In the oddest of “odd couplings” Casetext which just celebrated their 10th anniversary is being acquired by Thomson Reuters. for more than $650M. Congrats to Casetext Co-Founders Jake Heller, Pablo Arredondo and Laura Safdie.

Here is the press release from Thomson Reuters.

TORONTO, June 26, 2023 –Thomson Reuters Corporation (“Thomson Reuters”) (NYSE / TSX: TRI), a global content and technology company, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Casetext, a California-based provider of technology for legal professionals, for $650 million cash.

The proposed transaction will complement Thomson Reuters existing AI roadmap and builds on its recent initiatives, including a commitment to invest more than $100 million annually on AI capabilities, the development of new generative AI experiences across its product suite, as well as a new plugin with Microsoft and Microsoft 365 Copilot for legal professionals.

Founded in 2013, Casetext uses advanced AI and machine learning to build technology for legal professionals, creating solutions that help them work more efficiently and provide higher-quality representation to more clients. Casetext employs 104 employees, and its customers include more than 10,000 law firms and corporate legal departments. 

Casetext was granted early access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, allowing it to develop solutions with the new technology and refine use cases for legal professionals. Its key products include CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant launched in 2023 and powered by GPT-4 that delivers document review, legal research memos, deposition preparation, and contract analysis in minutes.  

“The acquisition of Casetext is another step in our ‘build, partner and buy’ strategy to bring generative AI solutions to our customers,” said Steve Hasker, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters. “We believe that Casetext will accelerate and expand our market potential for these offerings – revolutionizing the way professionals work, and the work they do.”

“For the last ten years, we have harnessed the power of AI to build products that elevate the practice of law and enable attorneys to serve more people’s legal needs, with the ultimate goal of increasing access to justice,” said Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext. “Joining Thomson Reuters is an incredible opportunity to advance our mission and the field of generative AI solutions exponentially, not only for lawyers but across professions, ensuring this revolutionary technology can benefit as many people as possible.”

Closing of the transaction is subject to specified regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions and is anticipated to occur in the second half of 2023.

Thomson Reuters will hold a conference call to discuss additional details related to the proposed transaction on Tuesday, June 27 at 9:00 AM EDT. A live webcast of the conference call will be available on the Investor Relations section of www.thomsonreuters.com.

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional is  announcing new document analysis tools  for transactional lawyers. space. The feature which is called “Agreement Analysis,” will streamline the manual tasks that accompany researching, negotiating, and finalizing transactional agreements.  The product currently supports M&A transactions, including merger, stock purchase and asset purchase agreements, with more transactions coming in future releases.

Agreement Analysis uses AI to extract and recommend alternate clause language from seven million clauses publicly filed in SEC EDGAR documents, and from Practical Guidance sample clauses, templates and agreements. The feature allows a lawyer to drag and drop their document into the Agreement Analysis tool. The tools focuses on “highly negotiated clauses” and quickly compares and offers alternate language for clauses in their document. Lawyers have direct access to the drafting guidance and insights from  Lexis Practical Guidance and benchmarking data points from their Market Standards tool.

Lexis Nexis Agreement Analysis Dashboard
Continue Reading LexisNexis Adds Extractive AI Deal Analysis Tool to Lexis+

Today ECFX announced that they had raised $7M in funding to expand their court notice management platform. Investors include Growth Street Partners, The Legal Tech Fund. Cove Fund as well as other investors. ECFX was founded in 2019 by attorneys Dan O’Day and Nelson Quintero. Their system is designed to streamline and automate the processing, distribution and internal filing of state and federal ECF notices received by law firms and in -house counsel offices. The system is designed to reduce risk of missed deadlines as well as repetitive administrative work associated with court notices. I routinely harp on the importance of vendors providing ROI tools. ECFX offers a free ROI calculator on their website to help customers and potential customers calculate the potential savings associated with streamlining the court notice workflow.

Here is the full press release:

Continue Reading ECFX Court Alerts Platform Raises $7M

Even lawyers who have been the most ardent print advocates have loosened their grip on their favorite treatises and deskbooks. The pandemic-enforced remote work environment drove most print holdouts to online resources. In 2023 many law firm libraries are completely digital while others have shifted significant amounts of their budgets from print to digital.

Although the large enterprise platforms such as Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg Law represent a significant portion of most budgets, library directors and knowledge managers also manage dozens and sometimes hundreds of other digital licenses. There has been a proliferation of specialty products targeting specific practice areas or workflows from topics as diverse as credit default swaps, social media monitoring, and predictive litigation analytics. The acquisition and management of these specialty products involves a different kind of licensing analysis, even though many issues may be similar to the large platform licensing issues.

If you are new to the world of digital resource licensing, this checklist will highlight some of the key issues to address when reviewing a license. The first thing you need to understand is that most license agreements are one-sided in favor of the vendor. All the liabilities and risks are on the purchaser. That is why it is so important for you to understand the risks and opportunities associated with digital licensing.

The ground rules. If you are new to your organization, there are several issues that should be addressed in advance. Identify the standard practices and procedures in your firm for procurement, contract review, and security review.

Work with your procurement team. If your firm has a procurement team, you should still be involved in the licensing process. The procurement team needs to understand how the product will be used and who will need to have access. If there is no procurement team, there may be a designated contract attorney who reviews the contracts for the law firm. Develop a collaborative relationship with those professionals. They can be important allies in the process.

Security. Determine if your firm has a specific security review process for vendors. Security compliance can be a complete deal killer. Many firms now require vendors to answer security compliance questionnaires and to disclose their security standards in advance of any trial or contract. Security issues should be addressed in advance of the licensing process. Confirm that the vendor is willing to provide security documentation.

Common Licensing Issues. Below are a sampling of licensing issues that should be considered for all types of digital licenses but are particularly important when assessing a niche product with a limited license. Read the full post at LegalTech Hub

Continue Reading Checklist for the Negotiation of Digital Subscriptions – Budget Control and Risk Management Strategies

Today Microsoft and Thomson Reuters are announcing a unique partnership for the integration of Thomson Reuters content including generative AI capabilities into the Microsoft 365 Copilot product. According to the Press Release:

Working with Microsoft, Thomson Reuters has developed a contract drafting solution, powered by its legal products and content, and Copilot for Word. Delivering users with a draft working document and access to trusted content right where work happens – in Microsoft Word, professionals can use their expertise to edit, validate, and build the final document with integrated access to Thomson Reuters knowledge, content, and AI technology.

A demonstration of the integration between Thomson Reuters Legal Drafting, powered by its legal products and content, and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word will be shown during this week’s Microsoft Build event in Seattle. In the demo, Copilot creates a draft contract with help from a Thomson Reuters plugin that surfaces intelligence and content from Westlaw, Practical Law, and Document Intelligence – delivering in minutes work that used to take hours directly into Microsoft Word.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot is reinventing productivity for people and organizations, and we are thrilled to collaborate with Thomson Reuters to extend Copilot with new AI-powered experiences that will support legal professionals by saving them time and helping them drive value for the clients and businesses they serve,” said Andrew Lindsay, Corporate Vice President of Industry, Apps & Data, Business Development at Microsoft.

Watch the demonstration here.

Market Watch: Generative AI has brought both opportunity and uncertainty to the legal research and tech marketplace. Everyone if planting a flag on the LLM ( Large Language Model) mountain. Westlaw’s main competitor LexisNexis has their own integrations with Microsoft products such as Teams, Matter Management and Office. Clearly being integrated into the platform where lawyers draft documents will provide huge opportunities for long term integration and control of legal spending on content.

Today LexisNexis® CounselLink  released its 2022 Annual Trends Report. The unstable economy and a tighter legal market have not caused law firms to pull back on  billing rates. To the contrary law firm partner billing rates rose faster last year than they have in a decade.

The average partner rate increased by 4.5% (compared to 3.4% in 2021 and 3.5% in 2020). Average rate increases were up compared to 2021 in all law firm tiers and practice areas.

“Inflation affected most sectors of the economy in 2022, and legal services were no exception,” said Pam Gelfond, VP and GM of LexisNexis Legal Business Solutions. “We hope our report can help the legal community understand where costs are rising fastest, and we know our tools can help them successfully navigate what’s ahead.”

The CounselLink trends report, now in its tenth year, draws on CounselLink’s extensive database of over $52 billion in legal spending across more than 420,000 timekeepers and more than 1.4 million matters. It provides detailed insights on seven key metrics, including law firm consolidation, alternative fee arrangements, and hourly rates by practice area, firm size, and location.

“This report furthers CounselLink’s mission of providing corporate decision-makers with world-class solutions to inform their legal staffing choices,” Gelfond added.  

The report’s other key findings include:

  • Partners from the largest firms (those with more than 750 lawyers) charged 46% more on average than partners from the next tier of firms (501-750 lawyers). That gap has narrowed from 54% in 2021, primarily because rate increases for partners in the second tier of firms outpaced those of partners in larger firms.
  • The “Largest 50” firms increased market share from 44.8% in 2021 to 47.3% in 2022, with the largest gains coming in Corporate, Regulatory & Compliance, and Real Estate practice areas.
  • High numbers of billers are performing minimal work on any given matter.On average, 37% of lawyers working on a matter will bill fewer than five hours to it.
  • Corporate counsel can mitigate individual attorney rate increases by adjusting staffing mix. For example, even though the median M&A partner rate increased by 6.4% in 2022, the median M&A blended average rate was flat compared to the prior year.

“Corporate legal departments are facing increasing pressure to do more with less. Our latest CounselLink Trends Report provides insights that can be leveraged to negotiate fees, utilize different law firms, and inform staffing decisions,” said Gelfond. “We’re excited to also provide new analysis this year on the number of lawyers billing per matter. The CounselLink benchmarking database is a gold mine, and we continue to look for new ways to harness the information contained in it to help legal departments improve performance.” The full CounselLink Trends report is available for download at https://counsellink.com/trends/

Bloomberg Law has announced the launch of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions,  a new AI enabled contract workflow for In-House Counsel. The product is designed to help lawyers streamline drafting and negotiation with tools for profiling, searching and extracting clauses.  The product was designed in consultation with corporate legal teams.

 Live Virtual Event Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions will be introduced at a live virtual event on Thursday, May 11 at 1:00 p.m. ET, accessible at http://onb-law.com/xYZk50OfKjg.

Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions Features:

  • A secure, centralized repository, including a database of automatically extracted clauses to deliver an organized single source of truth that can be filtered, sorted, and searched across – with little to no data entry.
  • Seamless integration with Microsoft Word, allowing users to access their contract repository and clause library directly from their document, providing a fast and easy starting point for drafting and revising contracts.
  • Advanced analysis tools, accelerating the review of draft agreements and allow users to efficiently identify and incorporate preferred language to ensure favorable terms.
  • AI-powered extraction of key contractual terms, providing greater visibility into final agreements to help identify and flag potential risks and obligations.

Bloomberg Law has previously leveraged AI and machine learning in a variety of workflow solutions including Points of Law  for litigation research and its transactional intelligence tool Draft Analyzer which provides benchmarking and analysis of deal documents.. Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions builds on this pioneering legacy, leveraging proprietary semantic search and natural language processing (NLP) technology to deliver advanced search engine and contract analysis features.

Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions Offers AI Enabled Drafting for In House Counsel -Launch Even May 11th

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, is announcing the launch of Lexis+® AI, a generative AI platform designed to transform legal work. According to the press release “Lexis+ AI is built and trained on the largest repository of accurate and exclusive legal content, leveraging an extensive collection of documents and records to provide customers with trusted, comprehensive legal results with unmatched speed and precision and backed by verifiable, citable authority.”  Lexis is not yet announcing the release of the product to the public. They are offering potential users an opportunity to learn about or participate in in the testing and development of the product. It is anticipated that the product will launch in the fall of 2023 and will be marketed as an “add-on” to Lexis+.

“We’re thrilled to bring this transformative technology to customers,” said Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “The Lexis+ AI platform provides first-of-its-kind tools for lawyers to dramatically improve the speed, quality, and effectiveness of their practice and business.”

New Lexis+ AI Features

The Lexis+ AI technology offers conversational search, summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities.

Conversational search Is yet another step toward simplifying the legal research process. Lexis had previously launched several solutions to simply research including Lexis Answers, Lexis Brief Analyzer and Fact and Issue Finder. “Conversational search simplifies the complex and time-consuming legal research journey, providing a search experience for diverse legal questions with citations, facilitating lawyers’ ability to complete research effectively and efficiently. “

Continue Reading Lexis+ AI Launches with Two Customer Initiatives: Commercial Preview and AI Insider Programs

Early in my career, one of the hallmarks of customer service excellence was the prevalence of periodic “business reviews.”  Business reviews are formal meetings that function as a “checkup” on vendor and contract performance. For several decades these reviews were offered by most large vendors throughout the course of a contract to assess past performance and set goals for the next period. Business reviews should not be thrown together as part of an 11th hour pitch before a renewal.

The best time to set up a schedule of business reviews is at contract signing. If possible, add the schedule of business reviews to the contract itself. Before a contract is signed, a long-term plan should map out a schedule of “how are we doing” meetings on a quarterly by semi-annual or annual basis. The reviews should focus on utilization and training and adoption benchmarks. It should also include updates on changes in content, support. or the vendor’s organization. It should be a “win-win” dialog. Please provide your feedback on Business Reviews at this link

In recent years, my requests for a ‘business review” are most often met with a blank stare. The follow up is a request from the account executive for me to explain “what should be included in a business review?”  My gut reaction is: “why do I need to teach you how do you do your job?” So today I am asking out loud –“Why is the business review no longer a standard part of customer support?” As far as I can tell most large information vendors do not train their staff how to provide a business review, nor do they provide a template for such a review. It appears that when a customer asks for a review, individual account reps have to cobble together their best guess at what should be included in a business review. But the problem does not end there.

Read the full post on Legal TechHub

ALM, the “grand-daddy” of legal reporting and intelligence has launched state court coverage in Law.com Radar. Law.com Radar delivers a clean customizable stream of breaking legal news and competitive insights.

Today’s release includes more than 100 courts in California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas and Maryland. Additional state courts will be introduced over the coming weeks and months, providing Law.com Radar users with new litigation alerts from key jurisdictions across the U.S. Most important of all the news comes with a link tot he full complaint which can be retrieved in” “one click.”

The Radar product provides litigation surveillance in commercially important state courts which are more challenging to monitor than federal courts, since there is no single reporting system for state courts. Radar covers courts that require the manual collection of documents. The Radar alerts include AI generated summaries which speed the accuracy and timeliness of delivery.

The  latest release supplements Law.com Radar’s existing coverage of federal district courts and Delaware’s Court of Chancery as well as its publication of corporate deal updates. Last July ALM released Law.com Rader Trend Detection  capabilities. 

New Alerting Features include daily case reports by jurisdiction. These new litigation  alerts that can be configured around courts, practice areas, topics, industry segments, law firms, parties or free text searches. And contain a link to the full complaint!

Continue Reading ALM Launches New Law.com Radar State Caselaw Surveillance Features