By Aebra Coe, originally published by Law360.
The world of legal technology is quickly evolving, with new products aimed at aiding lawyers coming to market in rapid succession.
The world of legal technology is quickly evolving, with new products aimed at aiding lawyers coming to market in rapid succession.
In recent days, developments in the legal tech world include the launch of a new ligation tool that makes use of IBM Watson, the completion of a $10.5 million fundraising round for legal technology startup Atrium LTS, and the acquisition of artificial intelligence provider Ravel Law by LexisNexis.
Here, Law360 rounds up the biggest news in legal tech.
BYU Law Launches LawX
Brigham Young University Law School on Tuesday unveiled the launch of LawX, a legal design lab aimed at creating technologies and other products to address the need for access to legal services.
The lab’s corresponding law school course will debut in the fall for second- and third-year BYU Law students. The course will be an immersive, hands-on experience for law students in collaboration with students and professors in other departments at BYU, with the goal of solving one legal challenge a semester.
The first LawX project — slated for fall 2017 — will focus on helping self-represented defendants answer a lawsuit. The project will be directed at everyday people who do not understand how to respond to a lawsuit and might not have the resources to hire an attorney, BYU Law School said.
“LawX will tackle some of the most challenging issues facing our legal system today,” said Gordon Smith, dean of BYU Law School. “Some gaps in legal services may not be attractive targets for innovation by small, private startups or larger profit-oriented businesses, but closing these gaps would make a tremendous difference to many people who feel priced out of the market for legal services.”
Jackson Lewis Offers Data Breach Service
Jackson Lewis PC has entered into a strategic alliance with data breach risk management provider Merchants Information Solutions Inc. through which Merchants customers can engage cybersecurity experts and breach coaches at Jackson Lewis to provide legal counsel in the event of a data incident, Merchants said Tuesday.
Merchants’ product SmartIDentity for Business, through which the Jackson Lewis service will be offered, helps customers mitigate legal and financial risks after a data breach through pre-breach planning, a post-breach response, and help responding to state and federal breach notification laws.
“We are excited about the opportunity to work with Merchants and its many subscribers as these small to mid-sized businesses are increasingly targeted by hackers. Our cybersecurity attorneys will be able to immediately step in and efficiently guide SmartIDentity for Business members through the incident response process,” said Joseph J. Lazzarotti, leader of Jackson Lewis’ privacy, e-communication and data security practice.
Atrium Wraps Up $10 Million Legal Tech Funding Round
On Tuesday, legal technology startup Atrium LTS confirmed it raised $10.5 million in a recent fundraising round. The news, first reported by TechCrunch last week, comes as Justin.tv founder and Y Combinator alum Justin Kan’s Atrium LTS is looking to launch in the legal technology space.
Kan told TechCrunch that the company’s products will be aimed at making “repeatable processes” in corporate legal work more efficient. The fundraising round was led by General Catalyst and included 100 institutional and angel investors who contributed.
“The companies around us promise customers innovation and efficiency. The law firms that serve them ought to promise the same. My founding team is ready to break down the barriers that have been keeping this $96 billion industry from adopting innovations in business and technology,” Kan says on the Atrium website. “We want to build the legal technology of the future to automate repetitive, low-value work and allow firms to deliver speed, transparency and cost certainty to their clients.”
Litigation Automated Using Watson
Los Angeles-based LegalMation launched a new technology platform Monday that automates tasks involved in the early stages of litigation by using the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson. LegalMation debuted its application at the Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s Global TEC Forum in San Francisco.
After uploading a complaint, LegalMation generates a draft answer, draft set of requests for production, form interrogatories and special interrogatories in as little as two minutes, the company said.
“Watson’s strength is in its ability to read like a human and understand and categorize information within context. LegalMation’s expert team of litigators and software engineers have ‘trained’ Watson and layered it with proprietary software to produce usable and quality first drafts in a fraction of the time, with increased accuracy and reliability. This is novel for the Watson ecosystem,” said Neil Sahota, IBM Watson worldwide business development leader and member of the LegalMation board of directors.
Legal Tech Partners With Legal Aid
On June 15, legal technology company One Legal revealed an extended partnership with Bay Area Legal
Aid, adding a revenue-sharing element to One Legal’s ongoing donation of technology to the organization, launched in response to steep budget cuts proposed in the current draft of the federal budget for 2018.
Headquartered in Oakland, California, and serving seven Bay Area counties, Bay Area Legal Aid, called BayLegal, may be faced with losing up to one-fourth of its total funding in the coming year, according to the organization. Through its Give Back program, One Legal is providing no-cost access to its legal services and products to BayLegal and will invite law firm customers to enroll in a program in which 5 percent of the net revenue arising from their use of the One Legal platform is donated directly to BayLegal.
“We have both an opportunity and a responsibility,” One Legal President Robert DeFilippis said. “Our organization is well aligned with BayLegal’s mission and I believe many of our law firm customers are as well. We’re just connecting the dots with our Give Back program.”
UK Law Firm Invests in Blockchain
U.K.-based international law firm Gowling WLG is among the founding private-sector members of the Blockchain Research Institute — a multimillion-dollar Toronto-based blockchain research initiative — and is the first law firm to get involved in the process, the firm said June 8.
Led by Don and Alex Tapscott, the BRI’s team is exploring the impact of blockchain on a number of sectors — including financial services, manufacturing, energy and technology — and is investigating how blockchain will change the way companies are managed, the law firm said.
In addition to Gowling WLG, other founding private sector and financial industry members of the BRI include International Business Machines Corp., Accenture PLC, Liberty Global PLC, Nasdaq Inc., TMX Group Ltd. and Thomson Reuters Corp. Founding public sector members include the government of Canada, the government of Ontario, and the city of Toronto.
“Gowling WLG is honoured to be the first international law firm to support BRI’s landmark initiative. It’s exciting to be included among an illustrious group of partners who are investigating the strategic application of blockchain technology,” said Peter Lukasiewicz, CEO of Gowling WLG Canada.
LexisNexis Acquires Ravel Law
LexisNexis Legal & Professional has agreed to acquire Ravel Law, a venture-backed legal research and analytics firm that has developed artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies that enable attorneys to quickly and efficiently mine and glean insight from court documents, the companies said June 8.
The financials of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is part of a push from LexisNexis to bolster the technology offerings that power its core legal research solutions, according to a statement. Ravel Law’s AI, machine-learning and natural language processing technologies allow attorneys to sort through case opinions and other court documents to identify patterns and trends, including how judges and courts make decisions.
“We have a clear vision focused on supporting data-driven lawyers and enabling better insights and better decisions,” explained Jeff Pfeifer, vice president of product management at North American Legal Research Solutions at LexisNexis.