PLI is offering a free one hour webinar on June 11th at 3 pm.  You must register on the PLI website and use the code: FREE COVID. Here is the description of the program.Register for free at this link

COVID-19 and Issues for Legal Librarians

As the legal community adjusts to the COVID-19 new normal virtual work environment, law librarians face unique challenges.  It is vitally important for law librarians to be proactive in monitoring the needs of the respective practice areas they support, including ensuring adequate research is being performed in those hot Covid-19 practice areas and ensuring alerts have been set up to monitor late breaking Continue Reading PLI Offers Free COVID Webinar for Law Librarians on Thursday June 11th

The financial crisis of 2007 triggered a convulsion in the legal industry which continues to offer aftershocks exacerbated  by “economic, demographic, regulatory, technology and competitive demands.” And then  as we know, the COVID-19 pandemic  triggered new a new crisis. Wolters Kluwer was analyzing the legal marketplace back in January 2020. Today they are releasing the survey results in the 2020 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer: Performance Drivers and Change in the Legal Sector” which was designed “to assess the future-readiness and resilience in the legal sector.”

The survey gathers feedback from an international group of 700 legal professionals working in law firms and as in-house counsel.. The full survey is available at this link.

The report is 29 pages long but is full of graphs and data illustrating various trends as well as the disconnects between law firms and in-house counsel priorities. Both law firms and in house counsel share an awareness of technology as a critical success factor but the majority of both organization types are f ailing overcome obstacles to implementation.

I spoke with Dean Sonderegger, head of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S about the survey results. Sonderegger predicts that the COVID pandemic will accelerate all the trends identified in the survey.

Top Trends and Readiness

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey–Tech Aspiration vs. Tech Implementation

Lex Machina has announced the expansion of their state law analytics  offering with the addition of the Sacramento County Superior Court (California) and Clark County (Nevada) which covers Las Vegas. This adds a total of 171,480  new cases bringing the total state case analytics to 1,126,722 new cases .  The state law analytics provides lawyers with insights into judges, court, law firms, attorneys and parties.

The new state court analytics modules are like the Lex Machina federal court analytics products, built using a proprietary  Attorney Data Engine and other natural language processing technology, According to the press release “Lex Machina is the only legal analytics provider able to utilize state court documents to provide comprehensive coverage about the behavior of judges, law firms, attorneys, and parties in state courts.”

In an earlier post about Lex Machina  state law analytics products I described the unique challenges of taming state court data. “each state court system the product development team had to get “under the hood” to understand the idiosyncrasies of  docket system and data collection practices.”

According to the press release “Lex Machina worked closely with the court systems to understand their docketing practices and create analytics that reflect the unique aspects of individual courts. The two new state courts – Sacramento County Superior Court (88,000+ cases) and Clark County (Las Vegas) District Court (82,000+ cases) – each have their own data collection infrastructure and nuances. These modules, and thus the substantial case numbers, cover four years of court activity beginning with cases filed January 1, 2016 or later.”

Why Sacramento and Clark County?

The Sacramento and Clark County courts were chosen because they represent important data sets in the universe of Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches New State Court Analytics for California and Nevada

Fastcase is digging deeper into the legal news market with the timely launch of an agricultural law news section.  David Nayer, Editor in Chief of Law Street Media cites the timeliness of the launch in the press release.  The Agriculture section and Alerts Center is being launched “ while our world is finding its new normal, and its especially relevant to those in food production, food service, and supply chains that impact each of us.”

The Agriculture section is leveraging “sister product” Docket Alarm’s real-time docket, litigation and analytics information to highlight emerging litigation topics such as farming, food, tobacco, and cannabis. It will also cover related topics such as agriculture policy at the FDA and USDA, the cannabis industry, environmental and land use, and the emergence of agricultural technologies. The Law Street Media newsletters are geared toward providing information “that generates business for its users.”

Law Street Media Docket Side Bar

You gotta love Fastcase co-founder Phil Rosenthal who offers his own “down home” explanation of why Agriculture was the second  news topic to launch. “We wanted our second industry news feed to be about meat and potatoes litigation – literally, so our bar partners across the country and their members can see how tracking filed litigation leads to new business”

As of today, the Agriculture news section is available for FREE on the  Law Street Media home page as well as in daily Continue Reading Fastcase Law Street Media: News With a Flash of Dockets – Launches Timely Food Chain Content

Thomson Reuters has added a collection of municipal ordinances  and order for the 100 largest U.S. cities. Early in the COVID-19 crisis Thomson Reuters published  a Global Coronavirus Toolkit on the Practical Law platform. A bigger legal publishing challenge  was about to emerge.  Ever since California Governor Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first state “stay at home” order on March 19, 2020 there has been a steady cascade of orders, ordinances and policies issued from every kind of governmental unit (cities, counties, villages) and administrative units ( health, transportation, public utilities, fair housing…)

Across the US. law librarians and knowledge managers were developing a “skunk-works” approach to gathering what was normally viewed as the “ephemera” of legal documents: governors proclamations and agency polices. Most states lacked a systematic publication plan and most failed to publish all the  COVID materials on one central website. Sometimes these  life altering  issues emerging  as tweets, texts,  on  Facebook or other social media sites. Finding Continue Reading A Major Legal Publisher Adds Local COVID-19 Ordinances and Orders

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory  has launched one of the first digital resources providing an in depth analysis of the employment provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The resource launched on May 8th and is available on the Cheetah platform. It provides an integrated analysis which links highlights, explanations, statutory text and amended law provisions to help lawyers understand both the new provisions as well as the existing laws impact by these two major pieces of legislation.

According to the press release “Wolters Kluwer’s new Families First Act and CARES Act, Selected Provisions: Law, Explanation and Analysis (LEA) provides a complete guide to the provisions of both laws that employers and their advisors need to know, offering a thorough analysis of important aspects of both laws that impact individuals, workers, and businesses of all sizes.“

Wolters Kliuwer has a long history publishing “law and explanation” materials to help practitioners get up to speed on major legal enactments and revisions. Ken Crutchfield, Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S is quoted in the press release: “The Law, Explanation and Analysis model is Wolters Kluwer’s unique approach to integrating information on significant legislation into a single resource, and this latest offering has a wide range of use across several topics, including labor and employment, human resources, payroll and entitlements, and pension and employee benefits. Perhaps now more than ever, our customers are in need of comprehensive, actionable information to help them deliver valuable insights and save time as they navigate this unprecedented and quickly evolving regulatory landscape.”

The digital resource covers the following topics:

– Emergency family and medical leave expansion
– Emergency unemployment insurance stabilization and access
– Emergency paid sick leave
– Health and privacy provisions
– Tax credits and other payroll relief
– Pension plan provisions
– Economic stabilization provisions
– Air carrier workers support

To learn more about the Cheetah™ Labor & Employment Law portfolio, visit: https://lrus.wolterskluwer.com/store/cheetah/labor-and-employment-law/

 Four products shared the top 3 places in this tears Dewey B Strategic Hits and Misses survey results. Back in January readers were asked to identify the products they either purchased for the first time in 2019 or planned to purchase in 2020. Although budgets may have been cut since the survey was taken the products identified by readers are likely to be top of mind as law firm budgets recover. Law firms can not afford to ignore new products which drive efficiency and unique insights. The survey winners are:
1. Blue J Legal Tax Foresight   topped the list of new products that firms hoped to purchase in 2020.
2. Westlaw Edge and Casetext Compose tied for second. place.
3.  Lexis Search Advantage  took third place.
Blue J Legal Tax Foresight is the first product I have seen which uses AI and analytics to predict outcomes on tax controversies based on a variety of factors. I wrote about Blue J Legal back in October 2019. Here is a link to that post.
 Casetext Compose was announced at legal tech in New York. It uses AI and linguistic analysis to help Lawyers  draft  responsive motions. Here is my post about the launch.

Westlaw Edge is Thomson Reuters new platform which is loaded with new functionality AI enabled research, brief analysis, analytics, AI enabled citation tools and jurisdictional comparison tools. Thomson Reuters has continued to add functionality since it was launched in July 2018. Here is the original post I wrote about Westlaw Edge.

Lexis Search Advantage  took third place. LSA is a sophisticated  knowledge management tool which leverages the over 300 algorithms developed by Intelligize (now owned by LexisNexis). The LSA algorithms sit on a server within the law firm firewall and crawl the law firm DMS to identify documents, extract key meta-data. and tag defined terms with the the documents.

Pervasive AI, Analytics and Workflow.  In the past it has been a fairly simple task to define products as falling into  product types along a functionality spectrum. As I reviewed the products noted by readers I repeatedly found that products included multiple attributes. AI and workflow. Analytics and AI.  Analytics and workflow….Many patent products were highlighted by readers  and all of them offered some form of  AI, analytics and/or workflow. Nonetheless to provide some structure I have attempted to group the products, but in truth many products could be in multiple categories.
I trust that the list of products  below will provide an interesting browse for knowledge managers and librarians who need to stay on top of the legal technology marketplace. Here are the products highlighted by your colleagues.
Drafting and workflow efficiency products  Casetext  Compose and Lexis Search Advantage  fit squarely in this catagory. Other productsreaders are considering purchasing are:  Bloomberg Law Brief Analyzer,  Litera  Transactional,  Courtroom Insight, and Castext Cara , Covenant review,  PacerPro.
Analytics products noted for purchase  Gavelytics, Doclet Alarrm,  Lex Machina and Trellis.
Patent products which readers may purchase are   Darts IP, Derwent,  Patdocs,  Questel , Orbit Bio Sequence, Clarivate.
Research related products include Data Guidance a global regulatory product for privacy compliance.
Bloomberg Law Health Practice Center, a suite of practice tools for health lawyers, Voxgov which monitors And aggregates every release from any federal agency website. From Counsel a UK corporate law resource, Sparkspread  Energy industry guidance.

 

Today the Association of Corporate Counsel and Wolters Kluwer  Legal and Regulatory  are releasing the 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmark Report. The report is over 80 pages long and  is exploding with scatter graphs and bar charts which assess  how well corporate legal departments have adopted various initiatives, such as knowledge management, strategic planning, innovation, technology and information governance. The press release states that the report offers some of the first numerical data to support key findings about legal operations Including:

1) Despite increasing focus on legal operations, most organizations, on average, still do not have a mature legal department.
2) A legal operations professional on staff makes a measurable improvement to a legal department’s maturity rate across ALL 15 functions tested.
3) Although legal operations functions have been shown to reduce costs and increase efficiency, many legal departments continue to face a diversity of challenges in the maturation process.

The full report will be available for download here.

How Innovative Are Corporate Legal Departments? Law firms that have done a lot of hand-ringing about developing their own innovation in the past five years will be comforted to learn that innovation is not as pervasive in corporate legal departments they have feared. In house legal departments have their own innovation and change management challenges. The report documents a spectrum of innovation across industries. For example, legal departments in ecommerce and real estate have the highest operational maturity scores. One can’t help but wonder what similar charts comparing the Amlaw 100 law firms would reveal.

The Survey Survey respondents were from 316 legal operations organizations across 29 countries and 14 industries. The report Continue Reading ACC and Wolters Kluwer Release Legal Operations Study – Legal Operations Leaders Drive Change But Innovation Lags in Legal Departments

The Hits and Misses Survey was conducted in the pre-pandemic world. Nonetheless the results will have a special resonance with Information professionals around the world perched at home scrutinizing their budgets with scalpel in one hand and an ax in the other.  Back in January Dewey B Strategic readers were asked to the identify the products which were on their radar for cancellation in 2020. Eighty seven  readers responded.  Most law firms use products such as Research Monitor and Onelog to capture usage trends for every digital product. This data can provide actionable insights on usage trends and provide  ROI insights.  No major vendor will be spared of cancellation scrutiny in 2020. Even before the pandemic and readers were using phrases such as” constant scrutiny” and referred to “high cost/ low usage,” “pricing not competitive” as well as mentioning  products which were both redundant and expensive. . The emergence of a competitor product, changes practice needs or the top down command to identify “something” to cancel all drive the continuous review of  research resource spending.

Four respondents indicated that their firms are considering complete cancellation of Lexis, Westlaw or Bloomberg.  The high end of the legal research market has clearly gotten overcrowded. Lopping off a  major CALR vendor can deliver major budget relief.  By contrast, the smaller vendors such as  Fastcase and Casetext  were not mentioned by any reader as being considered for cancellation.

LexisNexis Tops the Scrutiny List  Lexis products are receiving the most budget scrutiny followed closely by Bloomberg and Westlaw. A total of twelve readers cited LexisAdvance or other Lexis content as being considered for cancellation. Lex Machina was the product mentioned most often for cancellation– a total of seven times. It is not a stretch to consider whether Westlaw Edge analytics is eating into the Lex Machina domination of the  legal analytics market. Other Lexis products under scrutiny include Newsdesk, Total Patent, Patent Advisor and Context. Each were mentioned by one respondent.

Bloomberg products were mentioned by nine readers. Seven readers mentioned scrutiny of various legacy BNA practice materials. Two readers mentioned Bloomberg Law being under scrutiny. One reader mentioned the cancellation of the print Tax Management Portfolios.

Thomson Reuters Westlaw content was mentioned by eight respondents. The top products under scrutiny Westklw and   West KM  were noted by  three  readers each. Monitor Suite was mentioned by two reader and. Practical Law was mentioned once.

Wolters Kluwer  legal content was mentioned by five readers. Content targeted included labor and securities practice materials.

Business and deal related content cited for cancellation include Prequin, Deal Pipeline and Moodys..

Competitive intelligence products cited for cancellation were Manzama and ALM legal compass.

Other products under scrutiny include Trellis state analytics, Cannaregs which covers the cannabis regulatory market. and CEB Onlaw California practice materials.

 

Read Part 1 of the Hits and Misses Survey: Best Products here

 

Thomson Reuters continues to build out features in Westlaw Edge. Today they have announced  a new  A.I. enabled quote checking feature which resides within the brief analysis tool Quick Check which was launched at the  American Association of Law Libraries meeting last July. Quick Check allows lawyers to upload a brief and quickly identify missing or problematic authority. Most importantly it can be used as a final check on a lawyer’s draft documents or  to identify weaknesses in an  opposing parties brief or motion.
Quick Check Quotation Analysis is one more feature which drives efficiency while reducing risk. A lawyer can identify both misquotation or potential misrepresentation of quotes. According to Carol Jo Lechtenberg senior director of Westlaw product management, “Quotation Analysis uses AI to find display and compare the language of the  cited  cases to the quotation from the uploaded document.”  Briefs and motions can contain dozens of quotes, it can be very time-consuming to identify every discrepancy down to a  missing or misplaced “comma.”.
The quotation analysis report provides a side-by-side comparison  which highlights any difference in the quotes. It also  enables a lawyer to quickly review the context surrounding the quote in the original document.
I believe that QuickCheck may be the first brief analysis tool to offer this type of AI enabled quotation checking feature.  The  brief analysis market has heated up in the past year. Bloomberg Law launched  their  Brief Analyzer in in February 2020. Lexis is expected to launch a brief analyzer tool in the coming months. Casetext CARA launched the first brief analysis tool in 2016. In this highly competitive marketplace – every innovation by one company drives the development of higher value solutions across the market.
Quick Check Judicial. This could be a real headliner. Later this summer a new tool for the judiciary will be released which will enable judges and law clerks to upload the filings from each side and compare and easily identify potential issues in each parties briefs: