Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #24
In-house legal AI use cases, Most popular AI vendors, Feature Releases and much more!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 24th edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
A slightly delayed edition but packed full of interesting updates. The content was ready to go last week, but I had a fever, so I thought it best to hold back rather than risk sending something nonsensical out to 1500 readers.
I hope you enjoy it and find it’s worth the wait.
Potential in-house legal AI use cases
The Addleshaw Goddard innovation team maintain their reputation as forward-thinking and all-round nice people as they continue to share their GenAI learnings and insights with the wider legal tech community. 👏
This graphic outlines their thinking on potential AI use cases for in-house teams.
It’s hard to read the text in this compressed image, so you can download the original higher-resolution PDF here:
Webinar | The Augmented Law Firm
Last week Henchman hosted a panel discussion where I joined Katherine Crowley of Womble Bond Dickinson, Andrei Salajan of Schoenherr, and Michiel Denis of Henchman to discuss topics including the risks and benefits of law firms building their own GenAI products, the evolving role of data in legal services, tech adoption challenges, and much more! Given our first-hand experiences with the realities of deploying technology in large law firms, I think we struck a nice balance of optimism coupled with caution. LINK
PS - If you’re short on time you can view the 60mins recording in 30mins if you adjust the playback speed!
News Round-Up
🚀 LegalOn releases generative AI assistant to expedite contract review
The chat interface enables users to ask questions about a document, draft clauses, and summarize contract language. It is available within LegalOn's in-browser contract editing interface, focused on commercial contracts, uses GPT-4, and is free for all LegalOn customers. LINK
✨ 273 Ventures announce KL3M: A model trained on legally permissible data.
The KL3M model family is trained on clean, legally permissible data for enterprise use. The models are designed for use in legal, regulatory, and financial workflows and applications. Larger Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are in development. LINK
🎉 Factor announces ‘Sense Collective’ founding members
Back in edition #21 I covered Factor’s announcement of a year-long innovation and co-learning community aimed at accelerating the adoption of GenAI in legal departments. The founding members have been revealed, and it’s a seriously impressive cohort: Intel, DXC, Microsoft, Adobe, Crowdstrike, Ford, and
Anglo-American. LINK
💬 Adobe add AI-assistant in Acrobat
Many ‘Chat with your PDF’ style startups sprang up over the last few months, and it was only a matter of type before Adobe added their own PDF chat and summarisation feature. To borrow a phrase from Benedict Evans, this is another example of:
Every incumbent tries to make the new thing a feature.
This feature is currently only available in English and for paid versions of the product, although it will be released for the free Adobe Reader version. LINK
📝 Clausebase expands review and draft features for its Word plugin
The Belgian company has been steadily and thoughtfully adding GenAI features to its product for several months and has now announced a larger product expansion. New features include:
1) Clause extraction from drafting history. - Search your drafting history to locate and repurpose clauses.
2) AI-powered document reviewing - Conduct a red flag analysis.
3) Automated definitions and proofreading - Locate issues like broken cross-references and inconsistent definitions. LINK
📃 ScreensAI launch bulk contract review feature
I covered the beautifully designed Screens.ai contract review product and marketplace in the last edition. They’ve now released a neat feature to enable bulk contract analysis. It looks like a well-thought-out delivery. You can see a demo video here LINK
❓ Lexis Nexis survey of 1,225 lawyers and legal support workers in the UK
The survey highlighted several interesting stats and trends, but the one that most jumped out to me was the mismatch in expectations for how GenAI will impact law firm billing practices. LINK
62% of in-house legal teams said they expect law firms to make changes to billing practices as a result of generative AI.
Only 18% of law firms said they expect to make changes to billing practices!
🔍Lexion Launches Stand-Alone Version of ‘AI Contract Assist’
The standalone Microsoft Word plugin has four key features:
1) Review: Check your contracts against predefined rules and playbooks.
2) Ask: Ask questions about your contract.
3) Modify: Generate redline recommendations based on your requests
4) Add: Generate new clauses from scratch
LINK & PRODUCT PAGE
Adjacent Interests
📽️ The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video LINK
🙈 Finance worker pays $25 million after video call with deepfake CFO LINK
✨ The Abundance Agenda - How AI will transform consumer technology 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!
About me.
I’m the founder of Titans, a legal tech and innovation consultancy for leading law firms and new law companies.Legal Tech Trends is my fun outlet to share my hype-free positive take on legal tech market developments, informed by my own industry experiences and insights.
Connect with me on LinkedIn for more Legal Tech and innovation content Here 👋