Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #26
Ivo and Ayora raise, Bloomberg buys Dashboard Legal, Kalexius buy Lexoo, and much more!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 26th edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
The last few weeks of work have been an interesting blend of contrasts: strategy & execution, new tech and old, law firms and legal departments. 70% of my consulting work has focused on GenAI and 30% on document automation, offering a rounded perspective on both emerging AI and decades old technologies!
This month features more travel. First up was an insightful GenAI event hosted by LexFusion in London, and next on the agenda is a move to Amsterdam. Let me know if you’re in the Netherlands over the coming months!🚲
Legal-specific models? What do we mean?
In September, I covered the main levers we can pull to enhance LLM performance. At a very high level, there are four main approaches:
Prompt Engineering.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
Fine-tuning an existing model.
Training a new foundational model.
While there are various options, Prompt engineering and RAG stand out as the most popular approaches, largely due to their ease and cost-effectiveness.
I’ve spoken with vendors and builders across the market; those fine-tuning models are in the small minority. Given the rapid progress of foundational model capabilities, many are concerned that fine-tuning work will quickly become redundant once new and improved foundational models, such as GPT-5, are released.
Those training a foundational model are even rarer in legal, with 273 Ventures’ KL3M models being a notable exception.
However, over the past two weeks, numerous vendors have publicly announced legal-specific models:
1) Harvey - Harvey partners with OpenAI to build a custom-trained model for legal professionals.
2) Luminance - Luminance Raises $40 Million in Funding (They reference “Luminance’s specialist legal Large Language Model (LLM)”)
3) ContractPodAI Leah - ContractPodAi Announces Leah’s Availability On Google Cloud and Introduces Leah’s Legal Models.
The approaches may vary, and definitions for a legal-specific model can be a little blurry. It’s common for marketers to combine ‘fine-tuning an existing model’ and ‘training a new foundational model’ into the same bucket, so it’s worth asking.
At the same time, the specifics of the technical approach are usually less important than the quality of the product’s outputs. Users care more about whether a product solves their problem than the mechanics of what’s under the hood. Of course, there are many additional considerations, such as cost, latency, and copyright. But as a general rule of thumb, it’s good to focus on the problem being solved rather than geeking out on the technical details of development approaches.
It’s worth remembering that Bloomberg spent $10M training a finance-specific model that research suggests may be less capable than GPT-4 on almost all finance tasks!
The race is long, the terrain is changing quickly, and at this point, it’s not clear what approach will be best in the long run.
Raises & Round-up
🤑 Ivo - raise and rebrand
Ivo (formerly Latch) is one of two legal tech products that has consistently appeared in my Instagram ads in recent months! The generative AI-powered contract review solution announced its rebrand, $4.8M in funding, and a set of new features: LINK
AI-generated Playbooks
Issues List generation
Dynamic Checklist review and Redline
AI-powered Comment Bubbles
💵 Ayora secures $1.6M for its AI-powered revenue decision-making platform
The revenue management platform, which counts Mishcon de Reya as a customer, aims to streamline revenue management tasks for lawyers, reducing time spent on non-billable work and optimising revenue for firms. LINK
Revenue management and ‘lock-up’ have been particularly topical in recent months and were called out for special attention in several law firm surveys. I shared the relevant surveys and a primer from Ayora in Edition #20.
💸 Bloomberg buys workflow and collaboration tool Dashboard Legal
This product is an interesting addition to Bloomberg Law’s portfolio of tools, including Bloomberg Law research and its contract solutions (its product for storing, searching, drafting, and negotiating contracts). LINK
Sidenote - I’m a enthusiastic about workflow/project managemet tools and keen on their broader application in legal. Coming from a product delivery background, these tools, such as Jira, have always been essential for coordinating teams. Whilst HighQ is popular amongst big law firms, there is still huge opportunity for improving the management of legal work.
🚀 Charles Russell Speechlys unveils Advanced Client Solutions team, including 10 new F/T roles
Joe Cohen, former head of Innovation at Dentons, and now Director of Innovation at Charles Russell Speechlys, spearheads the new team’s formation. The ambitions to create custom client-facing digital products are particularly interesting. LINK
💸 Online legal marketplace Lexoo acquired by ALSP Kalexius LINK
🔍 Litera Launches GenAI Deal ‘Insight Engine’ – Foundation Dragon LINK
Adjacent Interests
🧠 Neuralink: Musk's firm says first brain-chip patient plays online chess LINK
📃 Future Today Institute 2024 Tech Trends Report (979 slides!) LINK
📝 Build an AI-Augmented Word Processor 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.
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