Legal Tech Trends Newsletter: #31
Contracts set for largest GenAI impact? Mega fundraises, AI feature launches, and excellent thoughts worth your attention
Happy Friday, and welcome to the 31st edition of Legal Tech Trends!👋
You may have noticed a slightly reduced frequency with the newsletter. I wish I could say it was the summer holidays, but it’s the opposite. Thankfully, all Titans’ consulting work is enjoyable, we have a phenomenal team and truly exciting GenAI projects.
My time is short, and yours is precious, so let’s get to the good stuff!
📊 Curious Chart - Contracts set for largest GenAI impact?
Deloitte Legal surveyed senior legal leadership at 43 of their largest clients and released an interesting report on the use of GenAI by legal departments.
Some of the main takeaways include:
💥 79% said that GenAI will have a moderate to significant long-term impact on legal work.
❌ However, 76% report no adoption of GenAI yet. They are at the “wait and see” or early impact evaluation stages.
📝 The ‘contracts and commercial’ functional area is widely expected to be the most transformed by GenAI.
Caveat: This chart shows how 43 respondents believe GenAI will likely impact legal functional areas. It is a prediction of future impact, not a snapshot of current impact. As referenced above, 76% of these respondents have not adopted GenAI at all yet.
Sidenote- I spent nearly seven years, from 2014-2021, working with Deloitte Digital and Deloitte Legal in the UK & Ireland. They’re an awesome bunch!
AI
🤝Leya partners with FromCounsel for a pilot with 12 leading law firms
I teased an upcoming Leya partnership announcement with FromCounsel in the last edition. Those details are now public, with the two teaming up for a closed pilot with 12 leading UK and US law firms. LINK
Leya also announced their recent $25M raise, on top of the $10.5M seed two months ago. They’re on quite the roll! LINK
🚀 Bryter Launches AI Agents For Legal Workflows
The well-known no-code platform has released a new GenAI product suite, AI Agents, designed to handle specific legal tasks effectively. These AI Agents are intended to help law firms and legal departments with specific workflows, such as searching and reviewing documents, drafting emails and more. LINK
Regular newsletter readers will know I’m a fan of vendors that let users sign up and access a free product version immediately. You can do that here: LINK
🔍 Paxton AI Releases Benchmarking Data Showing 94% Accuracy Of Its Legal Research Tool
We’re seeing a growing trend for GenAI vendors to release the testing approach and data used to calculate their accuracy scores. In the last edition, I called out Screens for praise, and now it’s worth applauding legal research provider Paxton. LINK
I haven’t dug into the dataset yet, but it’s available on GitHub here: LINK
📝 Thomson Reuters Launches CoCounsel Drafting for Transactional Documents
Thomson Reuters has launched CoCounsel Drafting, a Microsoft Word add-in that uses GenAI capabilities and Practical Law content for creating and reviewing transactional documents.
Key features include a document and clause finder that retrieves relevant materials from sources like Practical Law and SEC agreements, GenAI capabilities to draft or modify clauses, playbook comparison and deviation analysis to ensure documents align with preferred standards, and proofing tools to identify errors.
The product is launching in the US first, with rollouts in the UK and Canada expected later this year. LINK
Raises & Acquisitions
Funding continues to flow into LegalTech with some mega raises in the mix!
💸 Clio raises $900M at $3B valuation
The cloud practice management system provider currently serves over 1,000 mid-sized firms in the US alone and is now focusing on market expansion upmarket and internationally. They’ll also be investing in AI and integrated legal payments. LINK
🤑 Harvey raises $100M at $1.5B valuation
In the last edition, we referenced rumours of this raise, and now it’s been confirmed! The announcement includes their ambition to “collect and curate the data needed to build and train domain-specific models” and to “deepen our partnerships with both cloud and model providers to integrate additional models into Harvey”. LINK
They have a stellar list of investors, including Google Ventures, OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and SV Angel. Interestingly, Pat Grady of Sequoia said on a recent podcast episode that:
The idea for Harvey is never to replace human beings, it’s to dramatically expand the market to a whole bunch of people who don’t have access to legal services today. For the very high end law firms we’ll be an assistant, for the rest of the world we’re going to be the service. LINK
⌚ Timekeeping Startup PointOne Secures $3.5M Seed Round, Including Investment From Cooley Fund
Since legal work is often billed in six-minute increments, accurately tracking time is critical, but it’s often a pain for lawyers. When I first landed in legal tech five years ago and was working on client laptops, I found it amusing to get automated pop-ups after every email I sent notifying me how long it took me to draft the email. Fortunately, I didn’t have to record my time in such increments!
Timetracking is an important but tricky problem for startups to solve, as products often require deep integrations across many critical law firm systems. In addition to focusing on time tracking, PointOne is also tackling billing, pricing, and analytics challenges. Many will be hopeful that they can crack this nut! LINK
💵 Ghent-based LegalFly bags €15M in Series A
The legal AI platform focuses on data anonymisation, using a fine-tuned model to secure data before sending it to additional models. The recent investment will fuel LegalFly’s ambitious growth plan, which includes tripling its current team by the end of the year. LINK
🤑 Brazilian CLM Provider netLex Raises $22.7M, Seeking Global Expansion
NetLex currently serves major clients in Brazil, including Ambev, Samsung, iFood, and Localiza. The latest funding round aims to enhance product development, integrate AI, and expand its reach beyond Brazil. LINK
🔍 Xapien raises $10M for AI due diligence platform
With users including Magic Circle and AmLaw 100 law firms, Xapien provides AI tools for businesses to conduct checks on prospective partners. They claim to complete comprehensive background on any person or company in the world in minutes, not days. LINK
💫 CaseMark raises $1.7M for deposition summary product LINK
🤝Litera acquires FileTrail to expand information governance capabilities LINK
✨Disputes Startup DecoverAI Bags $2m For Legal Research + Reasoning LINK
Worth your attention
✨ GenAI in Legal: Progress, Promise, Pain and Peril
These days I try to limit my travel for work, but when Casey Flaherty and the LexFusion team organises an event I always make an exception! The GenAI events they ran in London in recent months were excellent, and this latest post from Casey shares insights from those events along with fresh views and content. It’s a long read but well worth it, and there’s a summary for those short on time or attention. LINK
📃 Legal IT Insider Practice Management System Report 2024
It’s hard to escape GenAI discussions, but it’s also important to understand the existing building blocks in the law firms’ tech stack. Practice Management Systems are a fundamental technology for firms, and this report from Legal IT Insider gives a brilliant overview of the market's history and current state. LINK (This hyperlink is to a Legal IT Insider sign-up form; you’ll receive the report once you submit your details).
🎙️Automates #5 - The one who could have been an artist
I’ve been binging this podcast from Ben Wightwick of Autologyx recently, and this episode with Horace Wu of Syntheia is probably my favourite yet. I’m a fan of Horace’s level-headed thoughts on GenAI and his openness to the surge of new legal tech vendors entering the market. LINK
✨ Bonus: An episode with Nicole Bradick just dropped. They cover her excellent GenAI UX session at LegalTechTalk. I was lucky to attend! LINK
🎙️Legal Innovation Spotlight #30 - Scaling AI Implementation and Adoption in Law Firms
Ted Theodoropoulos of Infodash hosts the Legal Innovation Spotlight podcast, and in this episode, he interviews David Cunningham and Richard Robbins of Reed Smith. They cover build vs buy, working closely with vendors, GenAI in Reed Smith, and other interesting topics. LINK
💡Clausebase - Tips for anyone purchasing an MS Word add-in
Lawyers live in Outlook and Word, so naturally, many Legal Tech products are add-ins for those products. Some add-ins are built on the old COM and VSTO architecture rather than the newer Office.JS architecture. This is becoming more topical as Microsoft announced it’s disabling COM and VSTO plugins for the new version of Outlook, which comes standard for Windows 11 devices.
There is no impact on Word add-ins for now, but given that it may not be a simple architecture switch for some products, it’s worth being mindful of this potential future challenge when chatting with your vendors. LINK
Kudos to ClauseBase for being a vocal and informative source of knowledge on this!👏
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 👋
Excellent informative compilation on the topic!