BlackBoiler, a company whose AI-driven contract review software automatically reviews and redlines contract drafts using Microsoft Word’s Track Changes, is today releasing a new feature, ContextAI, that enhances the markup by showing the user the reason for every redline.

Last year, I reported on BlackBoiler’s launch of Playbook Builder, a feature that helps companies automate the creation of contract playbooks, eliminating the need for extensive training of BlackBoiler’s AI.

This new ContextAI feature builds on those playbooks to show users not only its suggested redlines, but also why it suggested those redlines in conformance with the playbook.

Now, when BlackBoiler makes a change to a contract draft, it shows the playbook rules that prompted the change and provides examples from the playbook of how others in the user’s organization have edited the same or similar language in the past.

Learn more about BlackBoiler in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

In a demonstration yesterday, Daniel Broderick, co-founder and CEO of BlackBoiler, said that, by giving a reason for every edit BlackBoiler makes, they are removing the black box from the AI.

“Users want to know what’s inside the black box,” he said. “This is a major step forward that will allow lawyers and negotiators to understand why the AI has made the changes it has and enable them to have confidence in how this technology is powering their deals.”

The way it works is simple. When reviewing a contract draft in BlackBoiler, a left-hand panel shows the list of playbook rules. A flag icon next to a rule indicates that there is potentially the need for an edit that the user should review. A green icon indicates that BlackBoiler applied the rule and made the edit to the contract.

Click to open any rule, and BlackBoiler takes you to that point in the contract, where you can see the redlines it made within the document. In the left panel, you see a description of the rule plus the actual example of how your organization has edited similar text in the past. This example is the training sentence that BlackBoiler used to make the edit. It also shows the degree of similarity between the prior and current text.

BlackBoiler also allows the user to scroll through other similar revisions from the past that were not used in this edit.

If BlackBoiler fails to find language in the contract that is semantically similar to a rule in your playbook, it will insert your language in its entirety. To do this, it analyzes the document to find the appropriate location to insert the language, based on where that language has been inserted in previous contracts, and it shows you a context rating for its certainty of the location in which it made the insertion.

You could add a rule to the playbook on the fly, while you’re reviewing a document, then re-upload the contract, and the edit for that rule will be added.

Broderick believes that two factors are important to getting lawyers to adopt AI. One is control — that lawyers want to have control over what the AI is doing. Playbook Builder addresses that factor, putting lawyers in control of the rules applied to their contracts.

The other factor, he said, is explainability. That is what ContextAI addresses — explaining to the lawyer why BlackBoiler did what it did.

Broderick also believes that this new feature can help drive onboarding to BlackBoiler by offering explanations for what it does.

He describes the scenario of an attorney who questions an edit made by BlackBoiler, saying, “We’ve never made this edit before.” Now, with ContextAI, the attorney can see that, in fact, someone in that attorney’s organization made that edit just last week. it last week

Another scenario is when a newer lawyer is reviewing a contract. “If you just throw an edited document at them, they don’t know why the edits were made,” Broderick says. “This helps them get up to speed more quickly.”

BlackBoiler says it customer roster includes AmLaw 25 law firms and organizations within the Fortune 1000, including several customers in the construction industry. The company holds 11 patents in the U.S. and is currently pursuing additional IP protection in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

The legal research company vLex and the American Bar Association are today announcing a partnership to offer access to a collection of more than 60 titles from the ABA’s Antitrust Law Section on vLex’s AI-powered research platform.

The collection of competition and consumer protection content covers essential areas of antitrust law such as monopolization, intellectual property, consumer protection, mergers and acquisitions, and more.

The materials in the collection were all published by the ABA’s Antitrust Law Section, one of the world’s largest antitrust and consumer protection professional membership groups.

Access to the collection on vLex is available for both ABA members and non-members, with special pricing agreements in place for members.

The announcement is being made at the Antitrust Law Section’s spring meeting in Washington, D.C.

vLex said that the collection will be integrated with and powered by its natural language processing contextual search tools, driven by vLex’s AI-powered legal research assistant, Vincent.

“Vincent can search across the entire body of ABA Antitrust expert coverage and analysis to deliver related and relevant results, uncovering insights and answers in a matter of seconds, while also ensuring no important arguments or documents are missed,” vLex says.

The collection will be enriched with extensive hyperlinks to relevant case law on vLex, allowing users to easily navigate between primary and secondary law. Metadata constructed with expert insight from the ABA Antitrust Law Section will enhance text discoverability and research results, vLex says.

“We are delighted to host this exciting material from one of the world’s most established and authoritative publishers,” said Lluis Faus, CEO of vLex. “Working in close collaboration with the American Bar Association is another key step in vLex’s vision to make legal information more accessible in the United States and beyond.”

Exclusive: How It Works Video

Ahead of today’s release, I had the opportunity to get a preview of the new antitrust library as part of our continuing series of product demonstrations, How It Works.

For the demonstration, I was joined by Tom Atkinson, head of business for North America at vLex, and Robin Chesterman, global head of product at vLex, for a walk-through of the antitrust library and the Vincent legal research assistant.

Watch the video here.

About How It Works

How It Works is a sponsored video series that lets you see how legal technology products work. Each episode features a hands-on demonstration, presented by the product’s developer and moderated by me.

See other episodes here or read this introduction.

To feature your product in How It Works, contact us here.

Wait, are there now two legal AI companies named Harvey? And how is it they both involve a Winston? And why did one disappear overnight? It’s a legal tech mystery.

Last November, a GPT-powered legal AI startup called Harvey came out of stealth mode, revealing it had raised $5 million in funding led by the startup fund of OpenAI, the developer of GPT. Since then, Harvey has seen some major wins, including being deployed firmwide by Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms, and then being adopted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, for its 4,000 legal professionals.

Needless to say, all of this made for exciting times for Harvey’s two founders, Winston Weinberg, formerly an associate at law firm O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind and a machine learning engineer at Meta AI. 

Given this, I was surprised yesterday to learn of another Harvey legal product, also describing itself as an AI lawyer. Even stranger, the page title and the metadata description described the page not as AI lawyer Harvey, but as AI lawyer Winston — the very name of one of the other Harvey’s founders.

This second Harvey touted that it is “your personal AI lawyer” and that Harvey has “read every law book there is, scored in the top 10% of lawyers on the Bar, and knows the answer to any legal question you have.”

It also compared itself to the cost of a traditional lawyer, indicating it could be used in every state and would deliver 24/7 results.

To further deepen the mystery, last night I emailed the second Harvey’s CEO to ask if I could speak to him about the site. He has not responded as of yet, however, as of this morning, the site has now disappeared, and the URL is pointing to the website-building platform Wix, with the message, “Looks like this domain isn’t connected to a website yet.”

Just to confirm that this was not a spin-off of the first Harvey, I emailed the founders. They confirmed that they have nothing to do with this second Harvey.

I learned of this second Harvey after its CEO sent an email addressed to owners of small businesses in the Portland, Ore., area. The email identified the sender as Lance Bricca, CEO of Harvey, and said he also runs a Portland-based small business. The email went on to say:

“My brother and I built an AI lawyer to help our own business, but after seeing how much money it saved us writing contracts, reviewing legal docs, and answering any law question we’d normally have to pay a lawyer to answer, we decided we wanted to share it with other small businesses in Portland.

“Our website is meet-harvey.com. Let me know what you think! (Also, there’s a 7 day trial so there’s no risk to you to try it out).”

On LinkedIn, Lance Ricca is listed as the Austin, Tex., based CEO of a company called Orion. (The email I described above came from an email address showing the domain “send-orioninc.com.”) A December 2022 news release identifies Ricca and his brother as the founders of a company called Atlas, described as a men’s mental health startup, but whose URL leads to a newsletter about increasing happiness using neuroscience.

A version of the site revealed through metadata had its name as Winston, not Harvey.

He also received a FINRA Series 7 securities license in 2022 and was affiliated with a micro-investing company called MicroVentures.

The now-disappeared website explained that Harvey worked via email.

“Email Harvey any legal question or contract you want written; he’ll be able to do it,” it said. “Harvey emails you back in minutes with an answer backed by the whole internet. It’s that simple.”

The site was offering a seven-day free trial, after which the cost would be $100 per month. As of now, the site’s payment page on Stripe is still up.

The site also said that the product had been used by “top decision makers” at the companies Superhuman, Robinhood, Uber, Grin and Airbnb. All of these companies are also listed in the MicroVentures website as part of the company’s portfolio.

If anyone knows anything more about this company or its here-yesterday, gone-today website, please let me know.

Do you want to help transform justice across state, local, territorial and tribal courts? Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy is seeking applicants for an 11-month Judicial Innovation Fellowship (JIF) in which fellows will take the lead on a technical, data or design project aimed at improving a court’s capacity and access to justice.

The deadline to apply is April 7.

As the JIF website explains:

“Our goals are to build capacity in courts, train cross-sector leaders—who can understand the challenges of government and technology — and improve the transparency, equity, and efficiency of justice in America. More than just a job with a competitive salary and benefits, we are creating the flagship opportunity for technology leaders to change the way people access their rights and are served by courts in the United States.”

This is a unique opportunity to play a hands-on role in reshaping the justice system. The fellowships will run from September 2023 to August 2024. They will pay a salary of $85,000 to $100,000 plus benefits and moving expenses.

The JIF website has detailed information, including descriptions of projects, the application questions, a slide deck explaining the fellowship and application process, and an FAQ. There is also the recording of an earlier webinar for potential applicants.

This week marked the annual Legalweek show in New York, one of the world’s largest and most prominent legal technology conferences. Although COVID kept me from attending, it is not keeping me from covering the news coming out of the show.

Previously, I posted part one of my roundup of Legalweek news, featuring news from Reveal-Brainspace, Casepoint, DISCO, ContractPodAi, Haystack ID and the newly launched Repario. Now here is part two.

Everlaw Announces Visual Intelligence and Automation Updates

The ediscovery and litigation company Everlaw unveiled three new features at Legalweek: Communication Visualizer, Video Depositions and Cloud Connectors for Zoom. Everlaw said that the features “deliver unprecedented visual intelligence and automation to help legal teams quickly find hidden stories and context in the growing bodies of digital evidence.”

• 

  Everlaw’s Communication Visualizer is designed to uncover hidden relationships between people often concealed in big data sets.

  The Communication Visualizer is designed to uncover hidden relationships in conversations that may be concealed in large data sets, in order to identify outliers and patterns. Small circles – or nodes – represent key players. Larger nodes indicate higher volumes of correspondence, and the size of the line between any two nodes shows how often people email each other, Everlaw says. Interactivity allows teams to instantly isolate specific communications between individuals, dig further into the communication, refine date ranges, specific email accounts and even view the specific documents.

• The Video Depositions tool allows legal teams to analyze video depositions alongside the corresponding synced transcript. It integrates with Everlaw’s Storybuilder tool so that, as legal teams build a case in Storybuilder by citing testimony, the corresponding snipped of video is directly available. The Video Depositions tool also allows users to edit video snippets, automatically create video snippets when they highlight transcripts, search for and jump to keywords, and collaborate with others.
• The new Cloud Connectors automate the ingestion of data and video from Zoom and nine other popular enterprise applications and data sources, including Slack, Google Vault and Microsoft 365.

Read more about Everlaw on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Read about Storybuilder by Everlaw on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Read more from Everlaw.

Evisort’s New AI Capability Analyzes Up to 450K Contracts Per Day

The CLM platform Evisort announced at Legalweek announced new AI-driven contract processing with advanced OCR ingesting that it says represents “a massive leap in capacity,” capable of ingesting and analyzing up to 450,000 contracts per day, an advance that it says will help organizations build contract repositories in mere days instead of months.

Learn more about Evisort on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Evisort says that key highlights of this next-generation AI contract processing include:

• Overcoming common OCR challenges, such as deciphering handwriting, blurry text, tables, headers, footers and watermarks.
• Recognizing multilingual handwriting and typed text, including non-Latin characters, providing enterprises with a clearer view of their global operations.
• Utilizing generative AI capabilities to assist users in drafting, redlining, and negotiating contracts based on existing AI contract data and large language models.

“With these AI enhancements, Evisort’s solution empowers enterprise customers to develop a more accurate lens into their worldwide operations, including regional offices, via connected contract data,” the company says.

Read more from Evisort.

New Integrations from LawPay, CASEpeer and MyCase

New integrations were announced from LawPay, CASEpeer and MyCase, all of which are owned by Affinipay, the parent company of LawPay, which acquired CASEpeer as part of its acquisition of MyCase last year.

With LawPay having recently announced a new product tier, LawLawPay Pro, that enhances the standard LawPay electronic payments platform with the addition of legal billing features, LawPay has now also announced a partnership with QuickBooks Online. The integration allows small and medium-sized legal firms to automatically upload LawPay transaction data to QuickBooks Online.

Learn more about LawPay on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Yesterday at Legalweek, CASEpeer announced a new integration with Milestones, a product that automatically sends clients custom text messages to notify them of updates in their cases.

“The CASEpeer and Milestones integration unfolds an opportunity to intensify its platform to meet the needs of all personal injury firms and beyond,” Dru Armstrong, CEO of AffiniPay, said in an announcement. “The combination of services between CASEpeer and Milestones Software will strengthen its proactive communication, client satisfaction, and transparency.”

Learn more about CASEpeer on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Learn more about Milestones on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

MyCase said it continues to add integrations into its platform, with the most recent being the beta release of its integration with Zapier. MyCase said that this integration provides its customers with the flexibility to customize MyCase to meet their firm’s specific needs. Using this integration, MyCase customers can automate workflows, reduce costs, and increase efficiency, it said.

Other integrations already released this year include Proof, Infotrack, and version 2 of Kenect, and two additional integrations are planned for release in April, LegalBoards and EsquireTek.

Learn more about MyCase on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

[Disclosure: My son is a MyCase employee.]

Hanzo Announces Spotlight+, Offering AI-Powered Data Enrichment Tools

Hanzo, a company whose products help enterprise legal, governance and compliance teams manage collaboration and web-based data, announced the launch of Spotlight+,  a new add-on data intelligence layer in Hanzo Illuminate, Hanzo’s intelligent e-discovery collection and culling solution.

Hanzo says that Spotlight+ is a data-intelligence layer that helps users visualize data, offering large enterprises the scalability necessary to manage early case assessment of collaboration data efficiently. Its AI-powered data enhancement automates the detection of PII, toxicity, unwanted behaviors, and more.

Customers can filter using facets to pinpoint sensitive information and discover specific classifications during early case assessment for rapid insights into the data before export and outside counsel review. By providing quick and accurate messages and file intelligence of collected content, enterprise legal teams have the information necessary to support internal investigations or e-discovery matters, Hanzo says.

“It’s not uncommon for large organizations to have to make sense of thousands of channels and millions of messages,” said Dave Ruel, VP of product at Hanzo. “We’re embedding AI in Illuminate and adding categorization libraries that can rapidly analyze massive repositories of data, documents, and other artifacts, which will help enterprises more easily discover, classify, and protect sensitive data stored within cloud applications such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace and more.”

Learn more about Hanzo on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

LexCheck Announces Partnerships with LinkSquares and LegalEase

LexCheck, a company whose platform provides AI-powered contract review and negotiation, announced two partnerships this week, one with contract management company LinkSquares and the other with LegalEase Solutions, which provides contract review services. 

LexCheck and LinkSquares say their partnership will “increase deal velocity” by helping businesses accelerate the contract lifecycle process from creation to renewal.

“When sales and legal partner, they can reduce friction, allowing contracts to be turned quicker and deals to close faster,” said Gary Sangha, CEO of LexCheck. “By partnering together, our platforms are becoming more powerful, and can help to drive both companies’ missions forward.”

“LexCheck is a great partnership that can add to the work we’re already doing to elevate the status of legal teams to drive better business outcomes,” said Vishal Sunak, CEO of LinkSquares.

With regard to the LegalEase partnership, the companies said it will integrate LexCheck’s contract review and negotiation technology into LegalEase’s contract review services.

“In doing so, the companies will create a seamless hybrid contract review offering that combines the best of artificial and human intelligence to generate accurate redlines and feedback in an accelerated manner for non-disclosure agreements, vendor contracts and more,” the companies said in a press release.

Learn more about LexCheck on the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.

Learn more about LinkSquares on the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.

Logikcull Unveils ChatGPT Integration

The e-discovery company Logikcull unveiled several new features, including Logikbot AI, a tool that uses ChatGPT to let users command various actions on documents.

Logikcull said that Logikbot AI puts ChatGPT on the command line on the document viewer, where a user can command various kinds of actions on a document, such as “find the smoking gun,” “summarize this document,” “translate into english,” or “create a timeline.”

Learn more about Logikcull on the LawNext Legal Tech Directory.

Three other new features the company introduced are:

• Suggested Tags, an active learning AI that will suggest to a user what tags they should apply to a document based on the tagging of other similar documents.
• Automations, an AI automation engine that allows users to program Logikcull’s AI routines.
• Global Redactions, allowing redactions across large document sets.

You can watch the full video of Logikcull’s launch event, with other announcements and demos, at this link.

This week brought the annual Legalweek show to New York, one of the world’s largest and most prominent legal technology conferences. Traditionally a place where major legal tech companies announce new products and features, this year was no different, save for slew of GPT-related announcements. As has been the case for several years, e-discovery and contract-management companies dominated the news coming out of Legalweek.

Here is part one of a two-part roundup of legal tech news announced this week. See also my posts this week about the expansion of Law.com Radar and about two surveys from LexisNexis on generative AI and litigation analytics.

E-Discovery Company Reveal Acquires LIGL for Legal Holds and Evidence Collection

The e-discovery company Reveal revealed at Legalweek that it had acquired LIGL, a company that provides a cloud-based “evidence lifecycle management” platform for managing the evidence-collection process in litigation and investigations, including legal holds, data preservation and data collection.

Reveal said that the acquisition of LIGL will allow it to integrate LIGL’s legal hold, evidence collection management and e-discovery workflow automation technology directly into the Reveal platform, translating to greater simplicity and efficiency for users.

“With an aligned mission to remove complexity and barriers from the eDiscovery process, the integration of LIGL onto the Reveal 11 platform is a win-win for our collective teams and the clients that will benefit from our technology stack,” said Wendell Jisa, Reveal’s founder and CEO.

Casepoint Enhances Its Legal Hold Capabilities

And speaking of legal holds, the e-discovery company Casepoint said that it has released an upgrade to its legal hold product that will “substantially streamline and accelerate the legal hold process across roles and departments.” It said the upgrade includes many new customer-driven features that address the increasing requirements of both corporate and government users for litigation, investigations, and compliance.

“The new version includes improvements in almost all aspects of the software including user interface, templates, acknowledgments, approvals, and communications with external and internal parties,” said Vishal Rajpara, Casepoint’s chief technology officer. “This version is easier to use, exponentially faster, and more efficient.”

Rajpara said that nearly 70% of the features in this new module were developed in response to requests from corporate and government customers. By enhancing its speed and reducing the numbers of clicks required, the new capabilities enable corporate and government clients “to accelerate their time to insight by up to 83% and reduce discovery-related costs by up to 57%,” Casepoint said.

“This latest upgrade allows users to save time by tracking responses and viewing reports in one secure solution, reduce risk by collecting data directly without the need for individual usernames or passwords, and provide configurable hold-notice acknowledgment reminders,” Casepoint said.

Learn more about Casepoint in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

DISCO Teases AI Chatbot ‘Cecilia’

The discovery company DISCO said it will soon release DISCO Cecilia, an AI chatbot that is designed to enable lawyers to find evidence more quickly and easily.

According to DISCO, Cecilia is designed to allow lawyers to ask questions and receive answers with specific citations to supporting evidence in large-scale, private DISCO e-discovery databases. Unlike chatbots that answer based on only public data sources or the Internet, DISCO Cecilia is designed to cite evidence drawn from the user’s private documents contained in databases within DISCO — databases that can contain up to tens of millions of documents.

Learn more about DISCO in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

DISCO says this will shortcut the traditional discovery process, which typically involves asking a question about the evidence, crafting searches to identify documents related to that question, reviewing the documents to find evidence, and then answering the question based on the evidence.

With DISCO Cecilia, the lawyer can simply ask the ultimate question and get an AI-generated direct answer, with citations to supporting evidence, without the steps of crafting a search and reviewing documents.

DISCO said that Cecilia should be commercially available in 2023, following a planned phased introduction to DISCO customers.

Read more from DISCO.

ContractPodAi Introduces AI Services Hub ‘Leah’

Not to be outdone by DISCO’s Cecilia, ContractPodAi introduced Leah, an AI services hub that the company says “represents a generational shift in the way CLM is delivered.” According to the company, Leah offers five key features, all powered by ChatGPT:

• Leah One Drop, enabling users to create contract records with one simple drag-and-drop or upload step. Leah automatically detects and analyzes the contract file, creating records without any manual intervention.
• Leah Insights, providing vendor and customer visual insights using predictive analytics to accelerate negotiations based on historic data with customers and suppliers into previously negotiated contracts dashboard.
• Leah Assist, guiding customers to review, redline and negotiate contracts based on historic data analytics, precedents, playbooks, and use of generative AI technology to predict the best terms and conditions.
• Ask Leah, helping users search through thousands of contracts for insights or simply interact with a single contract via an interactive chatbot powered by ChatGPT, with real-time queries in relation to the contracts with smart prompts and guidance.
• Leah Deepsights, elevating critical contract data across all major business functions and drives improvements and better ROI across the enterprise contracting function based on benchmarking metrics from the cohort of customers across the ContractPodAi platform.

Learn more about ContractPodAi in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Read more from ContractPodAI.

HaystackID’s Next-Gen Review Incorporates AI into Project Staffing

The e-discovery services company HaystackID said that it has launched the next generation of its global managed review services powered by new artificial intelligence and staffing marketplace capabilities.

These new features include:

• ReviewRight Match AI, which HaystackID says is an advanced document reviewer ranking and selection technology powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
• ReviewRight Staff, a global document reviewer marketplace that matches certified candidates’ qualifications and performance with specific staffing needs.

The company said that these products build on its more than 12 years of review data, including millions of review hours and tens of millions of coded documents.

“ReviewRight Match AI’s proprietary learning algorithm leverages the latest AI technology to evaluate over 25,000 tested, qualified, certified, and continuously graded candidates from around the world,” the company said. “Additionally, ReviewRight Staff provides a comprehensive document reviewer selection program that ensures the best quality of candidates for clients.”

Learn more about HaystackID in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

Four E-Discovery Service Providers Join to Form Repario

Officially making its debut this week was Rrepario, an e-discovery and digital forensics company created through the integration of four e-discovery service providers, Teris, Modus, Elijah, and Meta-e. Each of the four bring a unique skillset “that is highly accretive to the others and together will deliver all services across the litigation and investigation lifecycles,” an announcement said.

“This merger unites some of the industry’s most prestigious thought and service leaders, creating a powerhouse team that can provide unparalleled, end-to-end e-discovery solutions,” said Dave Deppe, CEO of Repario. “Our mission is to deliver what everyone wants but few truly have: a happy team and satisfied clients.”

Repario says its professionals have the expertise and knowledge to handle every aspect of e-discovery, from data collection and processing to document review and production. The company says it will use the latest technology and tools to ensure that all data is processed quickly and accurately, while employing state-of-the-art security measures to protect sensitive information.

In addition to technical expertise, Repario says it offers consulting services to help clients develop and implement effective e-discovery strategies.

For more information, read the company’s announcement or visit its website.

Way back in 2018, as an increasing number of legal technology companies were launching litigation analytics products, I wrote about the trend in a post on Above the Law, where I posited that it could someday be malpractice for a lawyer not to use analytics.

Now, a survey out today from Lex Machina, one of the original legal analytics companies, concludes that using analytics have become “table stakes” for litigation.

The survey finds that seven out of 10 legal professionals use legal analytics in their day-to-day work, and that 79% believe that the use of legal analytics is required by or expected by their clients.

“The survey results show that legal analytics is an essential, necessary component of effective litigation practice and business development,” said Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina, which is owned by LexisNexis. “It’s heavily expected by clients, and it has demonstrated great value to users in both litigation and business strategy. It’s no surprise that two-thirds of respondents indicated they want to integrate legal analytics directly into their workflow.”

The survey of 400 legal professionals, which included both Lex Machina customers and non-customers, found:

• Usage is widespread, with nearly seven out of 10 legal professionals using analytics day to day.
• Users find value, with 99% of users saying they find legal analytics to be valuable.
• Non-users perceive value, with 85% of those who do not regularly use analytics saying they believe they are valuable.
• Practice is enhanced, with 66% of users believing that analytics makes them better and more informed lawyers.
• Clients are expecting it, with 79% of users reporting that their clients require or somewhat expect legal analytics.
• There is demand for APIs, with 67% of users wanting to integrate legal analytics with other data within their organizations.

Law firms are using litigation analytics in two primary areas, according to the survey: in the practice of law and in business development and marketing.

On the law practice side, the most common use (79%) is for analyzing litigation data to gain competitive insights on judges, parties and opposing counsel.

Litigators are also using it for case assessment (66%), case strategy (63%), predicting outcomes (48%), and improving briefs or arguments (45%).

On the business side, 75% of respondents said they use analytics when pitching or demonstrating expertise to clients. They also use analytics for competitive intelligence and to price bids and services.

In 2020, ALM, publisher of legal news sites including Law.com, The American Lawyer and New York Law Journal, launched Law.com Radar, a service that delivers custom-tailored news drawn from court dockets, with a unique twist — its news summaries are generated algorithmically, then quickly reviewed by human editors.

It later added transactional news to the mix and then, last year, unveiled Trend Detection, a feature that identifies trends and patterns in the ocean of federal court litigation data, revealing where cases are surging or ebbing as they impact particular practice areas, industries, or even a single client.

Now, in a further expansion, Law.com Radar has added coverage of more than 100 state courts in California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, with plans to quickly add more state courts over the coming weeks and months.

“Our commitment is to be in all 50 states in the next three-to-six months,” Vanessa Blum, senior director of ALM Newsroom Innovation, told me yesterday. This will include manual retrieval of new filings in states where digital coverage is not available, she said.

The coverage includes every trial-level court in Mass., N.J. and N.Y., and key courts in the other states.

Previously, Radar covered only federal courts and the Delaware Court of Chancery.

In addition to adding state courts, Radar is introducing daily case reports by jurisdiction and revamped lawsuit alerts that can be configured around courts, practice areas, topics, industry segments, law firms, parties or free-text searches.

Users can set the frequency of alerts to be notified immediately, hourly, daily or weekly.

The daily case reports provide a round-up of new commercial litigation from any court available in Law.com Radar.

“State court filings are vitally important to the lawyers and law firms that use Law.com Radar and the courts can be challenging to monitor,” Blum said. “Our team is doing the work of collecting just-filed complaints from courthouses across the country and surfacing them with the context that enables users to act quickly on opportunities.”

For the time being, there is no additional charge to access the state court information. An FAQ on Law.com Radar says there will be no charge “until we have reached a critical mass of courts.”

Currently, Radar offers both a free and a paid subscription tier. The free version includes federal litigation updates, headlines from Law.com, the ability to follow practice areas and regions, breaking news notifications, and daily and weekly digest emails.

The premium version, which costs $19.99 a month, adds the ability to link to complaint documents, the state court updates, customizable new-suit alerts, access to the Trend Detection feature, coverage of corporate transactions, and more.

Most stories in Law.com Radar are produced using data processing and what ALM describes as “algorithmic journalism.” Radar converts raw court data into short, easy-to-read summaries using natural language generation technology. Editors then review each summary to ensure accuracy. By combining automation with human review, Radar says, it is able to connect readers with the information they need as quickly as possible.

Related: 

• Coming Soon: AI-Driven, Personalized Legal News from ALM.
• ALM Updates Its Legal Radar ‘Automated Journalism’ Product with New Name, New Content and New Pricing.
• New Beta Feature of Law.com Radar Uses Algorithm to Detect Trends and Surges in Litigation News.

Now in its 10th year in business, Casetext has introduced a series of unique products over the years that have cemented its reputation as a leading innovator in legal technology and AI. Now, at time when seemingly every legal tech developer is rushing to incorporate the GPT artificial intelligence model into their products, Casetext has unveiled CoCounsel, which it calls the world’s first reliable AI legal assistant, and which is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s just-released latest version of its GPT model. 

“GPT-4 leaps past the power of earlier language models,” said Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer for Casetext. “The model’s ability not just to generate text, but to interpret it, heralds nothing short of a new age in the practice of law.”

Not only that, but Casetext played a central role in a study to have GPT-4 take the bar exam. Just two months ago, I had legal scientists Dan Katz and Michael Bommarito on this show to talk about their experiment having GPT-3.5 take the bar exam. Spoiler alert: It failed. With the release of the more powerful GPT-4, Katz and Bommarito collaborated with Casetext to conduct the study again. This time, GPT not only passed all three components of the exam, including the essay portion, but it scored in the top 10th percentile. 

So what does GPT-4 mean for legal professionals? How might it change law practice? To discuss all of this, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the three top executives of Casetext:

• Jake Heller, CEO.
• Laura Safdie, COO & general counsel. 
• Pablo Arredondo, chief innovation officer. 

They discuss what makes CoCounsel different than other AI products in the legal market, how they avoid the problem of “hallucinations,” how products such as CoCounsel may change law practice, and how they can help close the justice gap. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. 

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.
• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

LeanLaw, a company that provides a financial operating system for small and mid-sized law firms, said today it has raised $4 million in a Series A financing round led by FINTOP Capital.

Based in Boise, Id., LeanLaw’s cloud-based product provides IOLTA trust accounting, time and expense tracking, billing, matter management, electronic payments, and reporting.

LeanLaw integrates and synchronizes with QuickBooks Online, which it says makes it an ideal option for small and mid-sized law firms that use QuickBooks Online.

Learn more about LeanLaw in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.

“With cloud-based billing and invoice workflows, law firms will see invoices paid 70% faster with LeanLaw’ streamlined accounting workflows” said Jonathon Fishman, CEO of LeanLaw, in a press release announcing the investment.

“LeanLaw’s greatness comes from understanding the cross section of what we can automate, integrate and what are the data opportunities. FINTOP’s investment will accelerate our ability to deliver product innovation, bringing even more value to our clients.”

The company says it will use the funds “to become a competitive challenger to legacy legal tech and to move forward with its fintech integrations.”

Chris Haley, partner at FINTOP Capital, who will join LeanLaw’s board, said he believes that the next phase of growth in workflow software is going to be the integration of operations and finance.

“At FINTOP, we have witnessed the shift toward embedded financial services and the many benefits it brings to clients,” Haley said. “We look forward to partnering with LeanLaw to help law firms operate smarter and improve their financial performance.”

Few legal professionals are using or planning to use generative AI tools in their legal work, according to a survey conducted March 15-16 and published this week by LexisNexis Legal & Professional.

The survey finds that legal professionals — the survey polled 1,176 U.S. lawyers and 1,239 law students — are generally more aware than the general public of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, with 88% of legal professionals having heard of them compared to 57% of consumers.

But of those legal professionals who are aware of these tools, 81% say they are not currently using them in their legal work. Just 2% of those legal professionals say they are using them daily and 9% say they are using them weekly.

The full survey report has yet to be published but is forthcoming, LexisNexis told me.

(Note: The survey questions discussed below were asked only of respondents who first qualified by indicating they were aware of generative AI tools. The numbers do not include those lawyers who are not aware of these tools.)

Asked if they plan to use generative AI tools in their work, 68% of legal professionals say they have no such plans at this time, while 32% say they are researching and exploring opportunities.

Similarly, asked about the potential impact of generative AI on the practice of law, only 10% saw it as “transformative” and roughly half saw “some impact”:

• Low impact, 9%.
• Some impact, 48%.
• Significant impact, 33%.
• Transformative impact, 10%.

Of the legal professionals who are using generative AI tools, the survey asked how they are using them. The most common way was for researching matters:

• Researching matters, 59%.
• Increasing efficiency, 51%.
• Writing emails, 36%.
• Drafting documents, 35%.
• Understanding new legal concepts, 31%.
• Streamlining work. 29%
• Improving work quality, 28%.
• Document analysis, 22%.
• Conducting due diligence, 12%.
• Other, 6%.
• Developing litigation strategies, 5%.

Across the board, legal professionals express concern with the ethical implications of generative AI on the practice of law. All but 11% have some degree of concerns, while 28% express “significant” concerns and another 6% say they will not use generative AI due to “fundamental” concerns.

Consumers Using AI

The survey also polled 1,765 consumers and asked them about their use of generative AI tools for legal advice or assistance. The information I was provided by LexisNexis does not define who was in this group of consumers.

The survey found that 57% of consumers had heard of generative AI tools and 32% of consumers had used them either personally or professionally.

Of those who had used them, nearly half, 48%, say they had used them for legal advice or assistance. Breaking it down further, the survey found that consumers had used generative AI tools to:

• Research legal topics, 67%.
• Understand legal process/requirements, 64%.
• Find qualified legal professionals, 50%.
• Draft legal documents/contracts, 39%.
• Other, 3%.

Asked the areas of law for which hey would consider using generative AI for legal help, consumers answered:

• General legal advice, 60%.
• Creating a will, 43%.
• Legal requirements for setting up a business, 41%.
• Setting up a rental agreement, 39%.
• Financial power of attorney, 30%.
• Filing a small claims lawsuit, 30%.
• Legal requirements for buying a house, 28%.
• Preparing to sue someone, 20%.
• Filing for divorce, 19%.
• Filing for adoption, 10%.

Client Choice

The survey also asked both lawyers and corporate counsel about expectations around the use of generative AI. Overall, roughly 49% of lawyers agree their clients will expect them to use cutting-edge technology, including generative AI. Even more, 63%, believe clients will expect to be made aware of their lawyers’ use of generative AI, and about 42% say clients should be given the choice about a firm’s use of generative AI.

On the corporate counsel side, 67% say they expect the firms they work with to use cutting-edge technology, including generative AI. Nearly three-quarters (73%) say they expect their firms to make them aware of the use of generative AI. Fifty-eight percent expect firms to give them a choice about the use of generative AI.

Some 16% of corporate counsel affirmatively do not want their firms to use generative AI tools.

The survey encompassed attorneys and legal professionals in firms of all sizes and a range of practice areas, although the majority of respondents were in firms of 50 or fewer attorneys.

Featured photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so bring your green beer and join us live at 3 p.m. ET for Legaltech Week, where our regular group of panelists come together to discuss the top stories of the week in legal tech and innovation.

With Legalweek starting Monday and all our panelists getting deluged with PR pitches, we thought we’d talk about some of our PR pet peeves. We also won’t ignore the 800-pound robot lawyer in the room, as GPT-4 is released and bests 90% of lawyers on the bar exam.

Plenty more on the agenda as well, so join us today at 3 p.m. ET. Attendance is free, but, if you have not already done so, you need to register, which you can do here. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions.

Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:

• Nicole Black, legal technology columnist and legaltech evangelist at MyCase.
• Stephen Embry, publisher, TechLaw Crossroads.
• Caroline Hill, editor in chief, Legal IT Insider.
• Victor Li, assistant managing editor of the ABA Journal.
• Jean O’Grady, publisher of the blog Dewey B Strategic.
• Joe Patrice, editor, Above the Law.
• Stephanie Wilkins, editor-in-chief of ALM’s Legaltech News and the ALM Global Newsroom’s Legal Technology Desk.

Hope you will join us.

In 2018, two years after D. Gordon Smith became dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, he told an audience of law school advisors, “I want BYU to be known as, if not the most innovative law school in the country, then one of the most innovative law schools in the country.” Now, Smith has announced he is stepping down as dean at the end of this semester, after having been the second-longest serving dean in the school’s history.

So how did he do in pursuit of that goal? During his tenure, he drove a number of innovations around innovation and technology, including the launch of LawX, a legal design lab committed to tackling access-to-justice issues with solutions that address pressing legal problems such as debt collection, eviction and asylum. He also served on two Utah Supreme Court task forces that led to the creation of the Utah Sandbox.

Also during his tenure as dean, he more than tripled the amount of scholarships available to students, saw the law school’s national ranking rise from 46th to 23rd, pioneered a law and corpus linguistics program, and launched a global leadership program.

Last week, I was at the school’s Provo, Utah, campus, and I sat down with Smith in his office to reflect on his nearly seven years as dean.

Smith has been on this podcast twice before:

• BYU Law’s Innovative Dean Gordon Smith On His Next Five Years (March 2021).
• BYU Law Dean Gordon Smith on Law School Innovation (March 2019.

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

• Lawmatics, providing legal client intake, law practice CRM, marketing automation, legal billing, document management, and much more, all in one easy-to-use law practice software.

• Legalweek, the one week where thousands of legal professionals gather to network with their peers, dive deeper into their professional development, and gain the tools to get legal business done, presented by ALM and Law.com March 20-23, 2023.

 If you enjoy listening to LawNext, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Remember earlier this year when two legal scholars and scientists had GPT 3.5 take the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam and it failed to pass? Well, the second time’s a charm, as GPT has now passed not only the multiple-choice portion, but also the essay portion, and scored around the top 10% of test takers.

Only this time, it was the just-released GPT-4 taking the exam, the latest AI model from OpenAI that the company says “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”

For this latest test, those two legal scholars and scientists, Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito, collaborated with the legal AI company Casetext, which recently launched the AI legal assistant CoCounsel, which Casetext has now confirmed is powered by GPT-4. 

“GPT-4 leaps past the power of earlier language models,” said Pablo Arredondo, co-founder and chief innovation officer for Casetext. “The model’s ability not just to generate text, but to interpret it, heralds nothing short of a new age in the practice of law.”

In their prior paper, GPT Takes the Bar Exam, Katz and Bommarito described how they had put the GPT version released in late 2022 to the test of the bar exam, only to have it fail to pass any portion.

In a forthcoming paper, they will detail how GPT-4 passed the multiple-choice portion and both components of the written portion, exceeding not only all prior large language models’ scores, but also the average score of real-life bar exam test takers.

The implications of all this, Casetext said in a press release today, “go far beyond passing the bar exam.”

Casetext’s CoCounsel product, as I explained when it launched March 1, performs seven core functions, or “skills”, using GPT-4. Lawyers can use it to search a database, review documents, summarize documents, and review contracts for policy compliance.

They can also use it to extract data from contracts, draft a legal research memo, and prepare for a deposition.

Watch for LawNext interview next week with Casetext about this latest news.

Josef, the Australia-based no-code automation platform for legal professionals, is next week launching the beta version of a new product, Josef Q, that uses advanced AI to transform policies and regulations — such as those pertaining to privacy, data security, HR and procurement — into digital Q&A tools.

For businesses, the tool will allow employees on corporate teams such as legal, compliance, information security, and HR to deliver instant answers about policies and other complex content, Josef says. It potentially has applications elsewhere, including for law firms.

“This is a high-tech knowledge management tool that dramatically reduces the time spent answering FAQs for professionals who should be – and want to be – spending their time on higher value work,” said Tom Dreyfus, CEO and cofounder of Josef.

The company says that Josef Q is powered by Open AI’s “most advanced large language model.” This may mean the next version of GPT, GPT-4, which is rumored to be coming out this week.

Josef will release a free beta version of the tool at the Legalweek conference in New York next week, so that anyone can try it out. You can sign up to join the waitlist on Josef’s website (regardless of whether you plan to attend the conference).

Dreyfus said the company considered it important to launch the tool to the public for free.

“Josef’s mission is to make legal services more accessible, and so it makes perfect sense for us to do the same with our technology,” he said. “… The more open, transparent and collaborative we can be as a community, the better placed we are to change the way legal work is done for the better.”

Josef Q uses OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, with performance enhanced by human-in-the-loop training and moderation. With this approach, the company says, subject matter experts can quickly and efficiently train their tools to provide highly accurate answers about a defined content set, such as privacy, data security, HR and procurement policies.

While compliance professionals are concerned about the ability for tools like GPT 3.5 to deliver accurate results, Josef Q’s curated knowledge base changes the equation, the company says.

I have not yet seen Josef Q, but the company says it can be tailored to the specific needs of each business, in order to provide the right answer to the
right person when they need it.

The tool also creates a paper trail that can be used to track, report on, and prove compliance. And unlike other knowledge management and FAQ tools, which require time, effort, and skill to build manually, Josef Q speeds the process using AI. Users simply upload policies, processes or regulations, train it with a handful of questions, and launch in minutes.

In its press release announcing the launch, Josef quoted Mel Scott, senior legal counsel at Megaport and host of the podcast Counsel, who said that, when he first saw Josef Q, it was an “a-ha moment.”

“Applications are far-reaching and incredibly exciting, Scott said. “In-house teams will be able to synthesize large amounts of information to help them deliver accurate advice back to their business colleagues on virtually any topic. It represents a revolution and it will change the game.”

Colin McCarthy, founder and CEO of Legal Operators, said that rarely has he seen a tool that is so easy to set up and generate the kinds of answers that Josef Q does.

“You can upload a policy, train or untrain questions within minutes, and go live to your company the same day with extraordinary levels of accuracy,” McCarthy said. “The speed of adoption is astounding. These workflow capabilities with AI can be used for in-house, law firms, education, or small practice. This is game changing!”

Last November, Josef raised AU$5.2 million, or approximately $3.5 million in U.S. dollars, on top of a previous raise of $2.5 million in 2021 and a seed round of $1 million in 2019.

Nexl, a no-data-entry CRM platform for lawyers, has raised $4 million in a financing round led by Australian-based B2B venture capital firm EVP with follow-on participation from The Legal Tech Fund, Vulpes and Saniel Ventures.

Nexl said it will use the investment to accelerate the development of its core product, increase acquisition efforts in major markets, and attract industry talent to build out its fast-developing ecosystem for partners and clients alike.

Nexl said its product is in use at more than 100 law firms in 37 countries, including such firms as Eversheds, Wiersholm, Dentons, Bartier Perry, Polsinelli, and Al Tamimi.

Read more about Nexl in the LawNext Legal Technology directory.

Founder and CEO Philipp Thurner

Unlike traditional CRM products, Nexl works by automatically capturing all of a lawyer’s interactions, including emails and meetings, and then passively mapping all relationships and interactions among firm members, prospects, and clients on an ongoing basis.

The company was founded by Philipp Thurner, who previously led innovation at Gilbert and Tobin, a premier Australian corporate law firm. He had the goal of developing a relationship platform that functions in environments where client acquisition activity is passive, unstructured, and entirely relationship dependent.

“Relationships are everything in professional services, yet the management of these relationships usually relies on decentralized and largely disorganized communication and information-sharing practices,” Thurner said. “Management and growth teams within law firms will generally have very little visibility as to the strength of individual client relationships and the context behind each.”

Having launched its platform just 18 months ago, Nexl said that raising money in the toughest investment climate in recent memory is validation of its thesis.

[Editor’s note: This is the introduction to an article published in the free resource directory on the LawNext Legal Technology Directory. It is written by Marc Lauritsen, president of Capstone Practice Systems.]

You probably haven’t heard enough yet about ChatGPT and related developments. Let me bring you up to speed. Just kidding! We’ve been drowning in coverage and commentary about “large language models” (LLMs; not to be confused with master of law degrees). Yes, their capacities are awe-inspiring. No, they don’t portend the end of lawyering as we know it. Yet.

Let’s take a broader view of how AI has become increasingly practical in law. Where are we heading?

Read full article. 

If you are a legal technology author who would like to contribute an article to the resource center, let us know your idea here.

It’s Friday, so it’s time again for Legaltech Week, where our regular group of panelists come together to discuss the top stories of the week in legal tech and innovation. This week, we’ll do a post-mortem on ABA TECHSHOW, and also talk about other legal tech stories in the news this week.

Join us today at 3 ET. Attendance is free, but, if you have not already done so, you need to register, which you can do here. Register once and you are signed up for all future sessions.

Our panelist lineup changes from week to week, but our regulars are:

• Nicole Black, legal technology columnist and legaltech evangelist at MyCase.
• Stephen Embry, publisher, TechLaw Crossroads.
• Caroline Hill, editor in chief, Legal IT Insider.
• Victor Li, assistant managing editor of the ABA Journal.
• Jean O’Grady, publisher of the blog Dewey B Strategic.
• Joe Patrice, editor, Above the Law.
• Stephanie Wilkins, editor-in-chief of ALM’s Legaltech News and the ALM Global Newsroom’s Legal Technology Desk.

Hope you will join us.

As discussed Wednesday in part one of this three-part series, these posts are a collection of reflections on the 10th anniversary of the ReInvent Law Silicon Valley event, held in Mountain View Calif., on March 8, 2013, and what it meant to the authors and to the broader movement for innovation in law. In today’s final installment, we feature contributions from Ed Walters, Joe Kelly and Nicole Nehama Auerbach.

– Dan Lear and Bob Ambrogi, series editors.

(Part 1) (Part 2)

Ed Walters, CEO at Fastcase, Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and at Cornell Law School/Cornell Tech 

Ed Walters is the CEO of Fastcase, a legal intelligence company based in Washington, D.C. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches The Law of Autonomous Vehicles, and at Cornell Law School, where he teaches The Law of Robots, a class about the frontiers of law and technology. He is the author and editor of Data-Driven Law (Taylor & Francis 2018).

It’s not an exaggeration to say that ReInvent Law Silicon Valley was an event that changed everything.

Watching the 2013 presentations about disruption of legal services might not be very shocking, because the format, the presentation, and the topics have become so widely adopted that they seem like they have always been around. 

The idea that law was ripe for disruption has not always been around.

In fact, most of the topics at the conference were controversial, irreverent, and anything but inevitable. The presenters in many rooms would have been considered heretics in 2013. But when they were all collected in the same room at RLSV, it became a Moment.

Similarly, the lineup of speakers may not seem remarkable in 2023, because many of them went on to become quite famous in legal tech circles. But there wasn’t even an established “legal tech” category in 2013, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that Dan Katz and Renee Knake Jefferson were able to collect in one room (and later at ReInvent Law New York) so many people who were mostly unknown to each other, but collectively about to change the way law thought about itself.

Today we take for granted that legal services must be reformed, or they will be disrupted. We take for granted that 15-minute (or 6-minute) talks on stage, recorded on video, and Tweeted in real time for the room and for the world, is just the way conferences run. 

But the leading format in 2013 was hour-long CLE with a single speaker reading, word-for-word, the worst PowerPoint slides ever created, to a room full of people trying not to get distracted from The New York Times crossword.

ReInvent Law was shocking. These were new voices and a new format. I’ll never forget watching, for the first time ever, the audience’s (and the world’s) Tweets on a screen in the auditorium, broadcast live (and occasionally to hilarious results).

The format of legal talks would forever be disrupted. The bar had been raised, the conversation changed overnight. And perhaps most importantly, a band of legal-reform heretics found its tribe. They weren’t alone, but they had just been in the wrong rooms. And soon, they would take those messages everywhere.

It’s easy to take these innovations for granted, but they were anything but inevitable. The whole legal community should be in awe, and grateful to Dan, Renee, and the Kauffman Foundation, for an event of true reinvention.

Joe Kelly, Senior Software Engineer at Xcential Legislative Technologies

Joe Kelly is always up for a good argument or presentation and was a part of the inaugural ReInvent Law class. Always interested in technology, Joe quickly went back to being a software engineer after law school and started developing solutions for Novus Law, Seyfarth Shaw, and Chapman and Cutler. Having worked both on internal law firm apps as well as building tools for lawyers and clients, Joe has gotten to play with a lot of cool tech, including industry NLP tools and a variety of front end and back end technologies. Joe continues to tinker away and can currently be found in Northwest Iowa. 

I was one of the lucky ones that got a headstart with working with Renee Knake and Dan Katz when the ReInvent Law program was started at MSU Law. As a student, I was provided with a lot of opportunities to get involved with the ReInvent program. With a few other people, I got to go to London and  got the opportunity to present at the first ReInvent program in London and got to witness the birth of the T-shaped lawyer. It was just a great opportunity to meet people and to get back in touch with my roots of being a performer.

After London came ReInvent 2013. A bunch of students got the opportunity to present again, I was one of the lucky ones. All of us that were involved were also heavily involved with helping out where we could. We didn’t get to pick any locations but we helped lug equipment, wrangle presenters, and just made sure the event went off without a hitch. It really was a lot of fun and led to a great many connections. It also led to me meeting Ray Bayley and Lois Haubold from Novus and my first job after law school. It was a great opportunity to meet a variety of people, all interested in or concerned with technology, process, and the law.

Sometimes it is sad to realize we’re still having some of the same conversations as we did 10 years ago but it is good to see the progress that has been made so far stop there. Chas Rampenthal’s talk on how LegalZoom was (and still is) delivering legal services at scale via new business models helped put me on my path — one that led me not only to a role with LegalZoom helping to form its ABS law firm in Arizona but also to opportunities that bridge the justice gap for consumers while creating new revenue streams for lawyers.

I consider myself fortunate to have been part of ReInvent Law and deeply appreciate the friendships and professional relationships I can trace back to that day almost 10 years ago. Dan, Renee, Michael and the ReInvent Law crew: Thank you for showing me and the rest of the profession what a community of like-minded, dedicated people can do when they come together. I cannot wait to pay this experience forward. 

Nicole Nehama Auerbach, Vice President, Elevate

Nicole Auerbach has made her mark as an innovator in the legal industry — twice. Nicole began her career and practiced for 15 years at an AmLaw 100 firm in Chicago where she was a partner in the litigation department. In 2008, she co-founded Valorem Law Group, which became nationally known as a pioneer in the alternative fee arrangement movement. In 2018, she cofounded ElevateNext to offer innovative solutions involving the practice of law, alongside global service provider, Elevate. This unique combination blends high-quality legal expertise with people, process and technology to significantly lower legal spend and substantially increase efficiency without compromising outcomes. Nicole sits on the executive leadership team of Elevate and serves as its deputy general counsel. ElevateNext is certified by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council as a woman-owned firm and has been named as one of the Best Law Firms in commercial litigation in 2021, 2022 and 2023 by Best Lawyers.

 Nicole represents clients in federal and state courts and in arbitrations across the country and leads innovation projects for customers in a variety of areas, including subpoena responses, due diligence and streamlining litigation. In 2017, Nicole obtained one of the top 11 verdicts in Illinois. In 2022, Nicole was named one of the “Top 50 Women Lawyers in Illinois” by Super Lawyers. In 2019 she was named a “Notable Gen X Leader in Law” by Crain’s Chicago Business and one of the “Most Influential Women Attorneys in Chicago” by Crain’s Publishing in 2017.

Nicole is a co-founder of the Coalition of Women in Law, which has chapters in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. and reaches thousands of woman lawyers through its programming. Nicole is a certified arbitrator through the American Arbitration Association. She is also a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an advisory board member of Novus Law. She regularly speaks and writes on issues regarding innovation in the legal industry.

 When I was asked to write about my recollections of Reinvent Law Silicon Valley for the 10-year anniversary, I did a double take on the years. Has it really been 10 years since I stood on that stage to talk about bashing the billable clock while doing an “ignite speech” — which, ironically, like the time frame of the billable hour, is a 6-minute endeavor where your slides advance automatically whether you are with them or not? In so many ways it seems like the event was just yesterday, but that is more of a reflection on life, I think. If I had to come up with one word to describe what I recall feeling at the event, it would have to be “exhilaration.” Not only because I was asked to be a part of the event, but also because I had the great fortune of getting to hear all of the other speakers who, in 2013, were espousing things that were in many ways still novel. 

Now, when I look back at the roster of those involved, I marvel about how my path continued to intersect with so many after the event. As background, in 2013, we were halfway through what would be the 10-year lifespan of Valorem Law Group, a firm I co-founded with Patrick Lamb to at least maim the billable hour and practice law differently. In 2018, Pat and I joined forces with Elevate, the global legal service provider, to create its “practicing lawyers” arm.

Dan Katz, co-organizer of the event, and Michael Bommarito, speaker, were not only with Elevate for a while, but I was interim general counsel at Elevate during the transaction that brought them into the fold. Andy Ninh, a law student speaker, is now a colleague of mine at Elevate. Renee Knake, co-organizer, provided an ethics opinion for us when we embarked on our new and novel journey, and it’s one we look back on often. Hon. Ann Aiken, speaker, became a good friend after the event and was kind enough to invite me to speak (not in 6-minute increments, thankfully) at various events for the courts or other organizations in Oregon over the years.  Ray Bayley, speaker, and his co-founder, Lois Haubold, invited me to be a part of the NovusLaw Advisory Board, and Bill Henderson, speaker, was kind enough to include me in certain IFLP events over the years as well.

These are just a few examples, but the bottom line is, even a decade later, I look upon the Reinvent Law event with great fondness, and I salute the organizers and other speakers for their inspiration.

Zuva, the company that spun off from Kira Systems after Kira was acquired by Litera in 2021, is offering a completely free version of its AI-powered contract review technology, which can be used by anyone just by uploading contracts to Zuva’s website.

“Contracts AI is typically pretty expensive,” Noah Waisberg, Zuva’s CEO and cofounder and the original cofounder of Kira, told me. “We’ve had people pay us literally millions of dollars to use a different version of the same tech. This is free.”

There are some limitations over the paid version of the same technology. Document sizes are limited to PDF documents of under 150 pages or 5 MB, and users will not be able to export or copy and paste the results.

Also, only certain types of review are available, including for lease terms, vendor/supplier contract terms, rev/ops terms in customer contracts, finance/ops/privacy terms in customer contracts, M&A diligence terms, credit agreement terms, and employment agreement terms.

“We’re doing it because we think that by exposing people to our technology, there will be some of them who decide to pay us to use different versions of the technology,” Waisberg said.

Waisberg said that Zuva is the best in class for contracts AI and that, by making it easy to ease, he believes some users will see its value and want to integrate it into other systems.

Because it is all browser based, it is extremely easy to use, even for those who have not previously used a contract review platform.

“Users can find contract info without having to learn a new UI, register for a new service, or even give their email,” Waisberg said.

You can access the tool directly from the Zuva home page. No registration is required. If you just want to try it but do not have a contract at hand, Zuva has sample documents you can use.