Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #16
Document Automation vs GenAI, Co-pilot release date, Law firm LLM plays, Plus some non-AI news!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 16th edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
It’s been a busy but fun few weeks. Interest in AI remains high as law firms continue to explore and experiment. Naturally, not every issue requires this shiny and costly solution, but seeing such a strong appetite to drive change through technology adoption is promising.
I’m enjoying helping firms distil the hype, understand how the tech compares to existing products in the legal tech landscape, and assess the best approach to deliver value quickly.
✨ See you in London at Legal Geek?
I’m in London next week for the Legal Geek conference. I’m excited to catch up with old friends and meet new faces. Message me on LinkedIn or email me if you’ll be at the conference too and would like to chat.
I'll be presenting one of my favourite product delivery techniques, the pre-mortem, on day two. Swing by the Disco Stage on Thursday at 12:30 to hear some actionable takeaways and see some pretty slides.
🔥GenAI is hot, but do you know Document Automation?
Generative AI dominates the legal tech headlines, but the discussion is gradually moving from broad declarations to the nuances of specific legal processes and zooming in on potential use cases. It’s great that generative AI has ignited such enthusiasm for change, but change can only happen by delving into the details of specific use cases, and the subtleties of the processes firms hope to transform.
In his latest piece titled "What are the specific use cases for generative AI in contract drafting?", Jack Shepherd, Principal Business Consultant at iManage, offers a detailed insight into the intricacies needed to truly understand some processes that generative AI aims to enhance or replace. It's a compelling 32-minute read. LINK
I've drafted a brief sketch highlighting some takeaways from the article to evaluate the potential of GenAI in creating initial drafts. (You'll find my comments, which consider potential areas of impact in green.)
📽️ ILTA: Has GenAI Eliminated the Need for Document Automation Tools?
Catherine Bamford and Matt Basile chat with Jennifer Mendez to address one of the most common questions being asked right now.
Sidenote: Catherine is renowned as one of the world’s foremost Document Automation experts. I’m fortunate to work closely with her on Document Automation projects with BamLegal, her legal tech consultancy.
AI News
📆 Microsoft 365 co-pilot will be available from November 1st
The much-anticipated product will be available for Microsoft 365 customers on certain business and enterprise plans. At $30/month/user, it almost doubles the total subscription price for businesses on some lower-end plans. I’m excited to get my hands on it and see how it compares to competing products focused on specific legal use cases. At the very least, we can expect to see reported adoption of generative AI jump from the sub-15% seen in many recent legal market surveys. LINK
🚀 Simmons & Simmons to create a six-person LLM team led by Drew Winlaw
Simmons & Simmons purchased the Wavelength legal engineering business in 2019, and the firm’s legal tech capabilities are highly regarded, so this is a particularly interesting announcement. LINK
📢 Macfarlanes announces partnership with Harvey
There may be little public information about Harvey, but they’ve landed another client! Other firms using or trialling the technology include Reed Smith, Addleshaw Goddard, Osborne Clarke, and Ashurst. LINK
🔍 Relativity announces aiR, its gen AI review product, plus other AI products
aiR will be released with limited availability by the end of the year, with general availability in the first half of 2024. Interestingly, they view it as supplemental to their existing AI and state the main advantage of aiR over other forms of review is that it does not require training. Review teams can establish context for the AI through the review protocol that the team is already creating. LINK
🍂 ClauseBase’s Generative AI Fall 2023 Update (28 mins)
I previously shared ClauseBase’s excellent article on adding your own data to a large language model. They’ve released a summary of generative AI updates over the past few months, and there have been a lot! This article covers GPT-4, Confidentiality concerns, Regulating LLMs, Copyright lawsuits, Open-source LLMs, training your own LLM and much more! LINK
This observation particularly stood out to me:
English-only: Almost all the open-source LLMs are English-only, with little knowledge of other languages. For example, 89% of the source material used for training Llama 2 consists of English texts, with other major languages making up less than 2% of the training data.
Round-up
📃LegalOn Expands from Contract Review to Drafting with Addition of 100+ Lawyer-Drafted Contract Templates
LegalOn promotes the use of AI for their contract review offering, so in our current Generative AI news cycle, it’s interesting to see this latest drafting offering underpinned by human-created templates. It’s a nice reminder that well-curated templates are more suitable than AI for most drafting use cases. LINK
❌ The challenges of legal vertical SaaS
This is an interesting VC take on why the legal market doesn’t meet their investment criteria. Their reasons include: 1) Many large law firms don’t work with startups, 2) Large established players solidly entrench the core components of the tech stack, and 3) The major players are embracing generative AI. LINK
Sidenote: The article mentions Litera as the foundational technology that large law firms use for document assembly and automation. While Litera tools are widely used for proofreading and document correction, there are other providers that are more favored for document automation.
Media Partnership - Legal Innovators
Featured article: ‘We’re In a New Legal Era’ – Isabel Cervantes, Legal Innovation, Volkswagen LINK
Fundraising & Deals
💵 LawVu raises $15m from Movac
The startup focused on legal operations in the cloud has raised $15 million in investment from tech investor Movac. LINK
💸Darrow raises $35M for an AI that parses public documents for class action lawsuit potential
Darrow processes vast quantities of public documents to identify potential class action lawsuits in data privacy breaches and environmental pollution. 50 law firms currently using the product. LINK
💡Sidenote: Germany holds the record for the highest number of lawsuits per person, with 123.2 lawsuits for every 1,000 individuals! LINK
Adjacent Interests
⚖️ Yet more lawsuits for OpenAI. Authors are not happy that their books are in the training data. LINK
💡Y Combinator S23 batch LINK
✨ Generative AI’s Act Two LINK
🚀 ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak LINK
👮 These Prisoners Are Training AI LINK
Aaand that’s a wrap. To satisfy your curious legal tech mind before the next edition drops, explore LegalTechTrends.com for a searchable feed of legal tech news.
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Have a great Friday!
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