Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #30
Wins for Harvey, Copilot and Leya. Insurance-backed AI, and much more!
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 30th edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
The market announcements continue to flow at a relentless pace! Hopefully, this edition helps you get up to speed.
There’s a lot here, and your time is precious, so I’ve deliberately made each snippet a little shorter. Enjoy! 🎉
PS - If you’re in Amsterdam on July 17th, make sure to check-out the 3rd instalment of Legal Hops. LINK
📊 Curious Chart - GenAI disappointing Legal the most
Bain released their ‘Four Themes Emerging’ AI survey, and it doesn’t look pretty for legal. Legal respondents were the most disappointed by GenAI use cases so far, and that disappointment is increasing!
My hypothesis:
Expectations in legal are sky-high, fuelled by the media and vendors.
Tolerance for error is low: Most legal work demands high-quality outputs, and a single incorrect word could have a dramatic impact.
Misapplication of GenAI products: Horizontal GenAI products are helpful for many tasks but often unsuitable for legal-specific use cases.
Inflated expectations and excessive vendor product claims are incredibly harmful in the long run. Once lawyers’ trust is lost, it’s hard to regain. This isn’t unique to GenAI; it happens across the legal tech market. However, the study should serve as a reminder of the harms of overhyping a GenAI product’s current capabilities for use cases where it may not be suitable yet.
Caveat: The sample size appears to be 200 respondents. If that 200 is spread across the 15 categories listed, that’s only 13 respondents in each, which is negligible!
AI
🌟 Ashurst launches global Harvey partnership following extensive firmwide trial
Ashurst involved 525 users from 23 offices as they trialled three GenAI products over several months and will now roll Harvey out to 4,000 staff. The other two products in the trial were Microsoft Copilot and Wexler. LINK
Ashurst also kindly shared some great learnings from their GenAI trials: LINK
Sidenote: Harvey fundraising
There were reports of Harvey of looking to raise $600 million at a $2 billion valuation and keen to buy vLex. Now they’re raising $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation and scrapped plans to buy vLex. LINK
🚀 Linklaters places $1.8m bet on Copilot
The product will be available to 6,900 employees, reportedly at $261/employee. In previous editions of this newsletter, we covered Clifford Chance’s and DWF’s global Copilot roll-out. LINK (The Lawyer Paywall)
🌟 Bird & Bird adds Leya to its GenAI toolkit
Bird & Bird became one of the first international law firms to launch a proof-of-concept trial across multiple offices with Leya, a legal GenAI product taking the market by storm. Leya has been adding law firm customers across Europe at a ferocious pace and will soon be announcing an exciting partnership with FromCounsel in the UK. LINK
Having spent my career building digital products across several industries, it takes a lot for a product’s UX to impress me, but the attention to design detail across Leya makes me smile every time I use it!
💡 Orbital Witness to Offer GenAI Accuracy Insurance in Legal Tech World First
The UK-based real estate-specific tech vendor will offer ‘AI Reliance’, an insurance-backed accuracy guarantee for its GenAI product. If an AI error results in a compensation claim, the insurance policy kicks in, so law firms don’t need to claim on their professional indemnity insurance. LINK
Adjacent side thought: Imagine a world where insurance-backed AI legal tech vendors start to displace traditional legal service providers!? AI isn’t 100% accurate, but when combined with a suitable insurance product and sufficient human oversight it’s easy to imagine the potential. Ok, this may be unlikely, but it’s the type of innovation that could truly shake up the industry.
🚀RobinAI launch new DD report product
One of my favourite things about RobinAI is the ease with which you can self-serve to trial the product for free. They have maintained this philosophy for the new AI feature that generates contract analysis word reports. I encourage you to try the new feature for yourself! LINK
💫 Screens AI release new features and accuracy evaluation report
Following the now infamous Standford study on the accuracy of several GenAI legal research products, vendors face increasing pressure to provide enhanced transparency for accuracy claims.
Of course, Screens were not involved in the Standford study; their product focuses on contract risk review rather than legal research. They offer a web app and MS Word Add-in, covered with a glowing report in edition #23.
They have released their methodology for calculating their 97.5% product accuracy. The analysis only covered whether the product provides the correct pass or fail response and not whether its stated reasoning or its cited sentence is accurate. That’s fine, as they clearly call this out. The most important thing here is the approach's transparency, for which they deserve applause. LINK👏🏽
They also launched a host of new features for their Word add-in, which enables users to re-draft, summarise, make mutual, view defined terms, and much more! LINK
Sidenote: Friendly reminder to other GenAI vendors that the market has a strong appetite to see your GenAI scoring methodology. 😉
💯 LITIG Forms Legal Industry AI Benchmarking Initiative
On the topic of GenAI accuracy, LITIG, the Legal IT Innovators Group, with support from Artificial Lawyer and Legal IT Insider, has formed a Legal Industry AI Benchmarking Collaboration initiative to address the growing need for shared standards in the use and measurement of generative AI tools. LINK
Raises & Acquisitions
🤑 Norm Ai Raises $27M to Expand AI-Driven Regulatory Compliance Platform
The New York-based compliance startup has developed an AI platform that translates government and corporate regulations into computer code. They represent government regulations and corporate policies as decision trees that become executable computer programs. LINK
💸 Atticus raise £5.6m million
Founded six years ago and initially focused on streamlining the verification of IPO prospectuses for capital markets lawyers, the team has grown to 30 and serves sectors such as legal, financial, and corporate governance. The product has broadened beyond IPO prospectuses and now includes verifying annual reports, investor presentations, and ESG reports. 12 of the UK’s top 20 law firms are clients! LINK
🤝 Mitratech acquires HotDocs from CARET
HotDocs and Contract Express have traditionally been large law firms’ most popular document automation vendors and still command a large market share. A surge of competitors has sprung up in recent years, offering novel twists to enhance document automation. It will be curious to see how this change in ownership will influence the HotDocs product roadmap. LINK
Sidenote: For a comprehensive view of emerging document automation vendors, check-out the document automation focused DocAutoDatabase, setup and run by the leading document automation expert Catherine Bamford! (Disclaimer - I’m fortunate to work closely with Catherine on many automation-focused projects).
💵 Hebbia raises nearly $100M Series B for AI-powered document search
In edition #25 I featured the launch of Hebbia’s document review Matrix feature and their intention to lean into the legal market. It has been reported elsewhere that the raise may not have $100M, but regardless, Hebbia will have plenty of cash to propel their legal-focused efforts. LINK
💬 Y Combinator-backed Hona raises $9.5 million Series A
Hona addresses the communication challenges in consumer-facing legal practices like personal injury and criminal defence by offering a product that integrates with law firms' existing case management systems, providing clients with automated updates, messaging capabilities, and educational resources. They have over 500 law firm clients so far. LINK
🔍 DeepJudge raises $10.7M to improve legal enterprise search
Zurich-based DeepJudge integrates across document management systems and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to provide AI-powered knowledge search utilising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). LINK
✍🏽 AI Legal Writing Tool Clearbrief Raises $4 Million to Fuel Expansion Among Larger Law Firms
Clearbrief offers a Microsoft Word add-in to find and insert facts in legal writing. They have secured a fresh $4 million in funding, raising its total to nearly $8 million since its inception in 2021. Investors in this round include an investment fund affiliated with the Wilson Sonsini law firm that contributed to this round. LINK
Round-up
🚀 Litigation Finance Firm Launches With Over $100 Million In Capital
Arcadia Finance, a new litigation finance firm, has launched with over $100 million in capital to invest in various legal proceedings, including U.S.-based commercial and patent litigation, domestic and international arbitration, mass torts, and several other areas. They will predominantly focus on deals ranging from $2 million to $25 million but are open to lower commitments. LINK
🤝 Syncly joins forces with Thomson Reuters
Syncly focuses on a fantastically boring problem: enabling users to automate the secure movement of legal data across their tech stack. HighQ to iManage/NetDocuments/Sharepoint is a prime example. The Syncly team is stacked with smart ex-HighQ folks, so this partnership, which sees Thomson Reuters become a Syncly reseller, isn’t too surprising. LINK
📢 Calling all legal tech startups from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg
Dutch Legal Tech, a nonprofit organisation, is launching a revamped legal tech map for the law lands and is currently inviting all Legal Tech Startups from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg to sign up. LINK
Recent AI tools I’m exploring
Forget about GenAI in legal for a moment. Here are three cool products that show how GenAI will continue to infuse our day-to-day.
🎵 AI-generated music. Absolutely mindblowing. LINK
🗣️ The World's Fastest Voice Bot Demo LINK
📖 Turn academic papers into AI-generated audio discussions 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 daily legal tech news.
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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 market insights Here 👋