Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #25
Pondering GPT-5, PWC Leah partnership, CoCounsel launches in the UK, Draftwise raise, Lexfusion content library, and much more!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 25th edition of Legal Tech Trends!đ
Youâll find this edition is heavily focused on GenAI. Itâs hard to cover much else as it continues to dominate market discussions and remains a top priority for my clients.
Iâm enjoying using LLMs to support NDA review. Reviewing these documents is a chore, so Iâm happy for AI to expedite this tedious task!
đĄFood for Thought
The pace of technological progress is relentless. I do my best to maintain a measured view and squash hype, but despite my best efforts, several recent podcasts gave me serious food for thought. (Podcasts linked below).
Casetext CoCounsel pivoted their whole company after seeing the potential of GPT-4 through their early access to the model, and subsequently sold to Thomson Reuters for $650M.
Similarly, given Harveyâs close relationship with OpenAI, which is an investor in the company, one can reasonably assume they have a large advantage in accessing new OpenAI models. Harvey is currently valued at $715M following its $80M fundraising last December.
At the same time, Sam Altman is quick to downplay GPT-4âs capabilities in his recent interview with Lex Friedman:
âLook at GPT-3. Thatâs unimaginably horrible. I expect the delta between five and four will be the same as between four and three.
I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck looking backwards at them.â
The current models have many limitations, but this is the worst the models are ever going to be. They are continuously improving. Itâs unclear how good they can get or whether weâll reach a plateau shortly, but several questions are worth considering as we ponder the scenarios that could play out:
1) What if the jump in capability from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is similar to what we saw from GPT-3 to GPT-4?
2) What if context windows continue to expand rapidly and someday can have billions of tokens? (Weâve already seen Google Geminiâs 1.5 leap to 1 million).
3) How much cheaper and faster will the models get?
These answers are unknown, but considering the potential market impact if some scenarios unfold, itâs worth considering them seriously.
Early access to dramatically better models has clearly given vendors massive advantages. If youâre building in legal tech, what are you doing to try and secure early GPT-5 access? Could that early access be worth hundreds of millions!? đ¸
Some suspect GPT-5 will be released this summer. LINK
đ§ Podcasts that made me pause for thoughtâŚ
#419 â Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI LINK
AI and the Practice of Law: from CaseText to CoCounsel, with Pablo Arredondo, VP of CoCounsel for Thomson Reuters LINK
AI News
đ PwC launch a consulting service around ContractPodAIâs Gen-AI assistant Leah
Having announced an alliance with ContractPodAI last April, PwC has formalised its use of Leah internally to help deliver client work more efficiently and to help PwC deliver new products and tailored client solutions. LINK
Sidenote: In issue #21 last December I covered Integreonâs selection of Leah.
𼳠CoCounsel Cores launches in UK
In the last edition, I included survey results showing that CoCounsel was the most popular GenAI vendor in the Am Law 100. (With 14 of 41 respondents using the tool).
Following its availability in Australia and Canada last month, the product is now available to UK customers!
Thomson Reuters are also continuing to roll out GenAI features across the product suite, starting with Westlaw and Practical Law for US customers. LINK
đŤ RobinAI brings Anthropicâs latest Claude 3 capabilities to their contract copilot
The competition amongst the top-tier foundation models is heating up, with Anthropic releasing their Claude 3 series of models, which look to compete with GPT-4, earlier this month.
RobinAI, covered in edition #22 for their recent $26M raise, was Anthropicâs legal launch partner, so itâs no surprise to see them now include Claude 3 in their contract copilot product. LINK
You can also view a video of the feature in action here: LINK
⨠Hebbia launch their Matrix feature for document review
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is often touted as the answer to overcome the context window limitations of LLMs, but it has its own challenges. Hebbia first deployed RAG in 2020 and quickly realised that detailed processes are required under the hood to output quality results for user prompts.
Theyâve been hard at work enhancing these processes for their model-agnostic platform. Christian Baker from the team showed me their recently released âMatrixâ feature, enabling users to leverage templates or create their own prompts to query and analyse large document sets.
Having raised $30M from investors like Peter Thiel, they count several top PE firms as customers and have several law firm customers already, so it will be interesting to see their enhanced focus on legal use cases develop. LINK
đ ď¸ Is it worth training your own models? Maybe notâŚ
âBloomberg spent over $10M training a GPT-3.5 class AI on their own financial data last yearâŚonly to find that GPT-4 8k, the AI available to billions of people around the world, and without specialized finance training, beat it on almost all finance tasks!â LINK
Raises & Round-up
đ¸ US contract drafting startup DraftWise has raised a $20 million Series A
The product helps users draft and review contracts faster by directly accessing data from their firmâs document management system in Microsoft Word. Current law firm customers include Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, Gunderson Dettmer, Katten Muchin Rosenman, Womble Bond Dickinson and Mishcon de Reya. LINK
đĄ iManage reveals growth details and partnership plans
The stat that struck me most in this article is that more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies and 80% of the Am Law 100 are customers! LINK
They also reference enhanced integrations with the Microsoft suite, including Copilot. Many will be eager to see how this develops!
Sidenote: I had a vague memory of being surprised by a similar stat, and sure enough, in edition #4 March 2023, I included an article stating that 80% of the Global 100, 77% of the AM Law 100 law firms, and 87% of the top 100 European law firms use iManage. Itâs easy to forget how dominant they are in the DMS category!
âSurvey | Do you need a CLM to manage your contracts?
CLM has been a hot topic for several years, but according to a recent survey from Zuva, there may be far fewer enterprise-wide implementations than you think!
The stat that most jumped out to me from the survey of 80 companies:
Low CLM adoption: 36% use a dedicated CLM system.
Of the 36% that use a dedicated CLM, only 28% use the CLM system throughout the enterprise.
i.e. only 10% of respondents use a CLM throughout the enterprise.
The survey suggests that Document Management Systems are far more common, with 86% of respondents using document management tools for contract storage and management. LINK
đ Lexfusion releases free content library
Iâm a major fan of those who freely contribute to the greater good of the legal tech community. Lexfusion does so in spades through its events and content.
They have now released their content library, which is a curated and tagged feed of interesting source material for their presentations. LINK
âModernize Legal | Survey for Practice Technologists & Innovators
Modernize Legal is a huge field study comprising four related surveys. Each is meant for a distinct stakeholder group with a critical role in the modernisation of legal practice in major firms.
A summary of the findings will be published in Q2 and Q3, and an invite-only webcast with deeper insights will be held for those who participate in the study. Jae Um is involved, so you know the outputs will be top-quality!
A sizeable portion of LegalTechTrends readers work in senior tech roles in large law firms, so if thatâs you, and youâre heavily involved in legal tech procurement in your firm, I recommend you complete the relevant survey here: LINK
More information about the initiative can be found on the Modernize Legal website here: LINK
Adjacent Interests
đ¤ Devin - The fully autonomous AI software engineer. LINK
đ A little guide to building Large Language Models in 2024. LINK
Thatâs 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.
Iâm 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 đ