I am honored to be speaking at several upcoming events.

Driving Analytics into Practice: A High Speed Tour of the World of Commercial Analytics, Workflow and Predictive Tools. Marcus Evans Data Utilization and Practice Innovation Conference,  Chicago, Il. March 19-21, 2018.

Using AI to Power Push, CodeX FutureLaw 2018 Conference, Palo Alto, Ca. April 5, 2018. I will be a co-panelist with Patric Di Domenico, Ogletree Deekins, Marlene Gebauer, Greenberg Traurig; Jeff Rovner, O’Melveny & Myers  on the panel moderated  by Jake Heller of Casetext.

A Whirlwind Tour of the Hits and Hyperbole in Legal Research and Workflow Products, Southeast Law Library Association Conference, Nashville, Tn., April 14, 2018  an updated version of the presentation which I did with Steve Lastres of Debevoise and Plimpton last summer at the American Association of Law Libraries conference in Austin.

Last  Thursday, Daniel Lewis, co-Founder of Ravel Law (now part of LexisNexis) gave the Keynote address at the annual Ark Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library, Research and Information Services  conference in New York. Instead of another frothy,  sermon on the emergence of “robot lawyers,” Lewis delivered a measured analysis of the current state of AI in the legal market.  It was a dramatic counterpoint to some of the overheated  AI rhetoric reverberating througout the recent  Legal Tech conference in New York. Lewis provided a framework for understanding what AI can do today. His talk covered current AI technologies and applications. But the topic which was of greatest interest to me was the a practical outline  of  questions to ask of vendors who are selling AI enabled products.  How do you  distinguish marketing hype from reality? How do you help manage lawyer expectations after they have read about the latest “game changing” AI product — which was acquired by a peer law firm? When the talk was over I felt like standing up and cheering.  Continue Reading The Awesome Power of Understatement. Daniel Lewis On Assessing AI Products and Managing Expectations

Courtroom Insight was originally designed to as a Yelp-type directory to enable litigators to locate and share insights about expert witnesses. In a recent interview co-founder Mark Torchiana explained that since the launch in 2010 he has learned that lawyers do not want to share their comments about experts in a public forum. Courtroom Insights has evolved into the dominant internal expert witness knowledge management solution for law firms.

That transitional pivot occurred when the  Scott Rechtschaffen, The Chief Knowledge Officer at the Littler firm contacted Torchiana and asked if the product could be used to manage internal information about arbitrators. After eight years the company has become totally focused on private installations in law firms and content has expanded to include profiles of Continue Reading Courtroom Insight: Enhances Expert Witness Knowledge Management Platform

For my entire career, people have been suggesting that “the end was near” for librarians.  A  spectacularly absurd notion in a burgeoning knowledge economy. Once again the marketplace is demonstrating the versatility and value librarians  can bring to innovative knowledge organizations even in the 21st Century. Last week Kira the legal tech innovator posted a new job opening for a “Machine Learning Knowledge Analyst.” A complete description and link to the job application can be located at this link.

Here is how the job  posing in introduced:

“There is no question that for every successful law firm there is a talented group of law librarians who manage the flow of information, disseminate legal resources, and strategically support other Continue Reading Kira is Hiring a Librarian – I Mean– a Machine Learning Knowledge Analyst

Last week Casetext released a brief new report on the future of Knowledge Management. The full report is available at this link. The report is really a “thought piece” based on a question posed to a group of knowledge leaders. The question was basically”what would you do to improve KM if you had $10 million dollars?”  The respondents highlighted a variety of challenges and recommendations.  It appears that no one has the right mix of tools, technology and resources today but there was a consistent refrain – that emerging technologies may soon appear which will help bridge some of the critical gaps between implicit, explicit, internal and external knowledge.

Respondents basically were asked; “If you had $10 Million to spend on KM, What would you do?” While lack of law firm investment in knowledge solutions is part of the problem, it is not only only obstacle to effective knowledge management in law firms.

Key findings:

  • Data Collection will be Automated
  • Data will be automatically structured
  • Legal research and KM tools will be powered by AI.

KM Departments will play an important role in bringing about these changes.

Contributors to the the report include many prominent  law law firm thought leaders including, Patrick Dundas, KM Associate, Schulte, Ross and Zable, Shabeer Kahn, Director of Research Service, Morrison & Foster, Rich McClain, Chief Information Officer, Hunton & Wiliams, Holly RIccio, Knowledge Management Director, Nossaman; Joseph Keslar, Director of Library and Research Services, Blank Rome: Gina Lynch, Director of Knowledge Services, Paul Weiss; Genevieve Nicholson, Manager of Research & Knowledge Services, Lewis Roca.

Thanks to Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext for acknowledging the challenges facing knowledge managers today and  providing them will a platform on which to share some insights into the road ahead

 

Thomson Reuters and Acritas has released their first annual State of Corporate Legal Departments Report. Many of the themes echo discussions at last week’s Legal Tech conference in New York. Clients are king and law firms  are trying to catch up to shifting client expectations. The report analysed data from Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker, Acritas and the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. One of the most interesting aspects of the report for me was the focus on collecting metrics.  The suggested list includes 21 data elements which are categorized as preventive, efficient, effective or review. These metrics signal the issues which should also be of importance to law firms.

The five goals mentioned most consistently are:

In House Counsel Goals 2018

Key take aways:

  • Satisfaction with outside counsel has increased by 9% over the past 5 years.
  • Budgets for in house legal work increased 10%
  • Budgets for outside legal work decreased 6%
  • Although 53% reduced their legal roster, 43% have grown their outside counsel roster..
Acritas Spectrum of Technology and Innovation

Here is the list of key recommended metrics:

Recommended in-house counsel metrics

I met with Jeff Pfeifer, VP of Product Management at LexisNexis and Daniel Lewis,one of the co-founders of Ravel Law to review the upcoming release of Ravel content on Lexis. I reviewed Ravel Law when came to market in 2014 offering one of the most innovative approaches to legal research to hit the market in the past decade.  In addition, they had the novel idea of highlighting  judges precedential history – what cases do specific judges tend to cite for particular issues and then how do they rule?  They offered what I originally described as a constellation-like visualization of case law relationships. LexisNexis purchased Ravel in 2017 only two years after purchasing another Legal Analytics platform Lex Machina. Lexis has begun integrating Lex Machina analytics into Lexis Advance so it was not clear where the Ravel analytics would fit in. Last week at Legal Tech in New York, I received a preview of these integrations which are scheduled to  rolled out over several months beginning in March 2018.

Enhanced Shepard’s Citations

 

Ravel Law will Enhance Shepards Citations

In 2016 Lexis launched the search term maps feature which enables researchers to navigate to specific search terms and to see the depth of treatment of each term. With Ravel Law they are integrating Shepard’s  citations as a color wheel.

They have kept the standard Shepard’s color red- negative, yellow caution/explained, green – followed in the wheel. However since they are using those same colors in the term map which runs along the top of the case – I was originally confused and though the red in the term map  was connected to the Shepard’s history. I suggest that Lexis give this issue more thought.

 Ravel’s Search Visualization

Ravel’s search visualizations have been simplified and now include colored dots using the Shepard’s history indicators in the search visualization map.

Ravel Visuaizaton in Lexis Advance

 

6 Million Caselaw Images

Until now, Lexis has not had access to case law images. When LexisNexis bought Ravel they got access to the “Free the Law” archive  arising from  the 2015 Harvard Law School-Ravel Law collaboration .

According to Pfeifer, the Harvard case law archive will load more than 500,00 new cases into Lexis. In addition, over 6 million case reporter images will be available to lawyers who want an original reporter page to examine or attach as an image to a court filing.

Harvard Case Law Images on Lexis

Coming Soon 

Ravel’s judge, law firm and case law analytics are scheduled to be added to Lexis Advance and Lexis Profiler over the coming months. In addition, they are working on an expert witness enhancement providing analytics on expert witness challenge history.

The market has a strong interest in products which streamline expert witness research, so this feature will be welcomed by litigators.

Thomson Reuters is coming to Legal Week in New York with a Watson enabled Data Privacy product to show off at the annual legal technology conference. Today they are announcing the launch of a sophisticated global data privacy product which provides news, regulatory comparison charts, commentary and a Watson Enabled AI product that answers questions.  This is the first legal product to be produced by the Thomson Reuters- IBM Watson collaboration  which was announced In October 2016. Thomson Reuters is buttressing the importance of this product by simultaneously releasing the “Thomson Reuters Survey of Data Privacy Compliance.” According to the survey “data compliance” costs the average U.S. organization $2.1 M/yr.   64% of U.S. survey respondents have faced a privacy enforcement action and 52% report that they are struggling to keep up with privacy regulations. In addition the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation which goes into effect in May 2018 will further complicate the regulatory environment.

The Data Privacy Advisor

The Data Privacy Advisor was designed for data privacy experts at multinational law firms and organizations facing data privacy compliance, incident response and litigation.

Features include:

  • Global statutory and regulatory materials including pending legislation and regulations, data privacy country guides for 80+ jurisdictions, the full GDPR library, and Practical Law know-how content directed to global legal and program management issues. This contact can be browsed or queried with keywords or explored using “ask Watson.” In addition, users can generate jurisdictional comparison charts for specific issues.
  • Ask Watson a Question   IBM Watson-enabled technology that allows users to ask relevant “natural language” questions and receive a full-sentence answer
  • Curated news analysis and content from over 800 date privacy blogs.
  • Related Concepts  a feature designed to help users discover additional insights that otherwise might go unnoticed, also enabled by Watson.

    Ask Watson a Question

The Ask Watson a Question feature was trained by experts to answer thousands of question/answer pairs. “Our first step was to teach Watson the language of law,” said Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice president of Research Development at Thomson Reuters and head of its Center for Cognitive Computing. A combination of attorney editors from the Thomson Reuters Practical Law team and research scientists, taught Watson to understand the nuance of legal concepts from simple definitions, such as “parties” or “organizations,” to data privacy “terms of art.” During the training process, more than 60,000 Q&A pairs generated by Watson were “graded” by privacy professionals as well as Thomson Reuters and IBM Watson experts. This iterative process helped the system learn and provide increasingly refined responses. “Adding the AI capability from Watson to our own in-house AI expertise made a true collaboration between our teams to help Watson understand the law and the context of the questions – not just memorize the questions and answers – so the platform truly helps data privacy professionals find the answers they need,” Al-Kofahi added. Watson has been trained on data privacy issues in 84 jurisdictions. Answers  are accompanied by a confidence rating. The caveat is that many questions don’t have single sentence answers. Answers are accompanied by related concepts for researchers to explore.

Innovation has been our lifeblood for more than 100 years,” said Susan Taylor Martin, president of the Thomson Reuters Legal business. “Data Privacy Advisor is a great example of how we’ve brought together our global content, domain expertise and distinctive technology to meet the needs of legal and compliance professionals.”

The Data Privacy Advisor will be a standalone product for specialists and will be sold in the U.S. U.K. and Canadian markets.

What Questions Can You Ask this Product – Managing Customer Expectations

How is this different from Westlaw Answers?   In 2016 Westlaw  released a  new feature called Westlaw Answers which does not involve any cognitive technology. It was created by human editors at Thomson Reuters who identified common state level “black letter law” question and answer pairs. A natural language inquiry provides an answer statement which  which links to a primary source. Westlaw Answers  Westlaw has provided provided some fairly clear parameters regarding the type of questions appropriate for Westlaw Answers. Westlaw Answers can provide  answers to  state law questions such as identifying  judicially defined terms , statutes of limitations and “black letter” law.

I did not come away from the Data Privacy Advisor demo with a clear understanding of the type of questions the “Ask Watson” feature can handle. Al-Kofahi’s responded that Watson cannot provide answers to complex questions. By implication this means that it can answer simple questions, but what type of simple questions. A word of advice –  I recommend managing customer expectations by providing some clarity around the right kind of questions to ask Watson. But even for complex questions, the product will deliver the most relevant documents.

 

Legal AI is Not a Slam DunkThis should be obvious with the low numbers of AI enabled legal research products on the market. In a prior post “Dear Watson, I have a Question for You!…... I noted the complexity of law which lacks a  taxonomy of  universally defined terms — unlike medicine where the symptoms of a disease do not vary by state or country. In the U, S, each state has it’s own definitions which are defined in statutes, regulations and case law. Now expand that to the world… and you begin to see the brain numbing challenge of legal AI.  It is no mean feat that TR and Watson have developed  a Question and Answer product that has learned the statutes and regulations of 89 jurisdictions — on  slice of law as complex as “data privacy.”

Competition Thomson Reuters is not the first legal publisher to tackle data privacy. They may well have leapfrogged to the top of the heap by being the first to offer a product enhanced with AI. Several months ago Wolters Kluwer released it’s Cybersecurity and & Privacy Law Suite. BloombergBNA Law launched  Bloomberg Law:Privacy and Data Security in 2015. In addition, a number of Amlaw 100 law firms including DLA Piper, Hogan Lovells and Hunton & Williams, have also developed specialized data protection apps.

 

 

 

 

 

Several weeks ago Lex Machina subscribers started seeing analytics from the Delaware Chancery court appear in the platform. It is significant that Lex Machina has entered the state analytics market where there are so few players. It is especially exciting that they have started with one the most important  if not the most important jurisdiction for corporate and contractual disputes. The module covers over 6,000 cases which have been filed since October 26, 2012.Delaware Chancery is the 10th Lex Machina module following patent, trademark,copyright, antitrust, securities, commercial, bankruptcy appellate, products liability and labor.

As with all Lex Machina products this new module offers  insights and trends in case resolutions and findings across  a wide range of controversies arising from constitutional and state law issues. The module  provides insiilluminates the track records of opposing counsel and parties, and accurately chronicles the behaviors and decisions of the court’s judicial officers

 The press release quotes  Karl Harris, president and COO of Lex Machina on the importance of this product: “Senior litigators at major corporations and top national law firms need to understand the nuances of practicing law in this court to offer the best possible legal counsel and support to clients incorporated there. Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics for the Delaware Court of Chancery provides attorneys with data-driven insights to help them create successful litigation strategies in this highly influential jurisdiction.”

 The Challenge of State Court Data. The market is full of products leveraging federal docket data. That has been an easy market to enter because of the centralized federal filing system called Pacer. Not only do most state lack centralized court systems, there are still many states and courts which have no electronic filing system. Add to that the myriad inconsistencies and data mapping problems which could arise from the locally developed systems 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Adding Delaware to the Lex Machina Platform. Fortunately the Delaware Court of Chancery uses a proprietary electronic filing system that includes “taggable” information, such as case title, civil action number, judicial officer, parties, counsel and documents which are the building blocks of analytics systems.  Lex Machina’s Attorney Data Engine and expert legal editors were able to take the Delaware data and run it through the enhancement and clean up process which is used for all the Lex Machina modules. This editorial work includes correcting “errors ranging from simple spelling mistakes to complex data problems; normalizing data on judicial officers, parties, law firms and attorneys; extracting records of law firms and attorneys not found in the basic data; tagging and categorizing cases; annotating case resolutions, damages and rulings; and more.”

Lex Machina also added new features and unique tags such as Field of Law, and Nature of Claim, as well as tags such as case resolutions, damages, and rulings, which are similar to federal modules. Since New York has a unified court system and a robust electronic filing system and rivals Delaware in commercial importance, I wouldn’t be surprised to see on of the vendors in this space offer a New York product in the t

The Market for State Court Analytics Last year respondents to  my reader survey, named state court analtyics  as the feature/product that  readers most wanted someone to develop. In the past few months I have reviewed 2 other products which are entering teh challenging market for state level analytics data. Gavelytics – which is tackling several California state courts and Docket Alarm which was recently acquired by Fastcase is offering federal and selected state analytics. I am happy to see so much activity in an area where there is so much market demand and so few products to fill the need.

Click here for a Delaware Court of Chancery Video Demo.

This week Fastcase announced a new partnership with Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory which will enhance Fastcase subscribers access to treatises, handbooks and other secondary sources.  Wolters Kluwer sold their Loislaw research platform to Fastcase in 2015. It appears that both companies recognize the complimentary nature of each others resources. Fastcase has been bulking up their secondary source content throughout the past year through both alliances and launching their own imprint Full Court Press and hiring seasoned legal publishing executive, Steve Errick in 2017 as Chief Operating Officer.

With the Wolters Kluwer alliance, Fastcase gains more ground in their quest to close the “content gap” and become a serious competitor to Lexis and Westlaw who have dominated the legal research market for the past 30 years.

I would not expect this to  be the last alliance  between Fastcase and Wolters Kluwer. Fastcase still lacks regulatory materials which is one of Wolters Kluwer’s core strengths. And Fastcase has the caselaw archive that Wolters Kluwer lacks.

The Wolters Kluwer/Aspen Books

Fastcase has added more than 125 titles from Wolters Kluwer covering a wide range of legal issues such as bankruptcy, construction law, consumer finance, elder law, employment, family law, health law, litigation, insurance, pension and benefits, real estate, and many more. At this time the Wolters Kluwer collection will be available to Fastcase subscribers in first of 1 to 9 lawyers who choose to add the  WK content. The WK  materials will be fully searchable within Fastcase.

Ed Walters CEO of Fastcase also outlined how this alliance fits into Fastcase’s larger secondary source strategy . “Lawyers trust Fastcase as a powerful way to find the law,Now, with the launch of our publishing arm Full Court Press, our integration of the expert commentary of more than 15,000 legal bloggers in the LexBlog network, and our partnership with Wolters Kluwer, Fastcase will be an essential source for legal news and expert guidance as well. These libraries from Wolters Kluwer are some of the most comprehensive and authoritative in the world, and we couldn’t be more proud to partner with them to share that guidance with our very sophisticated subscribers.”

Fastcase despite their aggressive growth has remained a reasonably priced legal research platform. As they continue to enhance the platform by expanding content and leveraging both alliances and new technology, the threat of disruption and competitor product displacement grows.