Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #28
Widespread CoPilot Announcements, AI team spin-off, A&O Shearman embrace AI, CLM Market Movements, and much more!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 28th edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
CLOC already feels like a lifetime ago! I like to maintain a balanced view of GenAI’s potential vs current capabilities, but based on what I’m seeing, my excitement levels are ramping up fast.
Apologies once again for a slighter longer edition. I promise it’s worth the read.
If you enjoy the newsletter, please take a moment to share with one colleague that you think may benefit from it too!🙏
🔍 Spot the Legal Techs building for Copilot!
Most large law firms use Microsoft extensively, so Microsoft's AI moves greatly influence the pace at which GenAI is adopted in law. In edition #27, I covered the Law360 survey, which showed that GPT-4 in Bing and Copilot were the most widely adopted GenAI products.
DWF are the latest firm to announce a global Copilot rollout. LINK
Sidenote: You may remember DWF as the law firm taken private by PE firm Inflexion last year. I’ve fond memories working with their wonderful Ventures and Tech teams, and my experience leading their Horizon Scanning activities set the foundations for this newsletter. (Thanks JP, Daniel, Damien and co!)
It’s been widely noted, including by Litera in the last newsletter, that Copilot is not specialised for legal workflows and that additional technology may be needed. This is where Legal Tech vendors come into play.
Microsoft gave a sample of the vendors building for the Copilot ecosystem and legal features heavily. Of the 110+ logos, I count 10%+ being legal tech!
✨ Quiz time: How many Legal Tech vendor logos can you spot?
Sample of vendors announcing Copilot integrations this week:
iManage announces long-anticipated integration with Copilot LINK
Showcasing the power of CoCounsel combined with Microsoft Copilot LINK
NetDocuments Expands Microsoft Integrations, Connecting Microsoft Copilot and More LINK
Seeing so many legal tech vendors embrace Copilot is promising, and I’m curious to see how things will pan out. It’s still very early days, and questions that immediately jump to mind include:
When will these integrations be generally available?
We’ve seen many AI products available in the US far before the rest of the world. Will that also be the case here?
What products will they integrate with? Will it cover Teams, Word, Outlook, Sharepoint and others? (It seems many may focus on Teams initially).
What are the minimum user requirements? Will it be available to on-premise users? Do users need a specific number of licenses?
Will these integrations be charged as an additional add-on?
I’m sure these will be publicised in the coming weeks. Watch this space…
🎙️ Podcast Alert
Legal Tech startups are hard. I'm lucky; I get to advise large legal service providers on the buy side as they look to identify and procure tech for their pressing problems.
Sitting on this side of the table, I see many startups and the logic that drives customer buying decisions. In this podcast episode with Charles Uniman of the 'Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast', I discuss some tips for legal tech startups navigating the choppy waters of large legal service providers.
We cover:
✨ Adoption trends, including the factors promoting (or hindering) legal tech adoption by large law firms.
🎯 Where large law firms are regarding the GenAI “hype cycle”.
💡 My most contrarian view on legal tech.
🥅 The biggest mistakes (“own goals”) that legal tech vendors suffer from.
🌊 The blue ocean spaces in the legal tech competitive landscape.
You can listen to the podcast HERE or search for 'Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast' in any podcast player!
Recommendation: Alongside the podcast, Charlie also runs the Legal Tech Startup focus community. If you’re interested in legal tech startups it’s worth joining: LINK
AI
I use several GenAI products daily for both personal and work tasks. ChatGPT Pro remains one of the most versatile and best-performing. At times, it’s magical.
The recent controversy over one of OpenAI’s voices sounding similar to Scarlett Johansson reminded me that most people still use the basic free version—this voice has been in the app for months, yet it’s only becoming topical now! Now that OpenAI is making the latest models available for free, more people will experience the frontier models’ capabilities.
Most law firms are steering clear of ChatGPT, but some enterprise legal departments have been quicker to adopt:
Moderna and OpenAI partner to accelerate the development of life-saving treatments. LINK
Klarna lawyers drafting contracts with ChatGPT and 9 in 10 staff using AI everyday. LINK
While I’m slightly sceptical about using ChatGPT for contract drafting, I guess it depends on their risk tolerance and definition of what is good enough!
✨ Travers gives green light for AI team to forge breakaway company
Shawn Curran and the Travers Smith AI team were widely regarded as one of the leading law firm AI teams globally. Way back in edition #6 in April 2023 they were making waves with their open-source YCNbot to replace ChatGPT interface.
That team has now spun out of Travers Smith to create Jylo, a standalone legal tech company, with Travers Smith as an investor and customer. Given this team’s track record, it’s a product to watch! LINK
Sidenote: Top AI talent is incredibly hard to retain in law firms. In last year’s UI for AI - Secure AI access for law firms series I interviewed five people from the law firms I thought were doing the most interesting GenAI work. Eight months later, and three of those five have now moved on!
💡 Wilson Sonsini Adds AI-Enabled, Fixed-Fee Commercial Contract Offering
Wilson Sonsini has partnered with Dioptra to introduce an attorney-supervised, AI-enabled commercial contracting offering designed for cloud services companies. The AI review feature is underpinned by a proprietary playbook and is said to achieve an accuracy rate of 92%, significantly supporting the firm's attorneys in the review process. LINK
This announcement gives a glimpse of how legal service providers are seeking to reimagine service delivery through AI. If you’re looking for a healthy debate on the quality of the AI-powered redlines, you’ll find it in the comment section. LINK
🚀 Contract Analysis Company eBrevia Launches Gen AI-Powered DraftPro Months After Co-Founders’ Buyback
I spoke with co-founders Adam Nguyen and Jacob Mundt at CLOC, and it’s particularly interesting to see their excitement for the latest AI advances in this article. LINK
Many are paying close attention to how vendors known for strong machine learning capabilities will adapt GenAI to their products.
💡 Setting a precedent: how A&O Shearman is embracing AI to transform the legal sector
A&O Shearman is one of the few firms that have developed a client-facing SaaS offering with their ContractMatrix product. Many other firms have client-facing products, but these are usually ‘configurations’ of off-the-shelf products such as Contract Express, HighQ, and Bryter rather than involving extensive custom development work. LINK
Two topics jump out at me from this article:
Over 1,000 lawyers are using ContractMatrix, and it’s estimated they save seven hours on each contract review, a productivity gain of 30%! (This seems very high!)
They have overhauled their graduate recruitment process and now ask graduates questions about AI, such as how they would write the prompts if given a certain research task and ‘How do you validate the output and look for errors?’
🌟 Harvey partners with Mistral AI
OpenAI is an investor in Harvey, and they have worked closely together to train models. However, offering additional hosting options is a key driver for this partnership with an open-source model provider. The CEO referenced the ability to deploy on-premise and in secure Azure environments deployments in the announcement. LINK
Sidenote: For large European law firms, sending data to the US often presents a major challenge. I’ve seen tech procurements quickly halted if suitable hosting options aren’t available in Europe. On-premise complicates matters further!
CLM Market Movements
Following the massive raises by many CLM providers in recent years, there has been plenty of market discussion about the likely upcoming need for consolidation.
🤑 DocuSign to acquire contract management vendor Lexion for $165m LINK
Preston Clarke, Co-founder of SimpleDocs + Law Insider, did a great 6min video teardown of the acquisition. LINK
🤝 Icertis and Evisort Announce Partnership LINK
Raises
💡 AI that's licensed to practice law? Here is the deck Superlegal used to raise $5M LINK
💸 Steno launches Transcript Genius in closed beta and raises $46M
Search and document Q&A are increasingly popular AI use cases, and now Steno has launched their ‘Transcipt Genius’ product, using Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, to enable users to do just that for litigation transcripts. The concept search functionality works across multiple transcripts, whilst the Q&A feature currently focuses on a single document. LINK
💶 Leya Secures $10.5m Investment in Seed Funding
The Y-Combinator-backed Swedish startup founded last year already has 70 law firm customers! LINK
💵 Definely raise $7M in funding
I was fortunate to meet Definely in 2020 when they were still in their very early stage. It was immediately clear that they had a capable team solving a real pain point for lawyers reviewing pre-execution documents. Users loved the product, and its adoption was impressive. Seeing them go from strength to strength is no surprise, and they now have 60 employees and 40,000 active users. LINK
Round-up
Reveal Acquires Onna LINK
LegalOS rebrand as Flank LINK
Henchman announce webinar series LINK (You can also find all recordings from previous webinars)
Adjacent Interests
101 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organisations LINK
Owning the Workflow in B2B AI Apps LINK
I’m loving the Voicenotes app. I don’t know which voice-first notes app will win in the long run, but they have a $50 unlimited lifetime use offer, so I thought it was worth a punt. I’m majorly excited about the future of voice<>computer interaction. 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.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it, please take a second to forward this email to a colleague who might also appreciate it.
Have a great Friday!
About me.
I’m the founder of Titans, a legal tech consultancy for leading law firms and new law companies. We help some of the largest legal service providers on their priority GenAI, Legal Tech, and innovation initiatives.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 market analysis Here 👋