Today vLex and Fastcase, two of the  fastest-growing legal technology companies, announced that they are merging to form the world’s largest  digital law library. The combined company will also have the world’s largest law firm subscriber base and resources containing more than one billion legal documents from more than 100 countries.  Oakley Capital and Bain Capital Credit are investing in the combined business to expand its global reach and accelerate the Fastcase/vLex legal artificial intelligence (AI) lab, which develops AI tools that streamline research, tracking, writing, and filing documents for the legal industry.

Continue Reading vLex and Fastcase Merge to Form World’s Largest Global Law Library (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)

Pre/Dicta has profiled 750 federal judges and built an algorithm that can predict how each judge will rule on a motion to dismiss based on the cause of action, the characteristics of the parties and the attorneys. It runs this prediction based on one piece of data – the docket number!

It does not read the complaint, it does not care about the law, the facts or the defenses. Are you as horrified as I am? The problem is that Dan Rabinowitz built a methodology and an algorithm that was trained on over 50,000 federal motions and is right 85% of the time!

Rabinowitz was given the “Innovator of the Year” Award at ALM’s 2023 Legal Week conference in New York.

Earlier this year Pre/Dicta acquired the data created by the state court analytics pioneer Gavelytics which had gone out of business last year.

The full article is available on LegalTechHub

 Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. One week after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Wolters Kluwer posted a free publicly available resource Due Diligence Checklist .Since March 17th they have added five addition resources to a suite of tools referred to as the Bank Failures Toolkit. The resources are developed for inhouse counsel and their external law firms.. The Bank Failures Toolkit provides a variety of tools including practical guidance, strategies  and checklists to provide guidance if the bank used if the bank used by a business fails. The toolkit is designed to ensure “minimal disruption to a company’s business from the failure of a bank. The toolkit has been integrated into VitalLaw® and VitalLaw® for Corporate Counsel,

The Wolters Kluwer Bank Failures Toolkit includes:

“In light of a recent academic study that indicated there are 186 other banks that could be at risk if uninsured deposit withdrawals cause even small bank runs, it is essential that corporate and outside legal counsel have measures in place to ensure that the transition of accounts from a failed bank to an FDIC-managed successor bank goes as smoothly as possible and to ensure the least amount of disruption to their own client’s business operations,” said John Pachkowski, Senior Legal Analyst at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.

Laura Safdie and Pablo Arredondo Introducing CoCounsel

On Wednesday night, Casetext  continued to celebrate the launch of their Generative AI platform, CoCounsel with a special  “Invitation only” event  during LegalWeek in New York. CoCounsel is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 4 and was the first AI technology to successfully pass a bar exam.

The event included a demo of a new CoCounsel workflow for transactional lawyers called  “Market Check,” a brief keynote by Stephen Gillers, Elihu Root Professor of Law Emeritus at NYU, a lively panel discussion about the legal business impact and ethical challenges of AI.

What is Market check? Pablo Arredondo, CoFounder and Chief Innovation Officer at Casetext introduced a live demo of Market Check. This new workflow uses the CoCounsel generative AI technology to  analyze a corpus of transactional documents and identify the “market standard” for specific clause types. Currently Bloomberg Law and Intelligize both offer “what’s market” analysis on publicly available documents and enable lawyers to compare one or several draft documents with a market standard. Market check could enable a firm to analyze a custom corpus of internal and/or external documents and ask CoCounsel to deliver results in response to “plain English” questions.

Continue Reading Casetext CoCounsel Event – Professor Stephen Gillers Keynote Declares “The end of legal services as we know it.”

Today LexisNexis will be releasing a Generative AI survey at LegalWeek in New York. The survey which was conducted in March 2023 is based on responses from +4,100 US lawyers, law students and consumers.

“We’ve been delivering leading legal AI and analytics tools for some time, providing lawyers with data driven insights that make it easier for them to do their jobs,” said Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal &Professional. “Generative AI and large language models have tremendous potential to transform the way legal work is done. Our R&D labs are continually experimenting and releasing new innovations, and this survey reflects how lawyers, law students, and consumers alike are embracing legal tech in new and exciting ways.”

Top highlights include:

Questions cover overall awareness of generative AI, current use of generative AI tools in daily work, and willingness to adopt generative AI tools for various legal matters. 

Lawyers/law student awareness

  • Awareness was significantly higher within the legal market vs consumers (88% vs. 57%)
  • Half (51%) of lawyers had either already used it in their work or were planning to do so
  • 84% believe generative AI tools will increase the efficiency of lawyers, paralegals, or law clerks
  • 61% of lawyers and 44% of law students also believe generative AI will change law schools and the way law is taught and studied

Consumer awareness

  • 57% of consumers are aware of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT
  • 32% said they have used generative AI, with half of these (15%) stating they had tried using GenAI for legal advice or assistance
  • Those most aware of the tech were wealthy, highly educated males under age 45

  • The top five ways law firms, corporate counsel, and law students are currently or would like to use generative AI tools in their daily work include:
  • • Increasing efficiency (61% of lawyers, 60% of law students)
  • • Researching matters (59% of lawyers, 55% of law students)
  • • Drafting documents (53% of lawyers, 43% of law students)
  • • Streamlining work (46% of lawyers, 40% of law students)
  • • Document analysis (40% of lawyers, 34% of law students)

LexisNexis will be hosting a  Generative AI panel at Legalweek on Monday at 1:30pm, including LexisNexis CTO Jeff Reihl and several other law firm and corporate execs.

Google’s core value statement is encapsulated in “10 things we know to be true.” It includes two rubrics that knowledge managers and librarians should embrace  as driving principles:  “Focus on the user and all else will follow” and “fast is better than slow.” 

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The lingering shadow of cost recovery has impaired the intelligent use of digital resources in many law firms. Long after Lexis and Westlaw switched to flat fee contracts much of their data remains locked in the prison of “cost recovery” even though there are technologies available to unlock targeted content for specific use cases. But the problem doesn’t end there. Even products that have never been associated with chargebacks are locked behind passwords. Passwords are an obstacle to access.

Lawyers forget their passwords, lawyers forget client numbers, lawyers forget what they learned at the last training session… Lack of access reduces ROI. This post will explore how information professionals can take down the barriers and enhance the ROI of the firm’s information resource investments.


“Focus on the user and all else will follow. “

  • No one wants to read a manual.
  • Everything needs to be intuitive.
  • Everyone has information overload.
  • Everyone is multitasking.
  • Everyone sees your solution in their own context based on their role, their prior experience, and their “go to” tools.
  • Passwords are a huge obstacle to optimizing workflow.

(Continue reading on LegalTech Hub)

Legal Tech insiders knew that something big was “cooking” at Casetext. Yesterday Casetext announced the Launch of Co-Counsel, which is described as the first AI Legal Assistant. The launch included some notable media appearances : a live demo on tv and a video interview Product Briefing with Nikki Shaver of Legal TechHub.

In another first, Casetext CoFounders, CEO, Jake Heller, and Chief Product Officer, Pablo Arredondo appeared on Morning Joe on MSNBC and conducted a live demo showing the power of the product. (To my knowledge, this also marks the first time Pablo appeared in public wearing a suit and tie.)

During the live demo, CoCounsel “read” the January 6th report and was asked if Donald Trump can be charged with conspiracy to make a false statement and whether the report contained any information which would exonerate the former President. In a few minutes CoCounsel delivered responses to both questions in well crafted prose. An attorney Greg Sisskind also appeared on the panel to describe how he uses CoCounsel in his immigration practice.

According to the press release , “The co-founders of Casetext saw the potential in this next-generation of generative AI and collaborated with OpenAI to use their latest, most advanced large language model, which can read, write and understand at a postgraduate level in any field, including law. CoCounsel pairs this model with Casetext’s proprietary technology and legal databases, for a first-of-its-kind product that has been developed to address the most important use cases in law.”

Heller also appeared in a more in depth discussion about CoCounsel with Nikki Shaver, the Founder of LegalTechHub .

I want to applaud Heller and Arredondo for positioning the product as an AI enabled Legal Assistant rather than engaging in the “eyeball roll” inducing “robot lawyer” hyperbole. CoCounsel is positioned as a tool that empowers lawyers rather than replacing them.

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, U.S.   has announced a suite of new and enhanced features in Legisway.  their legal management software for in-house counsel . Legisway is  an AI enabled SaaS solution which offers to steamline corporate workflows.

Legisway offers AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) that enables document creation, editing and version control, as well as self-service templates and a legal ticketing system. Outside of CLM, users can leverage a range of modules to manage legal entities and corporate governance, intellectual property rights, legal claims, real estate, outside counsel spend, and more. The solution enables flexibility to easily create and manage custom reports, operationalize business processes and create automated alerts on key milestones, and more.

“Users now have access to a suite of tools to enable more streamlined task management, faster contract drafting, and AI-powered risk management,” said Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “Wolters Kluwer has a strong, longstanding track record of providing best-in-class solutions for the corporate legal market. With these new additions, we are showing our customers that we are committed to continuously improving an already powerful, intuitive solution that evolves with their needs and brings them the best possible outcomes.”

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Enhances AI Enabled Workflows in Legisway for In-House Counsel

Alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) now make up a $20.6 billion segment of the legal market and growth is accelerating dramatically, according to the The Alternative Legal Services Providers 2023 Report is being released today. The report is issued biennially by the Thomson Reuters Institute; the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law; and the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Report: Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSP) at $20 Billion Market Share and Growing

Last week I wrote about the current market landscape for news aggregators. This week I’m providing you with a checklist of features and negotiation issues. 

Aggregation platforms are so varied and law firm priorities are so unique I recommend a formal RFP process. Here is a checklist of features and issues to consider when evaluating aggregation platforms.


Taxonomy. 

For some firms, it will be valuable if the solution comes with it’s own pre-built taxonomy to support tagging. For others who already have their own robust taxonomy, it will be more important for the system to be able to apply the firm’s taxonomy, or a different third-party taxonomy.

What to Ask

Does the platform have a pre-built taxonomy? Does it provide automated tagging? Can it integrate with an internal law firm taxonomy or apply a third-party taxonomy? Can it disambiguate company names? Does it enable searchers to curate alerts by subject, company, name, industry, geography, or other keywords? Does the platform leverage AI or machine learning to apply tags?

Ingestion and management of sources

The sources that are able to be ingested or integrated into the platform are the bread and butter of these solutions. Without the ability to ingest the relevant content for your audience, there’s no point investing.

What to Ask

If the product is owned by a content provider (Lexis/Bloomberg), can they integrate content from other publishers? Can it integrate both premium content and social media content? Can it “de-dupe” i.e. eliminate redundant stories? Can it flag negative stories? Can the platform provide relevancy ranking? Can the platform deliver a full table of contents for a publication, as well as providing custom topic and keyword alerts?

Content delivery

These days alerts can be delivered in different ways and on different schedules. Flexibility in delivery options can help with adoption. 

What to ask

Can RSS, XML, APIs, PDF, URLs, email newsletters tweets and website monitoring, be integrated? Can results be delivered to Slack, Teams or posted into SharePoint pages or mobile apps? Does the provider offer a mobile app?

Timing of alerts 

Can the platform provide real time monitoring and delivery? Can timing be managed at both the user and the alert level?

Formatting

If you’re sending alerts out – within the firm and especially outside of the firm, if you are going to use the platform to send client alerts – it will be important to be able to brand these appropriately.

What to ask

Can the results be branded using a firm template or logo? Can the formatting be customized at the alert level?

Moderation versus automation

Automation is great but it only takes you so far. A solution that allows for careful curation by your knowledge and research teams combined with automated options is more likely to provide the results that your users need.

What to ask

Does the platform allow for custom moderation and curation by a knowledge professional? Does the platform provide automatic updates? Can updates be customized for the individual user preference?

Dashboards

Enabling dashboard views of the content can be a real value-add for both users and administrators. Dashboards allow administrators to use the dashboard to customize and configure alerts, and users to set their own preferences.

What to ask

Does the product offer dashboards for both users and administrators?  How intuitive is it to manage individual subscriptions, topical alerts, and user preferences? Is there a user dashboard where subscribers can manage i.e. add and delete their own alerts and format and delivery preferences? Can users set up their own curated alerts?

Analytics: Trends and Prediction

Analytics are increasingly important for both understanding user behavior and content insights. 

What to ask

Does the platform have an intelligence engine that can provide graphic trends of both news and user activity? Can users interact with data? Does the platform provide sentiment analysis? Does the platform offer any predictive signaling capability? Can users change the predictive parameters to weight certain factors?

Technical 

As with any technology solution, there is no point moving down the path towards implementation unless you know it will work in the firm’s systems environment and meet the firm’s security standards.

What to find out

Can it pass the firm’s security screening? Can it be integrated with the firms HRIS system so that users will be automatically added and deleted as they come and go from the firm?

Licenses. Passwords and IP Authentication 

Does the platform offer features to limit access to only licensed users. Can it integrate with password management tools such as Onelog and Research Monitor?

*Note: a version of this checklist will be available on LTH Premium as the News Aggregator Evaluation Framework.