Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #22
Agiloft & SpotDraft launch GenAI word plugins, A&O release contract negotiation tool, MDR enter ALSP market, mega raises from RobinAI & Harvey, plus much more!
Happy Friday, Happy New Year, and welcome to the 22nd edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
We’re back with our first edition of 2024 following a little break over Christmas!
Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who supported this newsletter last year. What started as a quick experiment to share interesting topics that resonated with me, highlight the great work of others in the industry, and provide my insights on market developments has quickly spiralled into something a bit more substantial!
We’ve grown to 1300+ readers, including most of the UK's top 50 firms, leading firms & ALSPs globally, legal techs, and a significant representation from corporate legal departments. It’s great to have so many legal tech enthusiasts tuning in.
✨ My particular highlights from last year include:
Teaming up with Alex Herrity of Adidas for our ‘The Top Three’ audio features.
The law firm GenAI deep dive series, which featured key takeaways from excellent chats with Shawn Curran of Travers Smith, Mike Kennedy of Addleshaw Goddard, Dan Hoadley & Amy Conroy of Mishcon de Reya, Joe Cohen of Charles Russell Speechlys, and Ravin Thambapillai of Credal.ai.
Teaming up with Legal Innovators UK as media partner for the excellent conference run by Richard Tromans and Cosmonauts.
The volume of LinkedIn and in-person messages from readers who are enjoying the newsletter. Thank you all! 👏
I hope to continue the roughly fortnightly publishing cadence this year and may continue to experiment with various formats. Let’s see what 2024 brings!
AI News
🚀 Agiloft launches GenAI redline capability to speed up contract negotiation
Delivered within Agiloft’s Contract Assistant for Microsoft Word add-in, the feature targets users performing contract negotiations. It recommends insertions and deletions to better align clauses that are substantially different from a corporate's clause library rather than simply replacing a counterparty’s language. It uses a fine-tuned OpenAI GPT 3.5 model. LINK
✨ SpotDraft’s Gen AI Contract Review Product, VerifAI, Released for General Availability, with Free Trial
VerifAI uses GenAI to check contracts against user-specified guidelines written in plain English and can answer open-ended questions about contracts. The product is incredibly easy to set up, and I was able to download the plugin and get going in minutes! After the free trial, the subscription is $60 a month. LINK
🚀 Allen & Overy rolls out AI contract negotiation tool
The tool, known as ContractMatrix, created in partnership with Microsoft and legal AI start-up Harvey, draws on existing templates for contracts, such as non-disclosure agreements and merger and acquisition terms, to draft new agreements that lawyers can then amend or accept. The tool is being rolled out to clients, with five unnamed clients from banking, pharma, technology, media, and private equity signed up to use the platform. LINK
📃 Generative AI legal industry leaders meeting: New report and calls to action
Back in October, Legal IT Insider’s editor Caroline Hill and DAC Beachcroft’s IT director David Aird led a session with 30 senior IT, knowledge and law firm leaders to discuss their views and approaches to generative AI technology. The report was published in December and outlines the approaches taken by many firms, along with learnings and insights so far. LINK
Raises & Round-up
🎉 Mishcon enters the alternative legal services market with Flex acquisition
London law firm Mishcon de Reya (MDR) has acquired the legal resourcing business Flex Legal. Flex connects businesses needing temporary legal support with a pool of over 6,000 pre-vetted lawyers, trainees, apprentices, and paralegals through an online platform. LINK
💸Robin AI raises $26M to drive expansion in US and APAC
The legal copilot targets in-house teams and is available as a Microsoft Word plugin. They focus on speeding up the drafting and negotiating of contracts, as well as extracting information from across contract repositories. It’s worth noting that they were Anthropic’s launch partners for the release of their Claude LLM, and a free version of the product is available for trial. NEWS LINK & FREE TRIAL👏
💵 Harvey raises $80M Series B from Elad Gil, Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI and Sequoia
This latest round of funding brings their valuation to $715 million, with reported annual recurring revenue of around $10 million. Having quickly landed A&O and PWC as customers, they’ve added several additional law firms, including MacFarlanes in the UK and Cuatrecasas in Spain. LINK
Even with the huge valuation and marquee clients, they have some meaty engineering challenges to solve, as listed on their careers page:
Unsolved product, architectural, and business problems: natural language interfaces, prohibitively expensive evaluation of models, massive marginal costs, versioning / training / segregating models per task / legal system / practice area / client and client’s clients.
📜 InnoLaw Group release 2023 CLM Market Study
The report includes a nice overview of the priority focus areas for in-house legal teams and a breakdown of how automation and AI can impact each stage of the contracting process. LINK
Adjacent Interests
🔍 Perplexity AI raises $74M to take on Google and Microsoft Bing with AI-native search LINK
🎥 AI avatar video generation is getting ever better. HeyGen Launches Near-Instant Avatar Generator, Adds $5.6 Million In Funding. LINK
📸 Camera makers want to watermark human images LINK
🤖 More AI-powered gadgets are hitting the market. See The Rabbit R1 LINK
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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