Courtroom Insight has announced the launch of a comprehensive Lawyer Directory. Courtroom Insight has been aggregating data on professionals (lawyers, arbitrators, judges and experts) as well as a suite of partnership alliances. According to the press release, “this unique, specialized offering expands on Courtroom Insight’s existing model for delivering legal professional insights by aggregating private
LexisNexis
Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)
I have lived through legal technology revolutions before. The conversion of legal research from print to online moved though law firms like slow rolling train. Lexis, the first commercial online legal research product launched in 1970. Many firms did not fully embrace online research and abandon print until the pandemic drove the profession to remote work, nearly 50 years later. Analytics in legal research provided dramatic new insights into the behavior of judges, courts, attorneys and clients. It took less than ten years following the launch of Lex Machina in 2013 for legal analytics to move from esoteric to essential. The promise of, if not the practice with Generative AI swept like a wildfire through the legal information market. When ChatGPT launched it took only five days to reach a million users and by January 2023 (2 months later) it had a 100 million users. Enter the “hype cycle.”
While OpenAi dominated the commercial market, Casetext, which had early access to GTP 4 dominated legal industry news headlines in 2023. Read the full post at Legal Tech HubContinue Reading Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)
Lexis+AI Suite Of Tools Expanded with Lexis Snapshot and Lexis Create
Less than a month ago LexisNexis announced the launch of Lexis+ AI which launched with Conversational search, document drafting, summarization and analysis features. Today they are announcing the availability of two new features designed to speed up workflow and deliver insights from within two very different contexts: CourtLink and Microsoft Word.
Lexis Snapshot
The new Lexis Snapshot will summarize complaints filed in U.S. Federal District Court cases. It uses Generative AI to identify the nature of suit, summarize the complaint, identify parties, harms, and remedies in the complaint. CourtLink subscribers can add Snapshot to their subscription. There are also plans to expand the service to additional product and documents within the “Lexis ecosystem.”
All CourtLink Customer can preview the Snapshot service for free though the end of 2023.
At launch, the Lexis Snapshot service can be added to CourtLink. They also plan to expand the
service to additional products and document types “within the LexisNexis generative AI-enabled legal product ecosystem in future releases.”Continue Reading Lexis+AI Suite Of Tools Expanded with Lexis Snapshot and Lexis Create
AI and the Future of Law Libraries : Opportunity or Armageddon
Once Again We Must Ask –What business are we in?
Over the years when speaking to library and knowledge management audiences, I have often invoked the importance of knowing what business we are in.
,I became a librarian because “I loved books.” Yet on the day when I started my first law library job, a hulking piece of equipment was rolled through the door of the Pace University Law Library. This was an omen, like a comet across the night sky, my career path would pivot in unforeseeable directions. The Lexis DeLuxe research terminal was the size of a washing machine, and it connected to Mead Data Central computers in Ohio via a dial-up modem. This “state of the art” equipment provided access to Ohio statutes and cases. Within 10 years the Lexis and Westlaw WALT terminals would shrink, the World Wide Web would be born and the stacks of books would be compressed into bits of data accessible on everyone’s desktop.
I love the “Black & Decker marketing strategy that recognized that their customers “don’t want a drill they want a half-inch hole in a board.” And librarians who thought lawyers and law firm administrators only needed books became flotsam in a surging tide of technology. Librarians and knowledge managers need to be aligned with what lawyers really need and that they have the unique expertise to deliver: information that gives them a competitive edge, new clients, happy clients, predictive and actionable insights , efficient workflow, and tools that make their lives easier. (Read the full post at Legal Tech Hub)
Seizing the Technology of the DayContinue Reading AI and the Future of Law Libraries : Opportunity or Armageddon
The 2023 Start/Stop Survey: CoCounsel Best New Product, Analytics Segment Shakeout.
As the 2024 budget planning season ramps up, we all look to both internal and external intelligence to support renewal, cancellation and acquisition decisions.
In August many of my readers participated in the annual Start/Stop survey which was open during the month of August 2023. I partnered with Harbor to conduct the survey and present the results On Thursday, September 14, 2023, at the third annual Legal Information + Knowledge Services Conference (LINKS)— a full day of virtual thought leadership conference.
As in the past, this survey was intended to gather feedback on both products and projects which readers started or stopped during the past year or plan to start or stop in the near future. For this years survey I added new questions related to the emergence of generative AI. Thirty-tree organizations participated in the survey (93% were law firms)
Some overall trends – Generative AI trending up. Analytics Market Shaking out.
Generative AI although legal publishers have been embedding and utilizing AI in their products for decades, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has captured the market in a rather feverish way. There are firms out on the bleeding edge, but most are holding back and struggling to create an AI policy and select from the ever expanding galaxy of products. Vendors are plunging ahead with AI offerings.
The most dramatic “shape shifting” market event was Thomson Reuters acquisition of Casetext, less than a year after the launch of WESTLAW Precision. The move was clearly designed to catapult TR over competitors, who are developing muti-modallarge language models based AI products internally.Continue Reading The 2023 Start/Stop Survey: CoCounsel Best New Product, Analytics Segment Shakeout.
Lexis+ AI Launch Promises Secure, “Hallucination Free” Generative AI Solution With Linked Legal Citations
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional has announced that Lexis+ AI™ is now available to U.S. customer’s Given the legal market skittishness about both the security and reliability of Generative AI, (GAI) the Lexis + AI launch meeting for the legal press focused on how Lexis+ AI will deliver encrypted, secure and reliable results. Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, North America and UK, provided the overview an demo.
Reliable research results. Pfeifer explained that the new AI solution is designed to deliver trusted results because the system relies on Lexis authoritative primary and secondary materials combined with Shepard’s citations which provides direct links to supporting authorities for all GAI based answers.
Lexis announced its commercial preview program back in May 2023. This provided a living laboratory where Lexis could get feedback from users across all segments of the legal market (global law firms, corporate legal departments, small law firms, and U.S. courts).
The Lexis+ AI press release asserts that Lexis+ AI answers offer the fastest GAI “answers” solution in the market.” The “conversational dialog” can respond to up to five sequential questions.
Hallucination Free At the time of launch Lexis+ AI is the only legal generative AI solution with citations linked in its responses, “providing trusted legal results backed by verifiable authority.” This minimizes the risk of invented content, or hallucinations, and checks all citations against Shepard’s to ensure citation validation. The solution also offers users the ability to input specific citations to verify accuracy and flag when a citation might be wrong. Customers can give instant feedback within the product to continually improve product performance, content relevance, and overall product accuracy.Continue Reading Lexis+ AI Launch Promises Secure, “Hallucination Free” Generative AI Solution With Linked Legal Citations
Budget Busting, Bundling & Bungling: The Worst Legal Information Mergers & Acquisitions
Legal Tech Mergers continue despite the uncertain economy. The recent acquisitions of Fastcase and Casetext inspired me to “take the temperature” of legal information marketplace. Thomson Reuters acquisition of Casetext for the breathtaking $650M was completed on August 17, 2023
The Survey I gave information professionals the opportunity to provide feedback on legal information mergers…
LexisNexis International Legal Generative AI Survey – In House Counsel Expectations Will Drive Law Firm Adoption
LexisNexis Legal & Regulatory has released the results of its International Legal Generative AI Survey. The survey asked 7,950 lawyers, law students, and consumers across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and France about their overall awareness, its anticipated impact on the practice of law, use of generative AI, and expectations of adoption.
“Our survey confirms what we hear from customers all over the world every day, that they are excited about the potential of generative AI to help improve their productivity, efficiency, and overall business and practice of law,” said Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “Customer-driven innovation is core to the approach we take with product development, and LexisNexis is excited that our Lexis+ AI platform safely and securely provides critical generative AI tools to help legal professionals excel in their jobs.”
It is clear from the survey that relatively few lawyers have used Generative AI and I have to assume that even fewer have used it for their actual legal work. The market has become painfully aware of the “hallucinated cases” that can be generated using open source GPT Chat for legal research. Lexis Nexis will soon launch Lexis+ AI. All of its competitors (Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Wolters Kluwer, vLex) are laser focused on developing or launching Generative AI products that can not only drive efficiency but also address lawyers legitimate concerns regarding the ethics and security of these products.Continue Reading LexisNexis International Legal Generative AI Survey – In House Counsel Expectations Will Drive Law Firm Adoption
Legal Tech Veteran Steve Errick Joins the American Arbitration Association
The American Arbitration Association (AAA®), the global leader in arbitration and mediation services and data analytics, announced that Steve Errick will join their international division, the International Centre for Dispute Resolution® (ICDR®), as Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer.
Steve has been a highly visible presence at legal tech…
Don’t Kill the Golden Goose – Survey on 30 Years of Legal Publishing Mergers
In less than six months, two of the remaining independent and reasonably priced legal research providers Fastcase and Casetext have been acquired or are in the process of being acquired.
Fastcase, which itself had acquired the analytics platform Docket Alarm has been absorbed into vLex, an interesting and innovative European start-up, which has been…