AI

Subscribe to AI via RSS

Today Thomson Reuters announced the launch of CoCounsel Legal which features both Deep Research and agentic workflows.  I attended a recent press briefing where Raghu Ramanathan, president of Legal Professionals, Laura Clayton McDonnnell, President of Corporate Business Rawia Ashraf,  Head of Product, CoCounsel Transactional and GCO, and Mike Dahn Head of Product Management Westlaw demonstrated a raft of new capabilities that resets the bar for AI enabled legal workflows.

CoCounsel Legal is designed to “help professionals move beyond prompting and start delegating.”  The agentic guided workflows are built TR’s existing AI assistant and enhanced with advanced reasoning models, TR’s deep reservoir of Westlaw and Practical Law legal content and an army of domain experts at TR.  “ CoCounsel Legal is a next-generation AI product that brings together legal research, essential workflow automation, intelligent document search and AI-powered legal assistance within one unified enterprise wide solution.”

At launch Co Counsel Legal offers workflows for transactional, litigation and regulatory analysis. The headliner here is that TR is building a single workflow that allows lawyers to transition seamlessly through an entire project without the interruption launching new applications and products. And the product responds like a an intelligent teammate that an attorney can interact with. The attorney gives assignments and the agent gives feedback, guidance and results.

What Does This Relaunch of CoCounsel Legal Mean for Subscribers?Continue Reading Co Counsel Legal with Agentic AI and Deep Research: Is It a Tool or Is it a Teammate?

Will Generative AI awaken the need for serious focus legal research education?

The introduction of Generative AI to the practice of law has been anything but smooth. First there was the unfortunate case of Mr. Schwartz who used Chat GPT-3 to write a brief complete with hallucinated cases which he submitted to a federal  court in New York. Judge castell of the Southern District of New York noted that the attorneys had “abandoned their responsibilities.” More recently there have been the controversies related to a Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) team study criticizing the quality of the Lexis and WL generative AI products. The study was so roundly criticized that it was revised and reissued. The HAI study’s conclusions regarding the Westlaw Precision AI and Lexis+  AI products requires a nuanced understanding of the HAI benchmarking definitions.  The HAI studies flag a wide range of issues including some which appear to be subjective. Problems noted range from a “true hallucination” to a factual error e.g. name of a judge, to the length of responses. Everyone agrees that legal generative AI products require serious benchmarking studies, but Stanford fumbled the ball.

Selling any new legal technology to law firms is hard. Selling generative AI products to law firms appears to be moving at a glacial pace and this post will explore some of the obstacles to adoption of GAI in legal. There are probably more stakeholders in the mix than I have seen for any prior technology. Most noticeable is the presence of the General Counsel/Ethics Officer who in many firms is waving cautionary flags. Then there are clients who are sending conflicting signals limiting, requiring or banning use of GAI products on their matters.  Add to this stew of ambiguity, the proliferation of judges rules restricting or establishing requirements regarding not only the use of generative AI but AI products in general. (AI is probably in  90% of the products the average lawyer uses including their smartphone).

Why are law firms are holding off generative AI adoption for legal research?

Read the full post on Legal TechHubContinue Reading Generative AI Risk in Legal Research: Is the Fault in the Technology or in Ourselves? Answer is Both

My prior post suggested that librarians are the logical candidates for the emerging role of “Prompt Engineer.” Anthropic which recently released an AI enabled tool called Claude agrees with me and they are searching for a Prompt Engineer/Librarian.

In the job posting, Anthropic describes itself as an “AI safety and research company that’s working…

LegalOn Technologies (“LegalOn”) a leading legal technology company from Japan,  has announced its expansion into the United States and  the appointment of Daniel Lewis as US CEO. Daniel Lewis is well known in the U.S. legal tech community as the co-Founder of Ravel Law (later acquired by LexisNexis). Ravel Law completely reimagined the delivery of caselaw research results and was the first platform to offer Judge’s “Precedential Behavior Analysis.”

According to the press release “LegalOn has built the world’s leading AI contract review solution for in-house teams and law firms. The company has over 3,000  law firm and law department customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent funding. LegalOn was founded in 2017 by two corporate lawyers and the company is backed by leading investors

Nozomu Tsunoda, CEO is quoted in the press release: “We have over 3,000 customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent fundraising, and now we’ve added an experienced executive, Daniel Lewis, to lead our US expansion.”

Daniel Lewis and Nozomu Tsunoda of LegalOn Technologies

Lewis joins LegalOn as US CEO after five years at LexisNexis leading practical guidance businesses serving 100k+ attorneys. He previously founded and led Ravel Law, a legal analytics software company. “One of the biggest challenges that general counsel and in-house teams face is providing timely review on urgent, high-volume contracts like NDAs and purchase agreements,” says Daniel Lewis, US CEO.

I recently interviewed Lewis and JP Biard, the Head of Global Strategy. Lewis  described how the drag and drop feature provides complete contract analysis in  lightning speed. The product provides clause by clause analysis and guidance. Another unique feature is that the product supports “point of view” analysis meaning that it provides guidance based on the position of the party. There are currently over 60 Japanese agreements supported. LegalOn is in the process of building up the U.S. corpus of contracts it will support by using Natural
Continue Reading Daniel Lewis Co-Founder of Ravel Law Joins LegalOn Technologies

One of the most exciting panels at the 2022 ILTA Conference (What is Natural Language Processing and How can I Use It?) showcased dramatic breakthroughs in neural net technology to natural language processing (NLP). Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder / Chief Innovation Officer, Casetext provided an intensely passionate tutorial on the history of AI through the centuries.…

Today Thomson Reuters is announcing the release of a new platform Westlaw Precision which promises to dramatically cut research time and improve the quality of research results. Westlaw Precision will be sold as an upgrade to Westlaw Edge. Westlaw Precision is tackling the gnarly and perennial problem of language ambiguity by doubling down on taxonomy. At launch, Westlaw Precision covers 8 topics (Commercial law, Federal Civil Procedure, Federal Discovery and Evidence, Federal Remedies, Federal Class Actions, Employment, Securities, and Anti-trust.) Fifteen new topics will be released through 2023. Only the most recent 12 years of caselaw in each topic are included in search results.

Westlaw Precision includes 6 new features at launch. Precision Research is the “Star of the show.” The other 5 features offer cite checking or workflow enhancements.

“Our customers tell us difficult legal research can often take more than 10 hours per case,” said Mike Dahn, head of Product Management, Westlaw, Thomson Reuters. “It’s time consuming because they are often looking for something very precise, but traditional
Continue Reading Westlaw Precision Launches With Promise to Cut Lawyer Research Time in Half

There is no question that the most exciting place at AALL is the Exhibit Hall. Connect with old friends, schmooze with vendors, learn about exciting new features and products. 2022 is the first live, post pandemic AALL conference. I am anticipating that a highly energized crowd will be streaming through the exhibit hall. I…

Fastcase  acquisition of Judicata  will bring a new era of innovation and advanced legal reasoning technologies such as, citation analysis, legal analytics and brief analysis to Fastcase 8 and Docket Alarm.

Several years ago I wrote a post  about Judicata, a small California start up which described its mission as “as mapping the legal genome.”   They used their analytics and  citation analysis tool to grade law firm briefs. How that for chutzpah?. Judicata knows how to stretch the legal research and analysis envelope.

Fastcase today announced the acquisition of Judicata technology assets “with the mission of extending Judicata’s California research and analytics tools nationwide in the Fastcase platform.”

Judicata founder, Itai Guriari  worked at Jones Day then at Google working on Google Scholar before founding Judicata in 2012 with Adam Han and Blake Masters. The team spent the last decade building out “industry-leading research analytics and workflow tools for California law.” Chief technology officer Ben Pedrick  and the Judicata team will join Fastcase to scale those solutions nationwide. Gurari  will be VP of Research and Development and lead  Fastcase labs.

I asked Fastcase CEO Ed Walters to provide some insights into the strategy behind this acquisition.  “Judicata has
Continue Reading Fastcase Acquires the Judicata “Legal Genome” – Watch Out For Fastcase 8!

Please take the 2019-2020 Dewey B Strategic Survey here. Review the 2019 highlights below and tell your colleagues about the best and the worst of 2019 in legal publishing and legal tech.

The Highlights 2019 was a relatively quiet launch year in legal technology and publishing.  The year opened with speculation about the impact…

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…