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
Today LexisNexis is announcing that their soon to be launched AI powered solutions will be integrated into Microsoft 365. The product integrations include– Lexis+®, Lexis ® Connect, Lexis ® Create, and Lexis ® Create Plugin with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Both companies are committed to providing legal professionals with “intelligent, AI-powered tools, enhanced capabilities, and more efficient, guided workflow experiences” inside the suite of Microsoft products where they currently work: Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Teams. Back in May Lexis announced two AI initiatives a commercial preview and the AI Insider Program as well as plans for incorporating generative AI into their product. Lexis announced its commitment to launching GPT enabled solutions with the Microsoft Azure Open AI Service which has already been rolled out to customers via Lexis+.
I recall Lexis as having a long history of integrations with Microsoft products. According to Jeff Pfeifer, LexisNexis Chief Product Officer Canada, UK and USA. “The company began working closely with Microsoft in the 1990s when we acquired the Jurisoft product line. These products were among the first legal market tools that delivered bespoke formatting tools integrated with Word. These solutions later evolved to become Lexis for Microsoft Office and later still, Lexis Create. Lexis Create is our first solution built entirely for the Microsoft 365 platform, a key technology enabler for delivery of generative AI in Word, Outlook and Teams. Our customers can expect integration of generative AI capabilities in Lexis Create in Q3 of this year and in Lexis Connect in Q4.”
Jeff Reihl, CTO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional is quoted in the press release “Microsoft and LexisNexis have a long history of collaboration, and we’re excited about how our Microsoft-integrated products will help improve the lives and work product of legal professionals. Lexis Connect, Create and Copilot truly embody our strategy of creating a fully integrated ecosystem, inserting world-class legal data, content and technologies directly into attorney workflows. To enhance this, we’re incorporating professional-grade generative AI capabilities into our current and future products to elevate legal work and help lawyers be more efficient at their jobs.”
LexisNexis Products Integrated with Microsoft include:
Continue Reading LexisNexis Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot/Generative AI Solutions
Today LexisNexis® Legal & Professional is announcing the launch of InterAction+™, a new cloud-based legal CRM that integrates the workflow around law firm contacts into Outlook and leverages the firms existing Lexis subscriptions to deliver business intelligence into the CRM experience. The new interface add new features, including a modern user experience, cloud infrastructure, and exclusive content from LexisNexis® to help lawyers manage relationships and identify opportunities and at-risk clients.
Integration with Lexis Content. If you have spend the past 3 years building custom API’s to link litigation data with InterAction contacts, you might want to sit down. InterAction+ now offers an “out of the box” solution which will deliver business intelligence insights from their Context analytics tool. Context provides analytics on litigation events involving clients or prospects which provides data on litigation events involving clients or prospects which can be filter and analyze data by firm, practice area, and jurisdiction..Continue Reading Lexis Launches InterAction+ with Outlook and Analytics Integrations, New Dashboard and Security Options
Thomson Reuters’ deal to purchase Casetext has driven the legal tech hype cycle to a fever pitch. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Casetext. I have been an admirer for over a decade. More than once, I have watched them not just beat the market, but redirect the market and invent whole new categories of legal research products. I have spent a lot of time over the past few years musing about innovation, new product categories and market advantage.
When Casetext created the “brief analysis” tool CARA, it was three years before even one of the largest legal information companies launched a brief analyzer and it was four years before all three,; Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and Bloomberg Law, had a brief analyzer on the market.
Note: vLex (Fastcase) launched the Vincent “brief checker” in the international market in 2018., two years after the launch of CARA. The above graphic was focused on the U. S. market.
Similarly, with Compose, Casetext introduced “parallel search” and a new category of concept searching was born. Or as Casetext co-founder Pablo Arredondo likes to exclaim “parallel search freed lawyers from the prison of the keyword.” This time The market responded in less than two years. LexisNexis launched “Fact and issue Finder” which leveraged extractive AI technology built on a highly tailored version of Google’s BERT to present insights to researchers. Westlaw responded with Westlaw Precision built with a large editorial team to help with machine learning. The response time in the market is growing shorter.
Industry Insiders’ Perspectives I have spoken to several legal tech industry insiders and the consensus seems to be that within 6 to 12 months, Thomson Reuters’ competitors Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and vLex (formerly Fastcase) are likely to have developed capabilities which can compete with CoCounsel. No one is starting from scratch. According to Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex, “we already have global AI products in the labs. We don’t release vaporware, but these products are coming no matter who owns Casetext.”Continue Reading Thomson Reuters $650M Bet on Casetext CoCounsel. Did They Buy Market Dominance or Just Time?
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
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%
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
As fall associates settle into the reality of legal practice, I am taking the opportunity to share a variety of research “best practices.” These
rules can be applied across all environments: law firm, corporate, public service and government. New associates are facing the messy reality of needing to harness legal and factual issues that need
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