept. 3,1919)
  4. 10K Wizard Bites the Dust. Morningstar Directs Customers to Intelligize. Will Intelligize Enter the Workflow Race? (July 3, 2015)
  5. The Improbable Rise of Law360: What Lawyers Could Learn And Its Not Just the News! ( Aug. 13, 2013)
  6. “Westlaw Answers” Looks A lot Like AI to Me. Westlaw Releases Major New Features – And It’s All in Your Contract!(Apr. 1, 2016)
  7. Thomson Reuters to Layoff 3,200 Staff Through 2020, Close Offices and Eliminate Products – Which Legal Products Might Die? (Dec. 5,2018)
  8. Black’s Law Dictionary 10th Edition: Making Everything Old New Again. Why Legal Dictionaries Still Matter ( May 9, 2014)
  9. A “Computer” Was Originally a Job Title: The History of Computing Timeline ( Sept. 27, 2012)
  10. Move over ALM and Law360 – LexBlog is Launching a Legal News Network (Sept  10, 2018)
  11. Will a Robot Take My Job? Study Predicts Increased Demand for Lawyers and Librarians Through 2030 (Oct. 10, 2017)
  12. What Do Law Firms Need to Know About Buying Litigation Analytics Products? (July 28,2018)
  13. Thomson Reuters Launches Westlaw Edge Quick Check Raising the Bar for A.I. DrivenBrief and Citation Insights(July 12, 2019)
  14. Martindale Hubbell: Another Legal Icon Bites the Dust. But It Was Once Worth Its Weight in Gold (and Held for Ransom)(Jan. 9, 2014)
  15. The Law Librarians Revolt: AALL Accuses LexisNexis of Engaging in Unfair Business Practices – Possible Antitrust Violations (June 7, 2018)

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 Tools

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

Tomorrow  Feit Consulting  will be  releasing  a study “Patent Research: The Importance of Precision a Comparison of Docket Navigator and Lex Machina Data Searches” examining the comparative performance of Docket Navigator and Lex Machina  two of the leading patent research and analytics platforms. The study was paid for by Docket Navigator. According to Feit, they invited Lex Machina to participate in the study.  Lex Machina’s response is included below. Feit identified four expert patent researchers at ALM 100 firms who had access to both platforms. According to the report – the main question Docket Navigator wanted to answer was: Does AI outperform human search, or the reverse?  Docket Navigator  is described as “a human-search driven patent litigation platform.” The purpose of the study was to identify and compare the key differences in the quality and quantity of research results of Docket Navigator Continue Reading Feit Report: Docket Navigator Outperforms Lex Machina in Patent Research Challenge

Two months ago, Lex Machina  launched an analytics module for the New York County Supreme Court, one of  the most important commercial litigation jurisdictions in the United States.

Today Lex Machina is announcing the completion of coverage for all five New York City counties (contiguous with the 5 New York City Boroughs).

  • New York County Supreme Court (Manhattan) released on September 29th
  • Kings County Supreme Court (Brooklyn) released on October 27th
  • Queens County Supreme Court (Queens) released on November 24th
  • Richmond County Supreme Court (Staten Island) released on December 8th
  • Bronx Supreme Court (the Bronx) released on December 8th

All of the New York City county courts  handle civil litigation involving contracts, torts, tax, and commercial matters. Legal Analytics are Continue Reading Lex Machina Expands Analytics to Cover All New York City Counties

A year  after announcing an alliance with Fastcase, Ross Intelligence  posted a press release  today announcing that they will be shutting down on January 31, 2021. Ross Intelligence launched as the darling of the legal tech media with bold promises to replace Lexis and Westlaw. There were months of bold headlines featuring Ross enabled “robot lawyers.”

The press release implies that the closing is related to the high cost of defending a lawsuit brought by Thomson Reuters which was reported on by Bob Ambrogi.

Ross was unable to raise necessary funding for innovation.  According to the press release their focus going forward will be transitioning their customers to other platforms: Fastcase, Casetext and vLex.

 What This Means for Ross Customers

ROSS will continue to be available as it is today until January 31, 2021. Each customer will be able to export their personal data, including all data from their saved folders, beginning in January. We will be working with our customers to transition them to other services — including platforms by our friends at Fastcase, vLex and Casetext.

More to follow on this developing story.

This week LexisNexis announced the launch of  Survey of Commercial Lease Terms  in Practical Guidance — a unique analytics resource for real estate practitioners. In October I covered the launch of Practical Guidance Market Standards for M & A.

Daniel Lewis, VP and GM of Practical Guidance and Analytic at LexisNexis provided me with a preview of the Survey of Commercial Lease  Terms. Legal analytics products are generally built on top of publicly available datasets. Lewis described the new product which
includes data from private deals as built on a “give to get” model. Large, medium and small law firms have contributed data about the commercial leases they have worked on in order to get access to the data set and reports. Unlike other products the data is anonymized. Continue Reading LexisNexis Releases Commercial Lease Analytics Product and COVID-19 Real Estate Impact Report

Law.com  reported today that the Open Courts Act of 2020 has been passed by the House of Representatives.  In a time of fierce partisanship, this is a bi-partisan bill introduced by two Georgia representatives:  Republican, Rep. Doug Collins and Democrat, Rep. Hank Johnson. The bill will now needs to be passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President.

Earlier this week, 2O legal tech executives sent a letter (reprinted below) to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supporting passage of H.R. 8235.

I spoke to Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase  one of the signatories. Walters described the letter as coming from an informal coalition of legal tech entrepreneurs and innovators who acted quickly to get the letter out when they learned that the bill was coming up for a floor vote. The letter points out something that is obvious to knowledge professionals. The prohibitive cost of aggregating Pacer documents – the core building blocks of federal analytics is stifling innovation.  Pacer documents represent the raw material which can be transformed by intelligent tagging and artificial intelligence into powerful insights for both litigants and access to justice advocates.  There are no losers if Pacer can be transformed by technology and intelligent planning. I agree with Walters and his colleagues that free Pacer could drive a Continue Reading Can We Afford Not to Modernize Pacer? Open Courts Act Passes House Vote But Enactment Not a Done Deal

This past fall,  husband and wife tech team Chris Ford and Nikki Shaver launched an important new technology resource: Legaltechnologyhub.com. Legaltechhub (LTH) is a curated database of legal technology tools, which is enhanced with extensive and careful tagging and taxonomy. The founders are well known throughout the legal tech community. Ford is CMO at the tech company Zero, and Shaver is a former practicing attorney and renowned KM and innovation thought leader. According to Ford and Shaver, LTH took almost a year to build. It was clearly a labor of love in which they made a large personal investment of both time and money. LTH currently includes descriptions of 1,621 products from 84 countries. The database can be searched, filtered, and browsed.

This is a platform that makes me slap my forehead and shout, “Why didn’t I think of that!”

The press release described LTH as “addressing a need for an updated, user-driven resource to find the right legal technology anywhere in the world. LTH is a free resource for users and offers free listings to vendors. Tech companies can opt for fee-based enhanced listings which will include more descriptive content and even  videos.”

Yes, there’s Google, but a Google search for legal technology will deliver a hideously bloated and imprecise list of “hits.” I searched for ‘legal project management” software on Google and in .53 seconds it serviced up a truly useless 811,000,000 results which were both repetitive and unreliable. A similar search in LTH delivered 18 product descriptions which I was able to refine by applying additional filters. Continue Reading Legaltechnologyhub.com: Find The Right Technology Tool Fast

 Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., today announced the integration of its Federal Developments Knowledge Center (FDKC) with its award-winning Cheetah platform. The easy-to-use FDKC platform has been enhanced with range of new features and is now available on 18 practice areas dashboards on Cheetah. The integration will help users monitor all newly issued executive actions, proposed bills and rules, enacted laws and final rules in real time across over 800 agencies and sub-agencies of the federal government.

FDKC’s integration with Cheetah allows users to access even deeper expertise within their workflow, providing the ability to search, get alerts, and receive daily news and updates for all types of federal bills, proposed and final regulations and executive actions in a single platform. With FDKC, legal professionals have the ability to customize and monitor specific topics in real time to advise their clients on new opportunities, mitigate risk and offer strategic counsel. By integrating FDKC by practice area, legal professionals can research current laws and regulations and potential legislative changes all in one place. The result is a greater ability to understand and advise clients about existing laws and potential changes to laws.

Features of FDKC integrated with Cheetah include:

  • Real-time alerts: Customizable alerts on legislation, rules and executive actions through FDKC can significantly reduce time spent on research;
  • Source documents: FDKC provides quick access to source documents from Congress, the executive branch, and federal agencies; and
  • Practice area-specific alerts: Users can access synopses, impacts, and next step analyses on legislation, rules and actions curated by Wolters Kluwer’s deep domain experts.

“The volume of executive, legislative and regulatory information created at the federal level continues to grow, and with a change in administration on the horizon, monitoring relevant government activity will become an even more time consuming and challenging task for legal professionals,” said Ken Crutchfield, Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “The newly integrated legislative tracking capabilities now available at a practice area level in Cheetah provides legal professionals with tools to cut through hundreds of updates to get to exactly the information they need to effectively advise their clients about the potential impact of changes to laws and regulations.”

For more information and to request a demo, click here.

 

 

Today Casetext is announcing the release of the new Compose motion drafting collection for Products Liability: Pharmaceuticals and Medical Device. According to the press release last year they were 10,000 mass torts in Philadelphia alone one of the hotspots for products liability litigation.. This release will bring the total number of motions available on Compose to 60.
This is the second topical collection announced since Compose launched in February 2020. In September they launched  a collection for employment law motions. In an earlier post I described how Compose offers to make lawyers more efficient by automating the first draft of a motion or brief. They also released a study reporting the Compose can reduce the drafting time by 75%.
“We are very excited to announce products liability as our next area of focus for compose said case text CEOJake Heller. “Finding cost-effective ways to provide high-quality representation as a top priority for many of our customers firms. We are confident that compose can help by enabling them to efficiently address a high-volume products liability cases while at the same time ensuring they never miss an argument in a high stakes case.”
The new collection covers 20 motions all tailored specifically to legal issues arising in pharmaceutical and medical device products liability litigation::
  • California New York New Jersey and Pennsylvania state motion
  • Motion to compel discovery
  • Motion to exclude expert testimony
  • Motion for summary judgment
Federal court:
  • Notice of removal to federal court
  • Notice of Romain to state court
  • Motion to compel discovery
  • Motion to exclude expert testimony
  • Motions for summary judgment applying California New York New Jersey and Pennsylvania substantive law
The following motions are immediately available to compose clients
  • California motion to exclude expert testimony
  • New Jersey motion for summary judgment
  • Pennsylvania motion for summary judgment
  • Federal notice of removal to federal court
  • Federal motion to reman to state court
 The remaining motions in the collection will be rolled out in early 2021. Casetext is also offering one month of free access to a limited number of firms that request access before the end of 2020. Firms can apply for access at insert link: https://compose.law/products-liability-motions/