By my recollection State Net is one of the oldest surviving legal research and legislative tracking systems.  State Net collected and coded and normalized data about the activities of 50 state legislatures back in the dial up  days of modems with acoustic couplers. They thrived long enough to be acquired by Lexis Nexis in 2010.

Over the years the system expanded to cover regulations from all 50 states. The latest challenge is addressing the growth in important local legislation. State Net now tracks  laws introduced in over 300 major cities and counties around the country.

Daniel Lewis, founder of Ravel Law which was acquired by Lexis Nexis in 2017 is now responsible for the State Net system in his role as vice president of product LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Lewis provided me with an overview of the new State Net features and put the challenge of state motioning in perspective. According to Lewis  each year 135,000 bills are introduced across the 50 states compared to about 10,000 federal bills. Fifteen times more state bills Continue Reading LexisNexis Announces Relaunch of State Net Celebrating 50 Years With Analytics and Forecasting Features

Gavelytics a high tech legal analytics company focused on state court analytics announced today that their analytics platform had been granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Patent no. 10,452,734     for “Data Visualization Platform for Use in a Network Environment”  covers Gavelytics’ invention of a unique way to parse, visualize and display data surrounding reassignment motions and similar filings, to compare such motions among a number of judges, and to predict which new judge will be assigned after a reassignment motion is granted.
I caught up with former “big law” lawyer, Gavelytics co-inventor and CEO Rick Merrill to explore the impact of achieving this benchmark. According to Merrill  “This demonstrates the value and quality of the technology we’ve developed. And how we are solving difficult problems through technology. The patent is actually first of several — we have others pending — some related to this. But all have to do with making sense of messy trial court order.”
JOG: In terms of Gavelytics trajectory what does the granting of the patent mean? RM: “This protects us should a competitor try to do the same thing. It enhances the value of the business, which is good for all of our customers. And is the first of several patents in the works.”
JOG: Will this make it easier to raise money? RM: “We’ve never had a hard time raising money but should we choose to, yes.”
JOG: Would you consider licensing the patent ? RM: “Not at this time.”
The Gavelytics patent  announcement comes less than a month after the company  announced a major launch of  their  New York.analytics module. Gavelytics which started in California has also launched modules covering cournties in Florida, Texas and Nevada. But Gavelytics can not sit still, the state analytics market is “hot.” Thomson Reuters has already launched state law analytics as part of their Westlaw Edge platform and Lex Machina which has focused on federal law is rumored to have state analytics modules in their product pipeline. Fastcase which purchased Docket Alarm offers customer the ability to use AI and APIs to customize state analytics.

Here is the full Press Release:

Gavelytics Secures Patent for Judicial Analytics Platform

Legal tech company granted U.S. patent for its first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence platform

 

LOS ANGELES (December 2019) – Gavelytics, a Los Angeles-based legal technology software company, is pleased to announce that it has secured a patent for its trial court data analytics platform, which helps attorneys better position their cases for success, analyze a judge’s hidden tendencies, generate more business, and manage client expectations.

Patent no. 10,452,734 for “Data Visualization Platform for Use in a Network Environment”  covers Gavelytics’s invention of a unique way to parse, visualize and display data surrounding reassignment motions and similar filings, to compare such motions among a number of judges, and to predict which new judge will be assigned after a reassignment motion is granted.  Inventors named on the patent include Rick Merrill, Juan Carlos Moreno, Jason Madsen, Brandon Hinesley, and Edgar Alejandro Anzaldua Moreno. Gavelytics worked with Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP on the patent application.

“We are confident that our patented technology will continue to support our company’s growth as we expand throughout the United States,” said Merrill, Gavelytics Founder and CEO. “We look forward to launching new geographic coverage and products in the coming months.”

Named among the National Law Journals’ 2019 Emerging Legal Technologies, Gavelytics is focused on bringing its state-level trial court analytics platform to more attorneys nationwide. Gavelytics uses artificial intelligence and attorney review to help litigators quickly identify judges’ tendencies, to understand the activities of competing law firms, and to research the trial court activities of parties in ways never before possible.

Gavelytics recently launched its coverage of New York trial court data. Trial court data from California, Nevada and Florida also are available in the platform, and additional states will be added in coming months.

About Gavelytics Gavelytics is a Los Angeles-based legal technology software company that provides law firms, insurance companies, advocacy organizations and corporate legal departments with state trial court analytics. Gavelytics legal artificial intelligence provides actionable insights that help lawyers win more motions, win more cases, and win more business. For more information, visit gavelytics.com

Thanks to the International Legal Technology Association for inviting me to present a webinar on the use of analytics to manage licenses and spending.Digital Resources Analytics: Determining the Right Mix of Resources for Your Firm  

Date : Thursday, December 12th from 11:00am-11:30am ET.

Format: 30 minute webinar.

Description: Thanks to high renewal costs, licensing models that require firms to buy more seats than they need, and the growing number of specialty databases and newsletters that do that one thing better than competitors, law firm library budgets are very hard to control.  Using a combination of custom built and third party tools, one firm has developed sophisticated records, analytics and reporting around costs and usage to ensure that lawyers and administrators have what they need.  Come see The House that Jean Built in this snackable webinar session!

Speaker: 

Jean O’Grady, Sr. Director of Information, Research and Knowledge, DLA Piper

Registration at this link.

 

Today Fastcase and Ross Intelligence are announcing a content, research and development partnership which the founders expect to drive innovation for both companies. Fastcase which is celebrating its 20th anniversary has excently expanded beyond its primary law focus into analytics, legal news and secondary source publishing and alliances. Ross which made headlines with its A.I. search engine for legal research has recently launched its law school program and begun building alliances with bar associations and with Clio practice management software.

I interviewed Ed Walters CEO and Co- Founder of Fastcase about this new alliance. Walters describes this alliance in terms of a major market shift in the legal research and technology space. “In the 1990s the main way market dominance was building gigantic silos of data” epitomized by the Lexis and Westlaw platforms. According to Walters “The future will be owned by small, nimble companies that have inter-operable parts. The Fastcase-Ross alliance is about creating a new paradigm for the next 10 years.”

Ross will gain access to the Fastcase pipeline of case law, statutes and regulations across all 50 states. Walters described t he benefits of the alliance in the press release. Fastcase will benefit from Ross’s “trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing in machine learning. The partnership will enable Fastcase to collaborate on exciting new products and jointly create new solutions for unmet needs of the legal profession.”

Lexis and Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) invented the online legal research market and have dominated it for years. Continue Reading In Paradigm Shift Legal Research Innovators Fastcast and Ross Intelligence Form Development Alliance

Gavelytics  has just expanded their judges analytics product to include the 4 of the 5 state counties within the boundaries of New York City (Bronx, Kings, Queens,  and New York). The expanded judge product also includes the ability to view the dockets underlying any of the product’s metrics. A user can, for example, quickly identify every case in which a judge presided over a motion for summary judgment in a tort case and view the relevant cases.

 

State law analytics is a hot area of development. There are two distinct branches of litigation analytics. Some litigation Continue Reading Gavelytics Launches State Litigation Analytics New York Judges–Posts Analytics Webinar Recording

One of the few silver linings of the 2008 financial crisis was that many lawyers were shocked into budget consciousness. Seemingly overnight, lawyers became willing to reassess old assumptions. Maybe they could live without personal copies of treatises. Maybe they would try online resources that they had resisted. The crisis has passed but the changed legal market place remains. Law firms that want to invest in new technologies must subsidize those investments with lean budget practices that continuously reassess all ongoing costs. No product is a “slam dunk” for annual renewal in 2019 without some “due diligence.”

Here are some tips to help your “harvest” saving which can be reinvested in “nextgen” resources.

Focus on ROI. Products such as Research Monitor and Onelog can provide invaluable insights into the number of lawyers who actually use web-based products.  Products are often maintained based on  Continue Reading It’s Budget Time! 12 Timely Tips to Help Manage Law Firm Costs

Ellyssa Kroski, the Director of Information Technology at the New York Law Institute  assembled a group of law library and technology thought leaders to contribute to her new book “Law Librarianship in the Age of AI” which was released last week by the American Library Association.

I was honored to have the opportunity to write the introduction to the book.

“The 2018 Altman & Weil Law Firms in Transition Survey reported that only 38% of law firms are actively engaged in experiments to test innovative ideas or methods. This indicates that the vast majority of law firms have a vacuum in innovation leadership waiting to be filled. While all innovation does not require AI– algorithms and analytics will play an important role in the transformation of the business and practice of law over the coming decades. Hopefully this book with inspire reluctant librarians to grab a seat at the innovation table or even set out the innovation agenda at their organizations.” From the Introduction to Law Librarianship in the Information Age.

Kroski’s books is a collection of essays  authored by professionals whose names are known on the legal tech speaking circuit: Bob Ambrogi, Steve Lastres, Scott Baily, Saskia Mehlhorn and Jamie Baker.

The book provides a great introduction to the nuts and bolts of AI and a survey of issues confronting legal information professionals. Chapters cover: an overview of AI tools in law,  how librarians are embracing AI, the impact of AI on legal research, AI in Legal Education, the risk and ethical challenges of AI and the future of AI in law libraries. One fun chapter teachers readers about machine learning by using machine learning to examine Shakespearean plays.

While the book is targeted primarily at knowledge and library professionals, could also help law firm leaders and Law School Dean’s to understand the critical role that law librarians can and should play in selecting the right AI tools for their organizations.

.Order the book here.

Today LexisNexis is releasing results of an independent study commissioned by LexisNexis.  The study was conducted between August and September 2019 and included responses from 5,061 law students at 201 law schools. The survey was  conducted” to better understand  future lawyer attitudes, behaviors and key drivers of user preference in relation to legal research.”Access the full Next-Gen Legal Tech Report  here.

The press release states that the results indicate that Lexis Advance is preferred over Westlaw for legal research.   Since the report did not include a copy of the survey instrument,   I can not tell if Lexis is providing the results of all questions or only selected questions.  In addition, some questions refer to law students, others refer to “new lawyers” so i wonder if I am seeing the results of multiple surveys. I will report on the “preferred platform” results when I receive responses to my questions from Lexis.

In this post I will only be reporting on the results related to the drivers of preference and recommendations

Research Methodology

LexisNexis Legal & Professional commissioned PwC Research, a global center of excellence for primary research and evidence-based consulting services and part of PwC LLP in the UK, to undertake data collection and aggregate results for the LexisNexis study. 83,909 U.S. law students from 201 law schools were invited to participate in the study which ran between August 12, 2019 – September 9, 2019 and from which 5,061 responded.

Drivers of preference:  Ease of Use and finding information quickly are the top two drivers of use.

 

Next Gen Lawyers

  • 76% find analytics helpful for research
  • 77% say visualization tools make it easier to find research results.

 

Law Students Value Analytics. 76% of students said that legal analytics are helpful!

Only yesterday, I participated on a panel discussion on legal analytics. We speculated on how long it would take for lawyers to graduate from law school with an understanding of legal analytics. I am thrilled to see that law students are not only being exposed to analytics in law school but are grasping the value of analytics in practice.

Next-Gen Legal Tech Survey Recommendations

  • Equip attorneys with technology tools they value – so they work faster and smarter.
  • Provide access to training programs for new and established to users to learn new technologies.
  • Embrace the “know how” of they digital natives and look to them to contribute to training programs across the firms

Lexis has been a pioneer in adding a wide variety of visualization tools for legal research. These tools include:  color coding research terms to ease navigation, the predictive legislation “gauge,”  Lex Machina docket analytics charts, and Ravel Context judicial analytics charts. The impact of these research features is reflected in the survey results.

Stay tuned for a follow up post on the platform preferences reported in the tech survey.

Legal organizations spend an estimated $3 billion dollars on technology according to a recent study by Mitretech
Catching the Wave: :Legal Technology Spend at $3 Billion and growing. Driving product adoption remains a challenge across law firms of every size.

Clients demand that law firms focus on knowledge management, analytics and legal project management and there is a burgeoning market of new products to address these needs. An email blast or an offer a free Danish and bagels no longer motivates lawyers to leave their offices and sit through a demo. Product deployment alone does not assure adoption and a return on investment. In order to optimize the adoption of products there are multiple strategies which can be used to drive the adoption and aid in the determination of ROI.

Eliminating the Obstacles to Adoption This step is often overlooked. It is important to recognize at the outset that policies and the technology itself can create obstacles to adoption. Obstacles to adoption include: imposing client charges of use; Continue Reading Best Practices to Drive Lawyer Adoption of Technology

On November 12th  (11 am PST, 2 PM est.)  I will be moderating a discussion on the value of legal analytics in the practice and business of law.   A panel of research experts and thought leaders will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the development of legal analytics products. Specific topics will include the  “use cases” for analytics, driving lawyer adoption, success stories and introducing legal analytics into the research librarians toolkit.

The panel is comprised of research experts and thought leaders from ALM 100 firms.

  • Martin Korn, Director of Research and Knowledge Services @Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP
  • Michael Saint Onge, Regional Director, Research & Library Services @Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
  • Brian Blaho,  National Manager of Research Services @Reed Smith LLP

Register for the webinar here.