Over on Twitter I posted a few weeks ago that Canada has had a disproportionately significant impact on the evolution of #legaltech, way more than one might expect. Someone asked me to expound on that.It’s not just that Canada has produced an unusual number of Legaltech companies and products for the size of the market, it’s the fact that these have often been highly influential in the way the industry evolved, or that they marked a particular period in the industry’s evolution in a way no other such product did at that time.Take, for example:Thomson Reuters - yes, Thomson Reuters is Canadian. Well, the international conglomerate we know today is Canadian, founded in the 1970s after consolidating UK company Reuters, US company West, and the Canadian Thomson Newspapers. Headquarters were established in Canada and Westlaw was launched in 1975. The company continues to be highly influential in the way we conduct legal research globally, and in legal innovation more broadly.OpenText - really the earliest (electronic) document management system used by the legal industry. Founded in 1991, partly by professors at the University of Waterloo, well before iManage in 1995 and Netdocuments in 1999. In 1997 and 1998, IDC recognized Opentext as the global leader by market share in electronic document management. Opentext eDocs held substantial market share in the legal DMS market for many years.&nbsp;Clio - founded in 2007 by Jack Newton, Clio at the time represented one of the most significant software launches for small and mid-market law firms. When Clio was released, it signified an enormous advance in practice management tech for firms who would not be separately investing in timekeeping software, billing software, matter management software and a document management system. At launch, it was also the first cloud-based practice management software made for law firms. Clio has been one of the more innovative companies in developing a partner ecosystem, supporting and growing a broad stable of associated, fully integrated “Clio apps”.Kira - founded by Noah Waisberg and Dr Alexander Hudek in 2011, Kira was the first company to use machine learning for contract classification, analytics and review. Kira became the most prominent such software for law firms over the next ten years, before being sold to Litera in 2021.Closing Folders - in 2013, Sahil Zaman founded Closing Folders, perhaps the first stand-alone tool to provide a viable automated solution to the closing process and closing binder creation. Often considered to be an alternative to full transaction management platforms, Closing Folders developed solid market traction and was acquired by iManage in 2020.ROSS Intelligence - in 2014-2015, the University of Toronto hosted the IBM Watson Cognitive Computing Challenge. The Challenge would determine who would win the rights to first develop Watson technology for a legal use case. Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele and Dall’Ogli, then students at the University of Toronto, won the Challenge and established ROSS Intelligence. Although ROSS has since folded, it was highly influential in the evolution of modern legal research and in bringing what was at the time advanced AI to legal.Blue J Legal - launched in 2015 by University of Toronto tax professor Ben Alarie together with Albert Yoon, Anthony Niblett, and Bret Janssen, Blue J Legal also initially leveraged IBM Watson technology and was the first AI tool to use precedent case law to predict trial outcomes based on the facts of a case. It is now used by the Canadian Revenue Agency and it’s not unheard of for Blue J Legal reports to be submitted as evidence in court. Blue J entered the US market in 2019.These are all major developments in the history of legal technology, and Canada’s influence does not stop there. Diligen was launched 2015, not long after Kira, by Laura Van Wyngaarden, targeting the same sorts of legal problems as Kira also with machine learning. Canadian company Athennian is one of the earliest and most well established entity management platforms, launched in 2016 to help maintain minute books. Start-ups like NLPatent, bringing computer vision and AI to prior art search, and CiteRight, making it easy to generate books of authority and to generate a research bank out of collective citation research, are just some of the newer innovative solutions to emerge from Canada.Worth nothing too is that Canada also established the first ever legaltech incubators. The Legal Innovation Zone at the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson) was founded in 2015 by former Government Minister Chris Bentley and Government Advisor Hersh Perlis. It was established as a hub and co-working space focused on building better legal solutions for the consumers of legal services. In 2020, LIZ went global with programs supporting legaltech companies from across the world. Also in 2015, Toronto's MaRs Discovery District, one of the world's largest innovation hubs, launched LegalX, a program dedicated to “moving the legal sector forward through enterprises — whether startup or established corporates and law firms”. Aron Solomon, the MaRs Innovation lead, and Elevate's Jason Moyse ran the program. In 2018, the <a href="https://www.canlif.net/">Canadian Legal Innovation Forum</a> (CanLif) was launched, focused on the intersection of law and business and providing webinars, events and educational content for lawyers and legal professionals interested in moving the needle on future-forward change in the industry.There are other notable aspects of the Canadian legal scene that have likely given rise to or allowed for an environment where legaltech and legaltech start-ups have flourished. The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) is fairly progressive, and in 2016 launched a program called The Pitch, where legaltech start-ups were given a platform to pitch their solutions to a panel of judges for the chance to win seed money. Mitch Kowalski, then a legal operations and innovation advisor, described it as “Dragon's Den meets Canadian Idol meets ET Canada”. Mitch ran an industry innovation group in Toronto from about 2014 onwards out of the Thomson Reuters offices, with KM and innovation leaders from law firms and consultancies in attendance. In 2012 Joshua Fireman founded Fireman and Company (now part of the Epiq family), which over the next ten years became the most influential and highly leveraged independent legaltech implementation and advisory business across North America, used by most of the Amlaw 100 firms. Canadian lawyer Aaron Baer is developing a new form of modern, practical legal education with the 4L Academy.&nbsp;In my previous regional surveys of the legaltech landscape (see <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/industry-analysis/regional-snapshot-whats-happening-in-legal-innovation-in-brazil/">Brazil</a> and <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/industry-analysis/regional-snapshot-whats-happening-in-legal-innovation-in-italy/">Italy</a>), I've commented that certain factors must be present in order for legaltech to flourish. Broad support for innovation is one of these factors, and in Canada that support for innovation across industries has been evident from Government initiatives such as MaRs, the forward-thinking nature of the CBA, financial and infrastructure support for start-ups in Toronto and regions such as Waterloo (where Thomson Reuters established its Innovation Lab in 2015), and from Universities that have run programs in support of innovation.&nbsp;If we look at global reach and influence compared to population size, there is no question that Canada has been and continues to be one of the richest regions for legaltech development. Though much of the truly disruptive activity occurred in the period 2011-2016, it continues to be a region to watch.

The Disproportionate Impact of Canadians on the Landscape of Legaltech

There is no question that the most exciting place at <a href="https://www.aallnet.org/conference/">AALL</a> is the Exhibit Hall. Connect with old friends, schmooze with vendors, learn about exciting new features and products. 2022 is the first live post pandemic AALL conference. I am anticipating that a highly energized crowd will be streaming through the exhibit hall. I asked Pablo Arredondo the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/research-by-casetext/">Casetext</a> – a relatively new AALL exhibitor - to explain the value of being at AALL. “From our earliest product, <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/research-by-casetext/">CARA</a>, to our most recent one, <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/parallel-search-by-casetext/">AllSearch</a>, the exhibit hall at AALL is one of the best places for Casetext to evangelize new technology. &nbsp;It has been critical to our success to date."Mark Torchiana, Co-Founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/courtroom-insight/">Courtroom Insight</a> planned to exhibit for the first time in 2020 but when the conference went virtual, he decided to wait for the first in-person conference. &nbsp;“This year, we are very excited for the conference to be in person and look forward to showcasing our numerous new integrations at the event. &nbsp;The timing is right for us because our customer base has grown (40 of the Amlaw 200 firms) along with the number of software integration partners. We continue to focus on KM and analytics about experts, arbitrators, judges and soon attorneys. &nbsp;And we are perfectly positioned to help marry private, internal content to external data sources via our application and our soon to be announced APIs. “It is hard to categorize the 14 new exhibitors. Many companies support some form of research, but there is no clear demarcation between research, KM, business intelligence and workflow solutions. Analytics, AI and API’s – once considered cutting edge – stream through most product offerings. Specialized resources for litigation, IP, securities, international and transactional practices are represented in the list.Below is a quick roundup of the 14 first time AALL exhibitors:<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/stn-ip-protection-suite-by-cas-data/">CAS Data</a> provides curated scientific knowledge for the R&amp;D pipeline. The CIS scientists curate connect and analyze data disclosed in scientific publications from around the world. The CAS Content collection covers over 150 years of discoveries, including patent data covering key invention details from applications published by 64 global patent authorities. The data can be licensed for machine learning or in-house workflow. The CAS scientists also support custom data curation projects through the CAS Custom Services unit.<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/coherent-digital/">Coherent Digital.</a> The Coherent Digital website proclaims “our mission is to tame wild content...” Their Policy Commons is the world's largest database for public policy. It includes more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources and media drawn from a directory of 24,000 IGO's NGO's, think tanks and research centers. It also includes over 1,000,000 pages of premium content from leading publishers and restored from organizations that have disappeared, A Canada Commons includes over 200,000 policy and government documents. They have a South Asia archive and Sabinet Complete which includes African research and insights from African journal news and government information. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/courtroom-insight/">Courtroom Insight</a>. Courtroom insight is a customized knowledge management solution that enables organizations to capture, share and analyze internal knowledge (attorney experience and documents) related to arbitrators, experts, judges and attorneys. CI has grown its network of partners and is focused on developing analytics and APIs. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/consultants/ibcf/">IBCF</a>. International Business Company Formation, Inc. (IBCF). Since 1998, IBCF has assisted law firms, tax professionals, corporations and other service companies with a wide variety of corporate services including, but not limited to, entity formations, registered agent/registered office, document retrievals and apostille/legalization services in all 50 states, US Territories and international jurisdictions. In 2017 they launched IBCF Worldwide Due Diligence which assists legal and tax professionals, corporations and service companies with various forms of due diligence checks available on entities and individuals around the world. There appear to be over 200 countries listed on their website. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/iditrace-by-ididata/">IDI (Interactive Data)</a>. &nbsp;IDI offers a suite of investigative and people finding tools. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/idicore-by-ididata/">idiCore</a> is a full investigative and risk management tool which offers “skip tracing”. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/iditrace-by-ididata/">idiTrace</a> verifies personal information. IDI offers batch and API solutions as well as custom data analytics. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/kaleidoscope/">Kaleidoscope</a> provides a database of SEC and SEDAR filings. In addition to providing traditional filtered searching of securities documents they offer data visualization tools including data driven charts and graphs, dynamic real time metrics. They use color coding to identify different types of filings throughout the system. They also offer customizable APIs and data feeds. The API contains all SEC filing types from 1994 updated in real time as well as earnings call transcript and financial data tables. The website highlights the fact that they are leveraging the expertise of professionals who formerly worked at 10K Wizard. (A product which was beloved and well known to the AALL community.) <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/law-business-research/">Law Business Research</a>. Law Business Research has been around since 1996 but in 2021 they stunned the US legal information community when they acquired IP litigation platform <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/docket-navigator/">Docket Navigator.</a> They also offer the well-known news aggregator Lexology. LBR’s website describes the company as transitioning from being a traditional legal publisher, to being a technology focused information business serving our clients and users with the knowledge, tools and data they need. Their solutions include a suite of intelligence platforms providing Know-how resources, regulatory updates and data tools for legal professionals. Their Performance Data product tracks the global legal industry with proprietary data for understanding law firm and lawyer performance. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/legitquest/">Legitquest</a> is a legal research product focused on the Legal market in India. The product includes the primary law of India and is driven by AI enabled search functionality. The platform includes a citator, judge information, data visualization and workflow tools. The website posts legal news updates from around the world. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-bi-by-leopard-solutions-llc/">Leopard Solutions</a> offers a variety of business intelligence services for lawyers and law firms. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-bi-by-leopard-solutions-llc/">Leopard BI</a> provides predictive analytics and reports for modeling law firm growth and success. The <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-list-by-leopard-solutions/">Leopard List</a> is an attorney database. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-jobsearch-by-leopard-solutions/">Leopard JobSearch</a> is a recruitment tool. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-firmscape-by-leopard-solutions/">Leopard Firmscap</a>e provides competitive intelligence and benchmarking of US and international law firms. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/leopard-inhouse-by-leopard-solutions/">Leopard InHouse</a> is a corporate counsel directory of over 80,000 attorneys. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/patentorder-by-minesoft/">Minesoft </a>Is a global patent information provider. Their services include global patent search and analysis, legal alerts, document delivery and custom workflow solutions. The research tools provide analytics and patent family tree visualization tools. Minesoft solutions include R&amp;D strategy tools, legal tech tools, alerting services for tracking PAIR, legal status, citations and patents. They also provide API solutions. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/skopenow/">Skopenow</a> &nbsp;is a powerful open-source intelligence tool. The website offers a great slogan for librarians “solve problems without busywork.” Anyone who has had to conduct due diligence on people or companies knows how tedious and time consuming those tasks can be. Skopenow instantly builds comprehensive digital reports on businesses and people, collecting and analyzing publicly available information from data sources including social media, the dark web, associated vehicles, court records and contact data. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/liberty-by-softlink/">Softlink</a> offers library management software. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/liberty-by-softlink/">Liberty</a> is an integrated library system (ILS). The illumen knowledge and research workflow solution offers workflow management for research services and research products. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/tloxp-for-legal-professionals-by-transunion/">TLO</a> is one of the leading “people search” providers. It provides detailed profiles of both people and companies. The 360-degree profile is compiled from a massive data repository that's updated daily.&nbsp; <a href="https://visualping.io/?utm_source=googleAds&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=Core_US&amp;utm_content=ChangeMonitoring&amp;utm_term=visualping&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw_ISWBhBkEiwAdqxb9uCpoVds3s6DQw60gQlDynwIxyVyAHqOqzx1xEaGESjfsPnK9L6GSRoC5hgQAvD_BwE">Visual Ping</a> “We monitor website changes … so you don’t have to!” &nbsp;Music to any researcher’s ears. &nbsp;And yes, it is not uncommon for lawyers to need to monitor websites for changes. &nbsp;Visual Ping sends an email alerting a researcher to a change in a target website. &nbsp;To learn more about AALL and register for the conference, visit https://www.aallnet.org/conference/.

Guess Who’s Coming to AALL! 14 First Time Exhibitors Offer Business Intelligence, Workflow, KM, IP, Transactional, Litigation and International Solutions

The best way to validate the functionality of a technology system is to test it. Most often, testing includes running a pilot or a proof of concept (POC). But what's the difference between a pilot and a POC? How do you decide which is relevant for what project?The terms "POC" and “pilot” are often used interchangeably by teams deploying technology within legal organizations, but they have different meanings. The opacity generated by indiscriminate use of these terms is not helpful, not least because vendors often have specific license terms that govern validation tests. To understand if the terms are reasonable, the team needs to understand the offerings and whether it makes sense for the type of validation you are seeking to do.For this piece, LTH interviewed three KM experts to help further explain the differences between a POC and a pilot, and provide guidance on when you might use one over the other.Defining a POCA POC is generally considered a less significant test of a technology's functionality than a pilot.&nbsp;Elisabeth Cappuyns, Director of Knowledge Management at DLA Piper defines a POC as an internal KM or IT process where the team considers how a tool might integrate into the firm. For example, a POC could test just one aspect of the technology. In legal, a POC is often used as a way to prove the use case or the business value of the product – to make sure that the technology being considered is indeed fit for the purpose for which it is intended to be licensed. In other words, does this technology address user needs the way we hope it will?Patrick Dundas, Knowledge Management Special Counsel at Schulte Roth &amp; Zabel LLP, defines a POC as a formal test with an articulated testing rubric where each participant in the POC has a specific quantitative task to complete and analyze.During a POC, it’s not unusual for a decision to be made to switch off some of the technology's capabilities. For example, you might not allow users to input data into a system, even though that is how you ultimately want the technology to be used. Instead, you will set up the technology to create the relevant workflows for the use case and ensure that these workflows work as you expect. The workflows in this instance are unlikely to be "live" – they will be set up to mimic how the end-users will work with the technology when it has been implemented. In this sense, a POC is effectively a prototype or a pre-prototype of the final solution.Patrick further explained that a POC does not always provide a definitive answer as to whether the firm or organization should deploy a technology system - unlike a pilot. For example, a firm could run a POC on an AI due diligence engine to prove that they can get value out of the product. A firm won’t run a pilot, however, until it has established a business case for the technology and a determination that the project will go ahead.A POC may not even involve end-users, although LTH recommends that end users be involved in all project stages. Instead, a POC might leverage knowledge management, legal operations, IT, or innovation team professionals who test the workflows and record results that indicate whether or not the technology meets requirements. A POC takes as long as is required for the testers to validate the solution. Depending on the technology's complexity, a POC's duration could range from one week to a month.A POC will usually occur before signing a license agreement with a vendor or under a separate agreement pertaining only to the POC. After the POC is successful, negotiation will emerge as the parties progress towards a license agreement. Patrick noted that he has seen many firms invest substantial resources into the POC to get effective results.Defining a PilotIn contrast to a POC, a pilot is a complete test of the technology and can often serve as the early stage of a roll-out or deployment. A pilot is a more sophisticated and controlled form of a POC, and might be set up within a license agreement as an initial "test run" of the technology. In these cases, the arrangement generally provides the organization with a "get out free" option if the pilot doesn't go according to plan.The pilot is intended to test all aspects of the technology within the relevant live workflows. Simon Wormwell, Chief Strategic Enterprise Initiative Officer at Osler, explained that in a pilot, the internal value of the use case has already been established. Demos have been conducted, a preferred vendor identified, the internal process has been documented, the requirements are precise, and now the next step is to effectively test implementation and evaluate what technology might look like in production. In addition to testing functionality, a pilot is often intended to also test business assumptions about the solution, for example, whether end-users will use the pilot as part of their regular practice.As a result of the broader requirements of a pilot (compared to a POC), they can be much longer. A pilot will typically last anywhere from a month to six months, though some may run for a year.A properly conducted pilot will leverage a subset of end-users. The goal is often to ensure that bugs and kinks in the solution are ironed out before a full roll-out to relevant end-users. If the solution is intended to be deployed to all users across an organization, the pilot might be run with just one department. If the solution has a narrower focus, for example, it will serve only one practice group, and the pilot group might be a set of "super users" of technology within that group who can be counted on to provide feedback. &nbsp;When to Use Which Model of ValidationPOC Examples ● You have concluded the demo phase of an AI due diligence software and have interviewed various vendor references. After an informal one-week trial, the team conducts a formal test of the software (or a POC), where each team member is assigned a specific task that is measured and scored in a rubric. An example of a specific task includes how key data points are extracted from structured files.● You are rolling out a directory product, and you need to ensure the right fields exist to capture the information you need, that inputting information is intuitive, and that the interface is clean. A POC will allow you to vet the details to ensure it is the right platform.● You are testing software in relation to a process that will undergo a sufficient amount of workflow change if the tool is rolled out. The goal is to test it with 30 to 40 legal professionals eventually. Before using such a large sample group to understand if the system truly performs how it is supposed to, it is tested as a pre-pilot or POC with five legal professionals to validate the core functionality. This test helps the team conclude if they should go further into a pilot to evaluate the tool in a commercial production environment.Pilot Examples ● You have decided on the solution that is the best fit for your internal use case, the security team has vetted it, and you have signed a contract with the vendor. As the solution is expensive and the practice group end-users for whom this solution has been identified are particularly change averse, you have negotiated a six month term in the contract that allows for an initial pilot during which adoption can be measured among participants. You intend to use this time to validate the usefulness of the solution to the lawyers it is meant to support. If adoption during the six month pilot is low, you can re-visit the investment with the practice group chair and the vendor to determine whether it’s still worth proceeding.● A significant investment in a technology platform has been made by the firm, and the technology has been implemented on prem. In order to ensure that the design and configuration elements of the system meet end-user needs, and to identify any bugs before a broader roll-out, you run a pilot with a smaller practice group. During this pilot, you track metrics that enable you to tweak and configure aspects of the technology that will ensure better success when you roll out to the whole firm.● As part of an adoption strategy, you implement a pilot stage prior to rolling out a new technology to all parts of a practice group. You engage super-users and influential members of the practice in the pilot and leverage their positive feedback to create messaging and communications that can then be used to generate interest and momentum when the technology is rolled out more broadly.Both pilots and POCs are useful testing mechanisms to validate the functionality of a technology. There are certain circumstances where one might be preferred over another, depending on the complexity of the tool, the number of vendors you are considering, or the available resources. Carefully considering which option is the best fit given your circumstances is one of the first critical steps in successfully adopting a new technology solution, and will ensure you can negotiate the right terms with the vendor. &nbsp;

Pilot versus Proof of Concept: What, Why, and When?

A common pain-point for legal counsel is the absence of any centralized document management system, making it difficult to track work and find content.This is not surprising. Time lost searching for information has long been recognized as a problem for knowledge workers such as lawyers. In 2001, an IDC report found that service professionals were spending two and a half hours every day searching for information. A McKinsey study in 2012 confirmed this finding, showing that 19% of time was spent searching and gathering information, and another IDC report in 2018 claimed that professionals lost 30% of their time searching, gathering and preparing data.&nbsp;Without a central repository within which to organize content, and in the absence of an enterprise wide search system, it’s no wonder that legal departments struggle to find the work product and information they need to perform their work.&nbsp;When the lack of access to suitable technology is paired with inadequate systems and processes, it can lead to:<ul><li>An inability to easily find documents,</li><li>Documents saved in many different places, with no consistency or process around matter files, and</li><li>Difficulties tracking performance and other key metrics (such as contract renewal dates).</li></ul>Happily, there is a simple solution to these problems. Legal teams can improve the way they organize their work and increase the findability of information by exercising basic knowledge management best practices. These practices can greatly enhance the efficiency and productivity of a corporate legal department, even where there is no budget to invest in a dedicated document management system.Set out below is the framework for a knowledge management project that can be leveraged to support legal departments of all sizes. In small departments (five staff or fewer), the whole team should be involved in key aspects of the project. In larger departments, it’s important that each part of the department is represented in the decision-making: elect a representative from each group to participate. That group of representatives will become the project team.&nbsp;1. Decide on a Central System of RecordWith your team (or, for larger departments, the project team), think about the various systems you have available to you where documents can be saved. Critical attributes of a system of record include:<ul><li>Must be accessible by everyone: saving work product locally on a PC doesn’t help.</li><li>Must allow for custom folder structures.</li></ul>Commonly used systems that may be available to legal departments include Sharepoint, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive. A shared network folder will also work. Speak to your IT department and identify all of the options available within your organization.Consider the needs of your team in relation to such a system. As part of this exercise, think about the various stages in the document life cycle:<ul><li>Creation of a document</li><li>Editing a document</li><li>Saving a document</li><li>Searching for documents</li><li>Retrieving a document</li></ul>Which systems that you have access to provide solid processes and capabilities in relation to all of these document stages?Identify the benefits and disadvantages of each system in relation to the needs of your team. You will likely want to take into account:&nbsp;<ul><li>What systems people are already using? (existing familiarity will help people to adopt the new processes you’re introducing)</li><li>Do you need to save emails or just documents?&nbsp;</li><li>What types of documents do you need to be able to save and retrieve – e.g. PDFs as well as Word documents? Any images, videos, or other unusual content types?</li><li>Is there a need to be able to co-edit or co-draft?</li><li>Security concerns – does the broader business have any concerns about providing department-wide access to any of the systems you’re exploring? Does your team need to be able to secure certain documents in a way that makes them inaccessible to the broader business?&nbsp;</li></ul>Once you’ve reviewed the attributes of the various systems and the needs of your team in relation to those systems, it should become easier to select one system as the key system of record for your department.&nbsp;2. Develop a Folder Structure for the Types of Work that You DoSit down with your team and write a list of all of the types of work you do collectively. For example, your department may undertake contract review, contract negotiation, and contract renewals, as well as handling complaints and managing litigation. You may also handle M&amp;A work or real estate lease negotiations. Add to this any administrative needs that your team has and whether there need to be additional folders to accommodate those – you may have a folder for the team’s CLE tracking, one for expenses and another for training.Once you have a full list of the types of work your team handles, you will need to come up with a folder structure that makes sense to everyone. Some things to consider here:Levels of Foldering<ul><li>Is your folder structure multi-level? (for legal work, it almost certainly will be)</li><li>If so, how many sub-folder levels will you accept as a team? For example, regarding your contract work you may have a “parent” level folder named “Contracts” and then your contract review, contract negotiation, contract renewal work types will fall under this item as “children”. With litigation, you will likely have a top level folder called “litigation” under which you will list the different types of suits your team handles. For each of those, you may want to list the cases that are under way, and then create a standard taxonomy for the phases of a litigation matter. See below for a partial example of such a folder structure.</li></ul><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_a942f6d8ac.png" alt="Graphical user interface, application

Description automatically generated"><ul><li>Try not to have a folder structure that has more than two or three sub-levels – ironically, browse trees that are too complex make it harder to find things, not easier.</li></ul>Simplicity<ul><li>At the top level, you want a list that is easily digestible, ideally no more than 10-20 items.</li><li>Where there is no other logical order for folders (e.g. phases of a litigation matter), the folders should be organized alphabetically.</li><li>The list should make sense to everyone on your team. I once worked in a legal department where the GC decided on our departmental folder structure without taking into account some of the specialized work that I and some of my colleagues did, and it meant that saving work was confounding to us – there were no folders that fit so we saved things sporadically and inconsistently. You want a folder structure that is helpful to everyone in the department.</li></ul>The folder structure list you come up with, including its various levels, is a “taxonomy” that will become an asset to your department because it will start to define how you think about and categorize your work. This can be helpful in other ways too, for example when you speak to the business about the work that you do, as you track the department’s work or when you evaluate costs.*A note on folder structures: if you work for an organization with a small number of defined customers, or where a few major customers make up the bulk of your team’s work, you may wish to organize your top level folders by customer name instead of work type. Most probably, these top level customer name folders will not cover all the work your department does, which means you will end up with top level folders of two kinds: customer names, and work type. Under each top level customer folder, you will then also likely need subfolders for work type, which means you now have a situation where “work type” can be both a top level folder or a subfolder. This is not ideal, but sometimes unavoidable. We encourage you to think of the consequences of such decisions ahead of time so you can plan for them. For example, you don’t want a situation where someone is confused by whether to put a renewal of the sponsorship contract for Adidas in the Adidas folder under “Contracts”, or in the Contracts folder under “Contract Renewals”.3. Agree on ProcessAs a team, you will need to decide on some consistent processes around saving work. Most critically, you need to reach agreement on:Which documents get saved into the central repository?Do you want all work product saved, even drafts? Think about various scenarios, including when someone is out sick or unexpectedly leaves the team. Presumably you will want access to the most recent draft they were working on, but if there have been 15 drafts of the same document you may not want all of them saved to the team workspace (very quickly, this will lead to clutter that can reduce the efficacy of your structure). Planning ahead for these kinds of scenarios will serve you well in the longterm.How do you handle old files?If your organization handles a lot of litigation, do you want to see old matters that have been closed for a year or more in the same folder structure as the ongoing matters? Same goes for contracts: once a contract has been terminated, do you want it appearing in the same folders where you manage live contracts for which you need to track renewal dates?Consider having an archive folder in your structure, or work with IT to create an archive for the legal department elsewhere in the organization (presumably it won’t need to be regularly accessible by the whole team). If you create an archive, you will also need to agree on processes and responsibilities for moving files to the archive on a regular basis, and for retrieving them when the need arises.How do you handle it if someone asks for a new folder to be added to the taxonomy?Your team’s work will evolve over time, but if the folder structure is a free-for-all and anyone can add a new item anytime, it will quickly become messy and unworkable.&nbsp;Establish a process for submitting change requests, and then schedule periodic reviews of those requests. If you have a large team, elect a small committee or working group who is responsible for managing the taxonomy and making decisions about whether a new term should be added or not. If your team is small, you can review change requests as a regular item during team meetings.4. Create Naming and Saving ConventionsNamingOnce you have established your folder structure and best practices for when to save work into the central repository, you will need to agree next on how the team names the documents they are saving.&nbsp;Purpose-made document management systems assign unique identifiers to documents that make it possible to find them regardless of the way they were named during the saving process. If you don’t have that luxury, you need to be more careful about using consistent naming conventions.Simply calling a document “agreement” or “motion” will make it hard for anyone looking for the document later to know what it is.&nbsp;Ideally, a saving convention will be simple, yet explanatory, containing some or all of the following information:<ul><li>If the work is for a customer, include the customer name&nbsp;</li><li>If the work is for an internal department, include the department name</li><li>Include the type of document, e.g. sponsorship agreement</li><li>If the system you’re using doesn’t automatically save the date when you last edited or saved the document, consider adding the date</li><li>Use a protocol for noting versions, e.g. parentheses around the version number</li><li>You may wish to also specify whether a document is draft or final (this information will be relevant for certain document types – such as agreements and pleadings – but not for others)</li></ul>Following the above steps would give you document names such as:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Brown – sponsorship agreement (final) – 7.6.22 (1)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ICG – subscription agreement (draft) – 8.2.22 (2)If these documents are saved in the appropriate folders, it will enable your team to relatively easily identify the work product they’re looking for. If the system you have chosen includes search functionality, even a fairly basic search should be able to retrieve documents named with such a convention.SavingFinally, you will need to implement agreed processes on where to save which documents.&nbsp;If your folder structure has been developed properly through consensus, it should be relatively simply to agree upon saving conventions. However, everyone has a different way of looking at content. One person’s “contract negotiation” might be another person’s “contract renewal”. It’s important to have conversations as a team about what types of documents belong where, so that there is consistency in the way that content is filed.&nbsp;The reality is that a dedicated document management system with built-in processes, version control, unique identifiers and security controls can significantly enhance the way a legal department operates. Not all legal departments will have the luxury of being able to invest in such a system, however.There is no reason, in those circumstances, to eschew knowledge management and improved processes simply because you don’t have a dedicated system in place. Going back to basics will serve any team well – whether or not they are also armed with sophisticated technology.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Knowledge Management Basics for Corporate Legal Departments

Many definitions of digital transformation are extremely broad, suggesting that it requires bringing a digital-first approach to all parts of a business, or true business model change. But many professionals whose mandate includes digital transformation are lacking the authority within their organizations to undertake enterprise-wide change – let alone the resources.&nbsp;&nbsp;While it may be true that digital transformation – once complete – impacts a business as a whole, defining it in this way at the start of the process is stultifying, making it appear that any smaller changes can’t constitute transformation because their individual impact is too insignificant. The impact of many such smaller changes together, however, may well add up to organization-wide transformation over time.&nbsp;Don’t Boil the Ocean – All at Once&nbsp;If you are someone whose role within an organization involves digital transformation, and you don’t have the authority to initiate an enterprise-wide initiative, where do you start?&nbsp;&nbsp;Most people working in business or law have heard the phrase “don’t boil the ocean”, suggesting that rather than tackle a large project all at once you should break it down and approach it in manageable steps. It’s also true, however, that spending some time to understand the bigger picture before delving into narrower initiatives can pay dividends down the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;In spite of your perceived lack of authority on the business as a whole, there is value before undertaking any digital transformation initiative in performing thorough discovery exercises to understand the way that relevant departments operate, and to start to build support and momentum towards a broader initiative. Understanding what systems are in place and where they are being used in other parts of the business, for example, will ensure that you don’t replicate efforts or duplicate technology investments in your own department. Understanding how data and information travel between systems (or where those connections are lacking but necessary), will give you better insights into what initiatives your team could undertake that might have impact beyond your own department. By engaging in these discussions, you will also build support amongst a network of stakeholders that might enable you to amplify your influence in the organization and generate additional inter-departmental resources to support your projects. &nbsp;&nbsp;Making an impact&nbsp;While undertaking discovery and understanding the systems and data landscape of your organization is important before commencing any digital transformation initiative, this doesn’t mean that those efforts must be similarly broad.&nbsp;Instead, consider what parts of the organization you and your team are able to directly impact, and what the most important needs are in that area. Instead of buying a fancy technology system because it is high in the hype cycle and promises to achieve digital transformation, look at the business needs that are of highest strategic priority to the organization. In particular, look for:&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Processes that are manual, unnecessarily onerous, and causing frustration.</li><li>Areas where there are “too many cooks”, in other words there are so many hand-offs within the same process as to make it needlessly complicated.</li><li>Processes around which there is confusion, or where efforts are being duplicated.</li><li>Areas where work-arounds have been developed because there is no system in place to support a necessary process.</li><li>Areas where it would save time and improve decision-making if data was connected, but system integrations are unavailable or haven’t been built.</li><li>Areas of low efficiency or realization, or pockets of unprofitability.</li><li>Parts of the organization from which repeated complaints are made to leadership, or where an unusually high number of calls are made to IT support or the organization’s help desk.</li></ul>&nbsp;In identifying the right project to take on, consider whether:&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>You have the ability to instigate and drive an initiative of this kind;</li><li>The initiative is linked to the strategic goals of the business and your department;</li><li>The project is high value and will provide a meaningful return on investment; and</li><li>You have the resources (both financial and human) to tackle this project now.</li></ul>&nbsp;Your aim is to identify the right initiative through which you can realistically drive digital transformation from your position within the organization and in light of the broader context of the organization. Only once you have selected this initiative should you consider whether new technology is necessary at all, and if it is, what work must be done before selecting the relevant technology in order to ensure that the organization is ready to onboard that technology.&nbsp;&nbsp;Watch out for the next edition of LTH Insights for more practical guidance on digital transformation in legal practice.&nbsp;

Digital Transformation: How to Start

As roles in law firms and other parts of the legal ecosystem evolve, it is becoming more common for talent to cross the divide between firms and vendors, bringing new perspectives and experience to both environments. This is a development that should be heralded with fanfare and applause as it stands to benefit all stakeholders in the ecosystem, bringing greater transparency to legal technology procurement and sales.&nbsp;As innovation teams proliferate in law firms, the relevant skillsets for prospective talent have broadened. A range of experience is now recognized as useful for KM and innovation professionals in firms, including technical product management, service design, client value, and more. Many of the new skills that innovation teams are hiring for cannot be found through the traditional recruitment avenues used by law firms, who have had a long tendency to hire from other firms or look for lawyers to fill roles even on the business side. The expansion of desirable skillsets in various law firm teams is thus giving rise to a burgeoning trend of law firms looking to legal technology vendors for new talent.&nbsp;At the same time, as KM and innovation leaders in firms develop relationships with external vendors, it is becoming more common for vendors to hire senior business professionals from law firms to bring new perspectives to the sale side. For these companies, hiring talent from law firms provides them with insight into the procurement processes and the customer context that they otherwise would not have. For the professionals who take this step, the cross-over is a unique opportunity to update their technical skills and work on new challenges.&nbsp;Ultimately, an increased cross-over in talent between law firms and vendors provides opportunities for significant benefits to the ecosystem as a whole, with potential arising for better partnerships, greater transparency around procurement, and improved adoption of technology by lawyers.&nbsp;Conservative Approach Historically Prevented Cross-Over&nbsp;Although knowledge sharing is a competitive advantage, sharing talent has not traditionally been viewed in the same way. Law firms, and particularly recruiters within firms, are still catching up to the reality that the traditional talent route is no longer the best one for all professional services personnel. The increased importance of multi-disciplinary teams within firms is a fairly new phenomenon, and one with which many recruiters are still grappling. They have yet to update their processes to reflect the changes that are happening in the legal talent market.&nbsp;Given that vendors have traditionally been viewed as sales organizations that have little in common with the law firms they sell to, it’s a full about-turn for recruiters to look to them as potential treasure-troves of new talent. Recruiters are still more likely to look to other firms in recruiting senior business leaders, often seeking to poach prospects who are already occupying the same type of position that the recruiter is trying to fill.&nbsp;Unfortunately, this short-sighted view – particularly when it comes to modern roles that involve driving culture change and leading technology innovation efforts – is unlikely to result in an optimum pool of candidates. An innovation team will always be more successful if it is diverse, which includes diversity of experience, perspectives and skill-sets. Using a checklist approach to recruitment for roles that are required to think outside the box may limit a firm’s ability to hire the most effective talent for these positions.&nbsp;Due to the persistence of these conservative recruitment approaches, it has continued to be unusual for law firms to hire for innovation roles from vendors, especially at senior levels. A few forward-thinking law firms led the charge in this respect, paving the way for others. One early such hire was Shearman &amp; Sterling’s recruitment of Glenn LaForce from Aderant, where he was Vice President of Knowledge Management. Shearman installed LaForce as Global Director of Knowledge and Research, where he has successfully led a 40+ person innovative team for over three and a half years. This notable departure from traditional recruitment paths by Shearman &amp; Sterling was spearheaded by the firm’s forward-thinking Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer, Meredith Williams-Range, and its success has opened the door for other firms to similarly break from tradition.&nbsp;Recently, there have been more of these moves, with an increasing number of firms appearing to recognize the benefit of bringing in a broader perspective to their innovation efforts. In order to gain insight into the impact that crossing the law firm-vendor divide can have on legal organizations, we interviewed Kate Cain, Alma Asay and Cheryl Wilson-Griffin.&nbsp;Kate Cain began on Sidley Austin's KM team, transitioned to Foundation on the vendor side, and is now back to the law firm side again leading KM and Innovation at Fenwick. Alma Asay was previously the CEO of Allegory, which was sold to Litera where she became an Evangelist before moving into her current position as the Senior Director of Practice Innovation at Crowell &amp; Moring. Cheryl Wilson-Griffin was a former Director of Legal Technology Solutions at King &amp; Spalding and is now COO at Lupl.&nbsp; &nbsp; Increase in Cross-Over as Skill Sets Merge&nbsp;Diverse teams that include people who have worked with both law firms and vendors have a greater appreciation for the competing priorities on each side. Alma points out that most people in legal innovation attempt to improve the delivery of legal services without a complete understanding of each side's challenges and finite resources. Alma’s experience on the vendor side has provided insight into the limited ability vendors have to upgrade or change a product for a single customer. As a corollary to that insight, due to her experience working in law firms she has an understanding for why firms can only implement so many solutions at any given time, even if other projects might look interesting. In Alma’s view, when skillsets and insights merge from both vendor and law firm experience, there is an increased understanding about what each side can do to achieve value faster, more candid communication about roadblocks, and a better likelihood of realistic expectations. Projects are consequently set up for greater success, benefitting all parties in the long run.&nbsp;On the vendor side, by contrast, Kate explains that her knowledge from having been a discerning consumer was hugely valuable for product development, bringing essential perspectives to design discussions, development priorities, and overall product roadmap strategies. Her insight from having worked on the buyer side helped ensure that what the vendor ultimately delivered was aligned with what customers need now and in the future.&nbsp;Benefits of Cross-Over for Law Firms, Vendors and the Industry at Large&nbsp;Having an individual on the team who understands both the lawyer and the vendor sides of the equation is vital to ensuring successful ecosystem partnerships, streamlining procurement and improving adoption. Now working back on the law firm side leading KM and innovation efforts, Kate says that: "understanding how a software company works, especially from the product management and ongoing development perspective, provides powerful insight into how to evaluate potential solutions."&nbsp;"When lawyers understand what it is like to be on the receiving end of customers' enhancement requests, bug reporting, and use case questions, they are better positioned to advocate for their team and partner better with vendors." Kate explains that this perspective has helped her to understand how to frame a question or report an issue in a way that will make sense to product or engineering teams. More specifically, she can pre-emptively provide the supporting information the vendor needs, such as relevant examples and helpful context.&nbsp;This knowledge also improves efficiency around the negotiation stages of legaltech procurement, creating better outcomes for law firms. Frequently, for example, vendors are limited in price but flexible in other aspects of the relationships. Individuals who understand this from having worked on the vendor side are able to leverage their expertise to arrange better terms for their firms. To illustrate, Cheryl shared that she was able to use her insight to help her firm negotiate the best price on a piece of expensive legal technology and ensure the firm had options to protect it against low adoption – precisely, an 18-month no-cause cancellation term.&nbsp; For vendors, navigating the complex priorities that lawyers are juggling can seem overwhelming and obsolete. Having the insight of a seasoned lawyer onboard who has experienced multiple procurement processes from the inside of a firm is a tremendous asset. Cheryl explained that knowing how law firms buy allows you to navigate the complex and confusing procurement process more capably when working on the vendor side. For instance, you can prepare documentation that answers the questions you know are coming, implement security protocols you see the firm will need and set better internal expectations about when a deal might close.&nbsp;Anyone who crosses the divide between a law firm and a vendor company has to be ready for significant change. Our interviewees shared that some of these changes can make your professional life better, but others might make you initially uncomfortable. Cheryl divulged that going from a well-staffed law firm to join a vendor without the same sort of support network and deep resources was a bit of a shock. In contrast, going from a vendor to a firm it can be equally shocking to find how much is done for you on the administrative side. Over time, however, given the many different cultures in law firms and especially at vendor companies, there is the potential to find a fit that will make a candidate happy on either side.&nbsp;As the industry evolves and recruitment practices develop to take into account the new skillsets that abound in legal, the number of people who choose to cross the law firm-vendor divide at some point in their careers is likely to increase significantly. This trend should be embraced, as it will benefit vendors, law firms, and the industry at large. For organizations currently seeking talent, the suggestion from those we interviewed in relation to this topic is to actively recruit candidates with experience from more diverse environments. Diversity and innovative thought will abound when recruiters recognize that the right expertise can arise out of a variety of contexts, and move away from prioritizing candidates who have only ever worked at law firms.&nbsp;

Crossing the Divide

One of the most exciting panels at the 2022 ILTA Conference (What is Natural Language Processing and How can I Use It?) showcased dramatic breakthroughs in neural net technology to natural language processing (NLP).&nbsp;Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder / Chief Innovation Officer, Casetext provided an intensely passionate tutorial on the history of AI through the centuries. The launch of commercial research systems such as Lexis and Westlaw in the 1980’s dramatically transformed legal research by making cases and statutes keyword-searchable. Arredondo enthusiastically proclaimed that neural net technology can now “free research from the keyword prison.”Let’s start with a definition. Natural Language Processing is a multi-disciplinary field concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. NLP is also generally considered a sub-field in the broader field of artificial intelligence.&nbsp;As with other areas of AI, there are two major approaches to natural language processing. Symbolic AI is a rules-based approach that remains largely tied to human experts and keywords (think chess grandmasters giving advice to a computer). With the other approach, machine learning, algorithms learn not from humans but from direct experience with training data (think of a computer teaching itself to play chess by playing over and over).&nbsp; Neural nets, a type of machine learning loosely inspired by the way biological neurons connect, represent the most powerful form of machine learning.&nbsp;The application of neural nets to language involves setting up simple (for humans) language tasks such as “guess the missing word.” *&nbsp;The neural net starts in a random state and its guesses are laughably bad.&nbsp;But through a massive amount of trial and error and self-correction, the neural net “trains” itself to more accurately predict missing words.&nbsp;In the process, for reasons that still a bit of a mystery (or “black box” to some), the neural nets get quite “smart” about language.&nbsp;Smart enough to, in Arredondo’s words “have profound and immediate implications for the legal profession.”&nbsp;The star of the show was Casetext’s AllSearch tool, which leverages neural nets to enable attorneys to search over their own documents.&nbsp;Two attorney panelists – Scott Reents,&nbsp;Lead Attorney, Data Analytics and E-Discovery at Cravath, Swaine and Moore and Samantha Seaton,&nbsp;Knowledge Management Counsel at Fisher Phillips – provided jaw-dropping examples of how neural nets are helping in the trenches of litigation.&nbsp;DiscoveryReents discussed how Casetext’s AllSearch tool enabled Cravath to more quickly find critical documents in a litigation.&nbsp;The ability of neural nets to take an entire sentence as a query enabled Cravath attorneys to search with more granularity; their ability to match relevant language even if articulated completely differently uncovered key evidence.&nbsp;Reents described how Cravath was even able to turn written discovery directly into search queries.&nbsp;Interrogatory requests could simply be cut-and-pasted into the AllSearch engine to surface documents that would help respond.&nbsp;Finally, Reents described using a different neural net to run sentiment-analysis on a document production. This tool quickly isolated the kind of “emotionally charged” statements so often correlated with useful evidence.&nbsp;One striking example he provided involved locating a relevant email where someone said “[like] bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Knives and gunfights aren’t “top of mind” when lawyers are reviewing internal corporate documents; this email would have been invisible inside the keyword prison.&nbsp;Legal ResearchReents’ primary focus was on e-discovery, but he mentioned that Cravath associates were finding neural nets equally useful to search case law.&nbsp;Reents joked that the only complaint he heard was that Casetext’s Parallel Search (the neural net engine aimed at case law) sometimes made finding on-point authority “too easy.”&nbsp; &nbsp;Trials&nbsp;During her remarks, Samantha Seaton put the power of Allsearch into historical context. Back in the “bad old days”, lawyers had to compile and flag hundreds of documents, exhibits and statements, organized into massive printed binders. The lawyers’ brains were the neural nets and they were aided only with post-its and binder tabs.&nbsp; Seaton described being an associate tasked with trying to memorize all the important documents and statements in the weeks leading up to trial.&nbsp; If a sudden need emerged to impeach a witness, attorneys would have to hope someone had marked the relevant documents in a way that was easy to find.&nbsp; Seaton contrasted this with the power of neural nets, describing how loading up 39 days of witness testimony into AllSearch, and bringing it into the courtroom enabled lighting fast “on the fly” searches to locate contradictory evidenceBespoke Client Repository&nbsp; &nbsp;Seaton discussed how Fisher Phillips deployed AllSearch to help support an internal client need. The client had over many years amassed hundreds of union contracts covering a wide variety of jurisdictions. There was no standard terminology, so even if the documents could be scanned and keyword searched, similar contract terms could not be located easily.&nbsp;That is until Fisher Philips pointed neural nets at them, giving their client dramatically better accessibility to the information in the documents without the need for Boolean queries or even familiarity with legal terminology.&nbsp;Drafting Briefs.&nbsp;One application that has been widely embraced by litigators at the firm is using Allsearch to validate facts in a brief. According to Seaton, litigators can write a brief quickly, but they get bogged down when they have to locate every instance in a trial record that supports a given statement in the brief.&nbsp; This is particularly painful in class actions where there are thousands of pages of deposition transcripts. When the entire case record and document production is uploaded – this verification can be accomplished with lightning speed. Attorneys spend less time on the painfully slow process of keyword retrieval and can focus on higher value work.The Next Frontier - Answering legal and factual questions&nbsp;Seaton also provided a fascinating preview of an early stage prototype that Casetext gave her access to. The prototype leverages an approach called Fusion-in-Decoders and combines neural net search with neural net synthesis – enabling a much more robust form of question-and-answer to be run against case law and litigation records.&nbsp;The powerful use cases amply proved the key takeaway of the panel. Neural nets, even in these early days, are demonstrating they can markedly improve the practice of law.&nbsp;*For a more in-depth description of this technology see Arredondo and Qadrud-Din, "From Vellum to Vectors," AALL Spectrum, Vol. 25, No. 5 (May/June 2021)Editor's Note: Want to compare more than one neural net search tool? Check out <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/smart-drafter-by-syntheia/">Syntheia</a>'s <a href="https://docs.syntheia.io">Text Search API</a>s, providing plain language neural net search functions combined with auto clause extraction for contracts: https://docs.syntheia.io. The neural network API is so new it doesn't yet have a discrete product name, but as soon as it does, you will be able to find it on Legaltech Hub, along with Casetext's AllSearch.

Practical Applications of Neural Nets in the Practice of Law

A glimpse into the landscape of legal innovation in Brazil might operate for many of us as a peek into the future - because developments we have long been heralding as imminent in the United States have already well and truly unfolded south of the border. For example, it is clients who dictate the cost structure of legal work performed by outside counsel, so most of this work is performed at a flat fee rather than by the hour. And the legaltech industry in Brazil is booming in comparison to that of other Latin American countries, with the number of start-ups having doubled since 2015.&nbsp;Indeed, the magnitude of the Brazilian ecosystem alone is likely to be surprising to those who aren’t familiar with it. Brazil has more law schools — some 1,300 — than the rest of the world combined. And the country has over a million lawyers — which means that there are more lawyers per capita in Brazil than in the U.S., even though there are 113 million fewer people in Brazil. This number gives rise to the astonishing fact that there is a lawyer for every 190 people in the country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nation is also highly litigious, with over 80 million active ongoing law suits. This latter number can be partly attributed to the fact that, compared to other jurisdictions, access to court justice costs next to nothing. With the bar for entry so low, it’s not unheard of for legal action to be brought over debts of less than $10. &nbsp;&nbsp;Over the past years, I’ve developed an interest in the way that legal innovation develops in different parts of the world, and why this varies from one place to another. Consistently, it seems, there are certain social forces that impact the speed with which change penetrates the legal industry in a particular region, and the nature of a local legal market is one of those forces. Another is regulation, and the Brazilian legal market is more highly regulated than some others, with ALSPs unable to operate and non-lawyers unable to run law firms, for example. &nbsp;&nbsp;When I spoke to Barbara Gondim da Rocha, the Head of Knowledge Management and Innovation at Rocha, Marinho E Sales Advogados (“RMS”) in Fortaleza, Brazil, she confirmed that the very size of the Brazilian legal ecosystem has had an impact on the development and adoption of legal technology in the nation. However, there are other factors at play too. As far back as 2006, Law n. 11.419 was passed in Brazil, legalizing digital evidence and electronic filings, signatures, communications, and judgments in court proceedings. The notion of digital transformation in law is not new to the Brazilian legal system.&nbsp;&nbsp;Gondim also tells me that after 2014, in the wake of recession, corporate legal departments in Brazil started taking a more strategic approach to outside legal spend. Legal counsel across the country united and organized themselves, in much the same way that counsel in the U.S. have through CLOC (though years earlier), seizing the reins of the client-lawyer relationship and demanding greater transparency around fees. Now, Barbara says, the clients in the Brazilian legal landscape overwhelmingly dictate the fee structure for legal work. &nbsp;&nbsp;With substantial cost pressure being applied consistently by clients, resulting in a high demand for flat fees, the need for law firms to adopt efficiency measures such as legal project management, alternative timekeepers and legal technology has long been understood. This is really what has driven the legal technology market in Brazil. In 2015, a local association identified 40 local Brazilian legaltech start-ups. In 2020, there are well over 80. Many of these serve as legal marketplaces, or operate in the access to justice space. Online dispute resolution and automated documents are another popular area, but what’s perhaps more interesting is that the market seems to be maturing with the evolution of advanced tools in the realm of analytics and AI. Neuralmind is one of these, promising to improve legal contract analysis using the latest advances in AI. And in 2017, AB2L was founded, an association for Law Tech in Brazil. AB2L has been very active in organizing local events and in bringing high-profile international speakers in legaltech to Brazil for various local conferences. &nbsp;&nbsp;But while the development of legal technology has been flourishing, Gondim says that the law firm resources necessary to implement it and leverage it appropriately have been lacking. She equates this problem to buying a very expensive car and yet not being able to drive. Gondim herself developed her own title after beginning to read legaltech blogs and attend conferences in other jurisdictions, where she learned about knowledge management and the significance of a strong knowledge function to support innovation at a law firm. At RMS, Gondim has gradually been able to build a team of cross-disciplinary professionals who are able to properly leverage legal technology for the benefit of not just attorneys at the firm, but also the firm’s clients.&nbsp;“Law is no longer enough,” she says. “It is assumed.” &nbsp;&nbsp;In an environment where clients are sophisticated enough to understand what a particular type of legal work should cost, and what tools are available to reduce costs, Gondim has found that working directly with clients and listening to them is critical in creating a competitive edge. After spending time talking to the firm’s clients to understand where they wanted to see improvements (spoiler alert: they demanded change on the service side), she was able to generate internal support for a broad process mapping exercise that led to improved systems and data mapping. The result? New business flowed to the firm, which is flourishing and has since opened additional offices. “It worked!” says Gondim. The firm is now able to provide greater transparency and metrics around all of its matters, in a way that is directly responsive to client demands.&nbsp;Roles like Gondim’s are gradually increasing across law firms in Brazil, and courses are available at various institutions to teach new lawyers about legal technology and legal innovation. Local enthusiasm for legal innovation is also evident in the fact that there are over 15 chapters of Legal Hackers across the country. With the advent of educated innovation drivers who are capable of leveraging the technology already available in the nation’s legal market, Brazil is on track to become one of the world’s most interesting regions for legal innovation.&nbsp;&nbsp;*This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.babel-law.com/">Tower of Babel - A Legaltech blog</a> on July 22, 2020, and has been republished here with the author's permission.

Regional Snapshot: What's Happening in Legal Innovation in Brazil

In our last vendor cheatsheet, we talked about the reasons why you might stop hearing from your customers during a prospective sale.&nbsp; We promised that our next Vendor Cheatsheet would give some tips about how to break through the silence and get a response to your email. See below for guidance sourced from communications best practices.&nbsp;1. WIIFM Messaging To have a better chance of your contact or potential contact opening your email, consider what might appeal to them. Messaging is more likely to resonate if it speaks to the recipient and their needs – in communications theory, this is called “what’s in it for me” or WIIFM messaging. If you are trying to reach someone in IT, your messaging will therefore have a different tone than if you’re writing to someone who leads a KM department, or if you’re writing directly to a lawyer. Consider your audience, and tailor the content of your email and especially your subject heading accordingly. It should go without saying but simple rules include:&nbsp;<ul><li>Make sure your email contains the right name for your contact</li><li>No bulk emails – it takes longer, but personalizing your emails makes a real difference</li><li>No sales-y type headlines, or gimmicks like “One last chance!” or “Final offer” subject headings – these won’t get traction, and may get you blacklisted. &nbsp;</li></ul>Instead, think about what someone in the position of your contact may wish to hear. Rather than subject headings requiring things of them, think of subject headings that indicate you’re going out of your way to give something to them. Consider thoughtful subject headings like:&nbsp;<ul><li>“Making sure you saw this”</li><li>“Updating you and your team”</li><li>“Wanted to let you know” &nbsp;</li></ul>Make sure you follow up this kind of subject heading with messaging in your email that follows through – in other words, provide that roadmap update, or give them news that is relevant to them. You can always ask for a short call at the end of the email, which you can then use to get the update you need; but starting by providing information that is relevant to them is a better way to get their attention.&nbsp;2. Build a Relationship Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts in this game. Subject headings will get you only so far. The legal industry is built on relationships. Although digital marketing efforts can enhance word-of-mouth referrals, most legal work at law firms is won through relationships and repeat work.&nbsp; The world of legaltech sales to law firms is not much different. The sales cycle at law firms is so long that vendors need to develop relationships with stakeholders in order to stay in the loop throughout the process. If you don’t have a relationship with relevant contacts at a prospective customer firm, it’s less likely that your email will stand out from any of the others they receive, or that they will be motivated to respond to it. Spending the time to develop authentic relationships with stakeholders on the buyer side will pay dividends later. That means that even when a sale is not on the table, you should be in touch regularly, with friendly check-ins, invitations, comments. Ideally, you want your contact to connect your name with their social world as well as their work world. You want them to see your emails as different from the others that flood your inbox because you are not a faceless salesperson but a friend, or at least a valued member of their professional circle.&nbsp; If you have a genuine relationship with your contact at a firm, they are far more likely to respond to your email and even take the initiative to tell you where your prospective sale is up to. Indeed, you may end up having the benefit of a number of different methods to get in touch with your contact rather than just email – you may even have their cell number (tip: if you do, don't abuse it! Use it only to further the relationship).&nbsp;3. Send Digestible, Useful Content If all you ever send are emails following up to your previous questions, or check-ins on the status of a sale, it’s no wonder that some of your emails go unanswered. Instead, consider sending emails attaching or linking to real content, or information that’s useful to the people who receive it. If you come across an article that might be useful to a segment of your buyers, send it to them – “saw this, thought you might find it interesting”. If there is an award you think one of your buyer contacts could submit for, suggest that to them – “looked at this and thought of you and your team”.&nbsp; Even better, if your company produces valuable thought leadership pieces and white papers on topics relevant to your buyers, distribute those to your contacts with a personal note. If the public needs to pay for access to one of your company’s reports, see if you can get permission to distribute a free version to your key contacts. If you become a source of genuine, relevant content for your contacts, it’s much more likely that your emails will be read and answered.&nbsp;4. Invite them out Instead of sending an email asking for a response, send an email asking your contact for coffee, lunch or drinks when you’re next in town. If your company is holding an event, invite them and make them feel like a special guest by giving them advance notice of the event. Instead of the usual cocktails, consider inviting your most critical contacts to join you for a night at the theatre, a cooking class, or for an activity like bowling or axe throwing.&nbsp; The recipients of these types of invitations will remember the time they spent with you and start to think of you differently, making it more likely they will respond to you when you need to reach them for work.&nbsp;5. Offer to Buy Them a Virtual Lunch If you can’t travel to see your contacts on a regular basis, invite them to buy lunch on you – from a local restaurant of their choice. Then set a Zoom meeting during which you can have lunch together.&nbsp; Give them the options of Uber Eats or Seamless, and ask them to pick some menu items from a restaurant, so you can order it ahead of time and make sure it arrives prior to your meeting. There’s no need for your contact to actually eat on screen, but the offer of a free lunch delivered to their home or office may well get you the “in” you need to schedule a meeting.&nbsp;6. Become an Expert Easier said than done, but if you or someone on your team can develop genuine insight and expertise on a key aspect of the market that impacts your contacts at firms, they will be eager to hear from you and get the inside scoop. If you have tracked, for example, the number of firms with 1000 lawyers or more who license a certain type of technology and use it in a certain practice group, your customers and prospective customer may be interested in getting market updates from you. They may even want you to speak to their team so you can convey the update. If your company is big enough to have insights across a spectrum of the market, consider putting quarterly meetings in your contacts’ calendars, to provide them with real-time intelligence and data in which they have a vested interest. This will also go towards building a relationship, and will help you and your company develop credibility.&nbsp;7. Ask them to Speak If your company runs webinars or podcasts, or is affiliated with an organization or association that does so, reach out to your key contacts with speaking opportunities. Flattering your contacts by asking them to join you in thought leadership efforts will help them see that the relationship is a two-way street. They will see that you are helping them build a profile, and that you understand and respect their expertise.&nbsp; Having one of your senior leaders interview your contacts on a webinar that is then shared across social media is a good way to cement a relationship. This also goes for podcasts, or for writing opportunities – ask them for quotes that are published in your company’s white papers, ask them to collaborate on a blog. Any situation that you can manifest where you are working together with your contact will help ensure that you have consistent and ongoing communication with them.&nbsp;8. Get Someone Senior to Send the Email If you don’t have the relationship you need to get a response form a key stakeholder, think about who in your organization might have that relationship. A senior leader on an innovation team may not respond to an email from a salesperson at a company (which can be a challenge especially if you’re new to the team), but if she has a personal relationship with the CEO or head of sales, she will probably respond to an email sent by them.&nbsp; This is not a tactic to overuse, but if you’ve been trying to get in contact with someone for a while without success, having this in your back pocket as a last resort is useful.&nbsp;Watch out for our next Vendor Cheatsheet, which will kick off our Law Firm Procurement Series: breaking down the procurement process and identifying the relevant personnel involved. &nbsp;

How To Get a Response from Your Customer

In spite of its proximity to European countries such as France, Austria and Spain, where legal innovation is flourishing, Italy has still not seen a lot of development in this area.&nbsp;It’s impossible to regard the evolution of legal technology and legal innovation in any region in the absence of the regulatory framework within which the legal industry sits. In Italy, law is highly regulated. No alternative business structures are permitted for law firms, meaning that for the most part lawyers operate in associations with profits split across partners. Even practicing in-house carries license restrictions imposed by the National Bar Council. This restrictive environment means that lawyers are less likely to introduce cross-industry expertise into firm leadership, and less likely to invest heavily in high value technology that comes with a price tag that may generate concerns around the take-home profit-per-partner.&nbsp;Marco Imperiale, an Italian lawyer and the Innovation Officer at LCA Studio Legale in Milan, says that the limitations on practice and technology simply mean he approaches innovation in different ways. When his role was initially created, Marco became the first legal innovation officer in the country.&nbsp;“I focus on both tech and non-tech innovation – such as third party funding, legal design, sustainability. If you put fifty Chief Innovation Officers for law firms in the same room, you’ll notice that everyone is doing a different job. I am lucky to be involved in a significant number of different kinds of projects.”&nbsp;Regarding the technology aspect, Marco says “in Italian law firms it is very hard to work with a data-oriented mindset, although we are ahead of the curve.” Trying to be innovative in an environment that is not yet open to new ways of doing things has its challenges. “Let’s put it this way. We try to be 2030 in a country that looks a lot like 2010, especially compared to the uptake of legaltech tools in the US, UK or some Asian countries”.&nbsp;For a country with a population of sixty million people, there are a large number of lawyers in Italy – almost 250,000. However, the legal market features fewer large deals than in some of the neighboring European economies, and it is generally characterized by small and mid-sized firms. A good number of lawyers working for larger firms are employed in the Italian offices of international firms. For the most part, Italian lawyers service individuals or the country’s own companies, which tend to be on the smaller side – 85% of Italian companies have fewer than 50 employees. And, Marco says, these corporate clients aren’t asking for innovation in the same way that clients in other jurisdictions are.&nbsp;“If we consider all the Italian firms, the technology available in Italy is still at its early stage,” Marco says. “Legal technology is not considered an emergency. When clients will consider it as an emergency, and some of our clients are already on that path, there will be a huge step forward”.&nbsp;Marco says it’s not that his firm isn’t investing in technology, but rather that they are an exception. However, as in other regions, COVID has had an influence on digital transformation, particularly in the increased confidence lawyers have in digital tools. This is a positive development for people like Marco, who hopes that the post-COVID world will see a boost in the adoption of digital solutions.&nbsp;It’s likely that language also plays a role in the scarce development of legaltech in Italy. The Italian language is in limited use across the world compared to, say, French or Spanish. Consequently, the incentive for vendors to enter this market is low. The cost of customizing an existing tool for the Italian language outweighs the benefits of new-market penetration. The industry therefore remains far less automated and the work less standardized than in many other jurisdictions.&nbsp;“You know how it works. You need to train the machines, which means investing time and effort, and both of them have an economic value from the firm’s perspective. More than this, lawyers really like plug-and-play software. This means that unless a tool is really ready to go (and this is very difficult from a practical point of view) it is unlikely to be adopted”.&nbsp;Some lawyers in Italy use tools to augment their legal practice because they work in the outpost of an international firm, or in a larger firm like Marco’s. “For a practice management tool – maybe the US leadership of a firm will pay for an Italian customization for internal use. Or maybe the partners will decide to carry on with the investment because they see the added value. But for smaller, national firms, such expenses are not considered essential”.&nbsp;However, the glass is not always half-empty. “I believe we are a very creative and flexible country; therefore, I am optimistic regarding the rise of legal tech, especially in the mid-term. We just need the right stimulus,” says Marco. “Moreover, I’d stress that it’s not only a matter of tools, but of implementation, and it’s hard to find a country that focuses more on emotional connection than Italy”.&nbsp;This is an interesting point, the notion that implementation and uptake of technology may be influenced by the nature of the people in a region, and by the emotional authenticity of their communications.&nbsp;A scan of the legal technology companies currently operating in Italy, however, reveals only a handful of entities. Two of these offer practice management functionalities for law firms. One is targeted at corporate clients, for contract lifecycle management, and the others are compliance tools. However, there are ten chapters of Legal Hackers operating across the country, signaling a rising interest in legaltech among law students and the younger generation of lawyers in Italy. After LCA created a role dedicated to innovation, other firms have followed suit and there are now four innovation roles in the Italian legal industry. In 2012, Italy’s “Start-Up Act” was passed (Decree-Law 179/2012), providing support and various incentives to companies that can be classified as innovative technology start-ups. The country’s first Legal Tech Forum was held in 2015, organized by the IP-focused Italian legaltech start-up Koprja. The forum is now an annual event that has also spawned an online educational platform (Legal Tech Academy), to keep lawyers updated on the legal technology ecosystem.&nbsp;Marco points out that Diritto al Futuro, an event dedicated to the future of legal profession, organized by ASLA – an association that includes most of the Italian big law firms - brought 2000 people to the Italian stock exchange last year. “This means that both students and lawyers are feeling the necessity of riding the legal technology wave. If they don’t, they’re likely to pay a significant price”.&nbsp;This groundswell of activity is indicative of approaching change. In spite of the continued heavy regulation of the legal market in Italy, we may soon start to see some legaltech evolution in this region.&nbsp;*This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.babel-law.com/">Tower of Babel - A Legaltech Blog</a> on September 14, 2020. It is republished here with the author's permission.

Regional Snapshot: What's Happening in Legal Innovation in Italy

Driving adoption of new technology and new processes is a challenge in law firms and corporate legal departments. Even though it's clear that a new system will markedly improve the way a lawyer works, and increase their efficiency and productivity, it can be difficult to get them to pause for long enough to learn how to use the new technology and integrate it within their workflows. Firms and legal departments are responding to this challenge by hiring professionals internally whose responsibilities include change management and adoption, or by bringing in external consultants to support change management and adoption efforts around a specific project. To shine a light on tried and true methodologies for driving adoption, we went out to speak with &nbsp;experts and have collected their top tips for addressing this challenge. We’ll be publishing a series of Adoption Best Practices over the next few months: this is the first. Elisabeth Cappuyns, Director of Knowledge Management at DLA Piper One of our more successful approaches was a concierge service approach. Instead of asking the attorneys to learn yet another type of technology, whether they thought they wanted or needed it, we had somebody who became an expert within the firm to help them through it. The concierge had the demo and was positioned as the person in the firm who could answer questions. This approach was beneficial to leverage when the attorneys were too busy to learn anything new and tired of using new technology tools. To entice the lawyers to use the tool, the team provided a value-add and offered to do all the closing sets for the next month. Afterwards, it was easier to mention all the tool's additional functionalities and the supporting concierge resource. This value-add allowed the attorneys and paralegals to get familiar with the tool by seeing it in action and to dive in as they knew they would have a back-up if needed.&nbsp; Lucy Bassli, Founder and Principal at InnoLaw Group Technology adoption cannot be successful if you have not done the preparatory work in advance. The pre-work focuses on the users, the process flow, and how things work today. We are constantly reminded that technology cannot be implemented on top of processes that have not been optimized and for people who have not been prepared. Readiness is critical to bring in technology to become more efficient, more effective, and streamlined. There needs to be an initial investment in completing the unsexy work that people don't want to do before they get their shiny new tool. Elizabeth Wilkinson, Lead Practice Innovation &amp; Knowledge Counsel at Paul Hastings&nbsp; We've had success in leading with the problem we are trying to solve rather than the resource or tool that solves it. For example, we often highlight our tools by first identifying the use case or pain point: "Are you trying to do X," "Are you looking for Y," "Have you ever wanted to Z," and then responding with the tool that addresses the problem. Catherine Bamford, CEO and Founder of BamLegal Adoption boils down to three components: the project starts small, it's promoted by lawyers to lawyers, and is sponsored by senior members. First, starting with small and not trying to do a project firm-wide that impacts every department or jurisdiction is vital. Instead, try incrementally growing from the original use case and leveraging the butterfly effect of lawyers as advocates. Secondly, lawyers listen to other lawyers: if you start with a small group and then ask that group to present or do a webinar on the project, the other lawyers will listen to each other a lot more. For example, a law firm's corporate department I worked at had an annual retreat where a partner from Germany talked about their innovative projects, which is much more powerful than the legal tech team trying to speak to everyone. Finally, sponsorship and having the senior members of the team promote, reward, and encourage the use of the new tool being rolled out is essential. This helps position the innovation team as a critical specialist team driving strategic change for the organization.Lewis Bretts, COO and Chief Legal Engineer ar SYKE It’s a cliché – but sharing data and feedback is a crucial driver of adoption. We always encourage project teams to circulate a regular report to business stakeholders showing who is (and isn’t!) using the platform and how they’re using it. This quickly shows what’s working and what isn’t, and usually helps to create a healthy sense of competition. Negative trends should be called out, and the remedial action shared in the following report. This helps create a sense of mutual accountability between users and project owners. Simon Wormwell, Chief, Strategic Enterprise Initiatives at Osler, Hoskin &amp; Harcourt LLP Not overselling the impact of a new technology or a new process is an important aspect of adoption. In other words, managing the expectations that the new technology is simply a tool within a toolkit that will hopefully make one area of your practice better. Successful adoption comes from setting up a context for success and being very honest and transparent with the functionality and probable outcome. KM and legal innovation leaders need to caution over promising, which typically comes from high budgets or long implementation periods. There’s an assumption that if we’ve spent this much or this long implementing the tool, it must do great things.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Adoption Best Practices: The Experts Speak

The model for law firm sales lags far behind that of other businesses, even as new technology and data solutions become available to support business development. There persists a notion that business development in law firms should be predominantly driven by partners and through word of mouth. By contrast, SAAS companies have developed highly effective sales strategies, leveraging digital tools and a data-driven approach. This article will discuss the advantages for law firms of steering away from a partner-focused sales model to one based on the proven strategies of SAAS companies. Business development and sales tactics in law firms remain largely entrenched in tradition, with marketing professionals failing to adopt the new tools offered by the market. In other industries sales practices have changed dramatically as the software supporting business development has evolved. SAAS companies in particular have proven success by adopting data-driven approaches and leveraging automation tools. If law firms adopted similar strategies to SAAS companies and avoided relying exclusively on a partner-driven sales approach, they could drive more sales and significantly increase revenue. Partners are not Sales People The partner-focused sales approach used by law firms for decades has been successful in many respects. Studies show that many top tier firms get most of their work through word-of-mouth or repeat clients. There is considerable risk of confirmation bias in these studies, however. It’s hard to know what additional work law firms could be bringing in if they deployed additional mechanisms for business development beyond the tried-and-true partner model. The typical law firm structure means that, in addition to the hefty legal responsibilities that come with the promotion to partner, there are also significant business development expectations. Partners are not natural salespeople, so it’s problematic when lawyer-driven business development practices constitute the main sales strategy for a firm. Unlike a trained salesperson, with years of successful experience to show for it, a partner rarely has sales training and legal expertise is a world away from the tactical planning that makes for successful sales. Requiring partners to be almost exclusively responsible for generating their own business does not set partners up for efficiency in practice, and potentially reduces their ability to leverage their most substantial skill set. Partners are legal experts, not sales superstars. Similar to how it would be absurd to ask a senior software developer to generate new clients and close business leads, it is inefficient to ask partners to take on the full weight of this dual responsibility. To further understand this dynamic, we sat down with Jeff Berardi, Partner at Baretz+Brunelle. Jeff confirmed that most law firms do not maintain formal sales functions. Although there are exceptions to the rule, the reality is that only a small percentage of firms have made a concerted effort to recruit, train, and manage outside sales professionals who are not existing partners in the firm. He also shared that there are often robust business development departments in law firms where the sales professionals serve in a sales support role. They provide law firm lawyers with assistance and direction on client pitches, proposals, event management, and in other related support activities. Changing how law firms do sales is an important opportunity for growth and increased revenue. Law firms could be bringing in much more business by leveraging new tools and adopting modern-day sales models. Current Systems are not Working Although most law firms invest in customer relationship management (CRM) software and corollary strategies, such as email outreach campaigns, these investments consistently under-deliver for a few reasons: 1. CRM platforms used in law firms rely on lawyers' manual input. Lawyers are tasked with spending hours that could be spent billing manually imputing data on their clients and potential clients instead of relying on automation software. When relying on manual data entry, these systems are scant, providing inadequate data to be truly helpful. &nbsp;2. Processes are rarely implemented to ensure that pertinent data is automatically populated. If firms focused on improving the automated capture of relevant data it would allow lawyers to rely more heavily on CRM software, and free up their time. &nbsp;3. Ultimately when data inputs are insufficient, systems become useless. CRM platforms are expensive investments for law firms but in the absence of processes to ensure the data they capture is useful, the return on investment will be low to minimal. Poor customer relationship management in any business has consequences including potential decreased productivity and growth, as well as missed opportunities in the long run. Another issue impacting sales is that cross-functional collaboration is lacking in law firms. Jeff Berardi shared that he often sees a disconnect across the marketing communications, business development, and sales functions. If each of these functions are acting independently of one another, there are lost opportunities. Even in those situations where there is partial or full integration across these different functions, there are often additional steps or initiatives that can be taken to streamline the sales process or to make it even more effective. To illustrate, Jeff shared the following example: “we are seeing really great results for clients that employ a campaign-based approach driven by compelling content that blends opportunities related to greater awareness of services, direct engagement with clients through the use of thoughtful content, and targeted client development efforts.” The SAAS Sales Model A critical aspect of a SAAS sales model is demand generation. Many SAAS companies will have employees dedicated exclusively to generating potential clients. Instead of waiting for inbound clients, their responsibilities concentrate solely on developing leads, increasing awareness and calling clients. They are specialists with extensive training in sales development and years of experience in leveraging data-driven approaches. There are many benefits to this model, including the ability to drive proactive outreach campaigns and undertake data-driven prospecting. From a marketing perspective, law firms could similarly leverage digital marketing trends to drive more business. Law firm marketing departments typically focus on broad-based, mass communication marketing tactics, including client alerts, thought leadership distribution, webinars, and social media. In contrast, B2B businesses opt for a more personalized, behavior-based approach to marketing. As a proactive alternative, most other industries have adapted to a model that pulls clients into highly personalized digital campaigns that align to their specific needs at the precise right time. To further understand the opportunity law firms stand to gain from embracing digital marketing, we spoke with Shade Vaughn, an expert in data-driven marketing. Shade is the Chief Growth and Communications Officer at Paul Hastings, an international Amlaw 25 firm based in New York. Shade was hired from outside of the legal industry from Cap Gemini, in a bold move that appears designed to modernize the firm’s approach to business development. Shade shared that the foremost opportunity for law firms in digital marketing is within behavioral intent tools. These tools are "illuminating the dark funnel," he explained, meaning they can help lawyers become exceptionally good at understanding what their current and prospective clients need. It helps anticipate incoming business and what the client needs. Shade explained that reaching out to prospective clients after they appear in the media or after a ruling that potentially impacted them is too late. Instead, lawyers should look to prospective clients' behavior patterns to decipher their next strategic move. By understanding what clients are researching online, the content they are consuming, and the remarks their leadership is marking in the media, lawyers can understand a client's business strategy. The next step entails discreetly exposing the prospective client to the law firm's experience, either through personalized advertisements, sponsored content, or even paid media. Shade emphasized that when there is a spike of interest in the law firm's advertising, there is a perfect opportunity to pick up the phone to suggest a meeting. New Approaches and Modern Technology There are now hundreds of offerings on the market that help law firms sell their services proactively and more effectively. In order to provide some examples, we sat down with two experts, Ed Walters from Fastcase, David Kamien and Mind-Alliance, and Laura Leopard from Leopard Solutions. We conducted interviews to understand their experience and opinions on how law firms can leverage technology. Tracking Clients' Market Activity The fundamental start-up theory prioritizes a client-first approach, where a deep understanding of clients and their pain points is crucial to any successful product. Law firms can benefit tremendously from tracking their clients' market activity. Ed Walters from Fastcase, a tool that provides cloud-based software for lawyers, helped us understand the current gaps and benefits. Ed shared that law firms currently track their clients' activities, but in an anecdotal way where they read legal news for mentions of a client. Proactively anticipating clients' needs and pain points is essential for business development. When an important client of a firm is sued, that client often has many options for representation, and it might be the most proactive firm that wins the client's business. Ed shared that a few firms have taken this approach by creating direct APIs from state and federal docket tracking services such as Docket Alarm. Some of these APIs can be set up to trigger direct emails to a firm’s relationship manager, or to automatically update the firm's internal business development tools. This kind of API alert no longer requires a software developer – it can be as simple as a search for the client's name turned into an email alert or an API that syncs directly with the firm's CRM or KM system. Firms with automated alerts can proactively reach out to clients days before litigation is reported in the news, which provides an actionable strategic advantage in winning business. &nbsp;Company Profiles and Intelligence Reports&nbsp; When law firms opt for producing company profiles and reports manually, it can overburden human resources such as research services teams, and harm the efficiency of business development activities. On-demand automations save time and provide effective alternatives. MindPeer BD is an example of one of these automation products, allowing partners to easily access automatically generated information regarding prospective clients. In fact, David Kamien, CEO at Mind-Alliance, believes that the key to making this practice more efficient is templated automations and API-driven feeds from multiple data sources. Within this process of knowledge sharing and collaboration, it is essential to avoid email traffic with static PDF, Word and PPT attachments. David advocates instead for dynamically updated company profiles that are interactive and can be used asynchronously. This practice ultimately provides partners with high-value client insight reports, and frees up data analyst’s time. Leveraging Data Law firms manage much internal data on employment, deals, and client information. In many cases, however, other types of internal data are tracked poorly. For example, alumni data, which firms use as a vital business development tool and recruitment, is often incomplete and outdated. Laura Leopard, the CEO of Leopard Solutions (a software that provides legal recruiters, attorneys, law firms, corporations &amp; law schools with legal intelligence data) shared that "having up-to-date and accurate internal data provides the firm with a report card on how well they are doing with lateral and entry-level hiring. The strength of any data set depends on the quality of the data, which is why we place such a high focus on quality at Leopard." According to Laura, data should be the backbone of decision-making for two main reasons. Firstly, firms need reliable benchmarking data to see how well they are doing compared to their peers. They need to identify competitors in each location and each practice area. Unfortunately, their outside data is often lacking, meaning they require data service providers such as Leopard Solutions to supplement it. Secondly, Laura believes that data-based decisions are the best path to success. Data provides the framework for essential decisions such as next hires, competitors, new office locations, etc.&nbsp;&nbsp;The benefits of data-based decisions are vast, but one large plus – especially in the current market - is that they can lower the risk of employee moves, both big and small. Being grounded in good, solid data grants more confidence in making big decisions.&nbsp;*This article first appeared on LinkedIn, on April 18, 2022. It has been republished here with permission of the author.

The 'S' Word

That’s it – you’ve made the sale.&nbsp;&nbsp;Or as good as made it, anyway: you’ve been told you’re in the budget, or in the review process. The firm has your pricing proposal, your terms, a draft contract. You’ve provided all the security documentation they asked for.&nbsp;&nbsp;And then, a month goes by. Another month. You hear nothing. Crickets. You email your contact, wait a respectful amount of time, email again – no response. The end of your sales quarter is coming up, and you can’t get anyone to speak to you, at a lead you already told your boss was a sure conversion.&nbsp;What happened? Why do law firms go silent just when you think you’re on the verge of a sale?&nbsp;As someone who has just left large law and spent a good deal of time navigating the procurement process, let me give you some insight into what’s happening on the law firm side. Here are five reasons law firms go silent.&nbsp;&nbsp;<ul><li>They Don’t Have Any Information About What’s Happening</li></ul>&nbsp;The internal procurement process at some firms is as much of a black box to your internal contacts as it is to you. Even if the spend or investment of a new solution has been tacitly approved, there are many steps to move through before the new solution can be greenlit and a contract signed. In some cases, this is the case even for a pilot or proof of concept. The stakeholders involved in the procurement process don’t all report up to the same decision-maker, and the way they work together (or don’t) varies from firm to firm, as do the many steps that make up the start-to-finish procurement process. Your contact may be holding off on getting back to you until they can figure out where your project sits in that process.&nbsp;<ul><li>There are Five (or Ten) Projects Ahead of Yours</li></ul>&nbsp;At large organizations in particular, there are many projects happening at once, all in different stages of onboarding and implementation. Your technology solution might solve a clear use case and have solid internal support, but it is almost certainly only one of several – or many – products that your internal contact is shepherding through internal processes. It’s likely that there are a number of other vendors in the queue before you, and your contact is busy responding to them.&nbsp;&nbsp;<ul><li>They Get 500 Emails a Day&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;The high number of simultaneous projects and the intensity of ongoing work within a firm means that legal innovation, operations or KM folk these days are under fire from emails in the same way that many lawyers are. On top of that, especially since Covid, meetings have proliferated and your contact may be sitting for 10 hours a day in back-to-back meetings while emails pile up. Unless there is movement on your project, your check-in is unlikely to be top of their list to action once they get a chance to deal with the back-log. It’s also possible that your email has been lost in that back-log, which is why a polite follow-up after a decent amount of time is warranted (and will often be appreciated).&nbsp;<ul><li>There’s Nothing They Can Do For You</li></ul>&nbsp;The distributed nature of procurement in legal organizations (and law firms in particular) means that there is no one decision-maker who can push things through. If your project has been approved in the budget, or your solution has been put forward for procurement, it likely means that your contact has completed all the necessary steps over which they have direct control. Once the paperwork has been submitted, your contact loses sight of the various feasibility, resource, and security reviews that need to be conducted before a contract is reviewed. At this stage, there’s little they can do to drive the process or to help you move things along.&nbsp;<ul><li>You’re Being Pushy</li></ul>&nbsp;The unfortunate truth is that procurement and law firm sales cycles take a long time. That is frustrating not just for you, but for your internal contacts – the reason you have a project in-flight is because they want to work with you, which means they want to see the procurement process completed. But if you are sending emails every few days or even every week, you may lose favor. Your contact will tell you when there’s something to report. A check-in every now and then is fine, but give them some breathing space.&nbsp;&nbsp;Regardless of the reason, it’s annoying when a law firm prospect is ghosting you. Is there anything you can do to break through and get a response? Check out the next LTH Vendor Cheatsheet to find out.&nbsp;

Why Law Firms Go Silent During the Procurement Process

Depending on the type of technology you’re selling, the people you need to connect with inside a law firm will vary. For some vendors, the finance department is important, for others the library or research department, for others still the KM director, or the CTO, and so on. From the outside, it can be hard to determine who you should be speaking to or what the role is of the person with whom you’ve been communicating. How much connection to or influence do they really have on procurement decisions? What do they need from you that would actually push things forward internally?&nbsp;In this Vendor Cheatsheet, the team at Legaltech Hub gives you a breakdown of the key roles in law firm procurement – who they are and what role they play during the buying process. Over the next few Vendor Cheatsheets, we will take the time to delve deeper into each of these roles to give more information and provide insight into how to manage the various stakeholders in procurement to ensure a smooth road towards execution and implementation.Innovation&nbsp;Key roles include Innovation Manager, Director of Practice Innovation, Chief Innovation OfficerAt firms large enough to have a separate department or function for Innovation (also called Practice Innovation), the leaders of that function are key decision-makers when it comes to technology that operates within or enhances legal workflows, and should be considered key stakeholders for most vendors.&nbsp;Foundational technology is an exception to this rule. Innovation is not generally tasked with decision-making or procurement of the keep-the-lights on kind of technology that keep the administrative side of a legal organization humming (IT is the key decision-maker here). For foundational technology such as document management and timekeeping that involve lawyer workflows, however, innovation staff will be pulled into discussions and are still worth connecting with.Knowledge Management (KM)&nbsp;Key roles include Director of KM, Chief Knowledge OfficerHistorically, much of the innovative work in law firms was led and managed by KM departments. In fact, innovation has evolved out of KM in many law firms, and the two functions are often linked under one department.What does that mean for you?Don’t treat KM as a secondary library function – it’s not. KM is often where much of the true innovation sits at a firm, and KM leaders are therefore strong decision-makers when it comes to procuring legal technology. In firms where there is no separate innovation function, KM should be your go-to (unless your solution is foundational technology or supports end users other than lawyers). Even where there is a separate innovation function, KM will often be a key stakeholder.Though some vendors fear that centralized KM or innovation teams can stand in their way and hold up procurement, the reality is that a good KM or innovation leader will act as your biggest internal advocate.Research Services&nbsp;Key roles include Director of Research Services, Library ManagerIf a firm has a centralized research services function, any research or research-related solution will need to go through the research services team. Sometimes business intelligence tools will also fall to this function. This team is tasked with ensuring that every practice at a firm has the research resources it needs in order to operate at its best.Unfortunately, research and library teams are frequently undervalued by law firm leadership. This results in pressure being put on research teams to keep research budgets flat, which often means that if they bring something new on board, they need to give up something else to compensate – thereby removing a resource from the lawyers.The restrictions from firm leadership on research spend is in direct contrast to the needs of the lawyers, who want to feel they have every possible research resource at their fingertips when serving their clients.The tension thus created for some research services groups does make it harder for them to proactively canvas for new solutions.&nbsp;What does that mean for you?If your solutions is research oriented, research services is a key relationship for you but the lawyers will be better drivers towards procurement and you will need to develop relationships there too.Business Development / Marketing&nbsp;Key roles include Director of Marketing, Chief Marketing OfficerIn projects involving the procurement of technology supporting marketing teams or empowering business development at a law firm, business development will be a key stakeholder. Examples of such projects include CRM, experience management, anything to do with pitches and proposals, and the procurement of data sources to populate such systems.&nbsp;Business development is rarely a sole stakeholder and IT will usually be critical in decision-making for these projects, along with other departments (such as KM for experience management, for example). Typically, business development professionals do not have the skills around technology selection that innovation and KM teams have, and so they will lean more heavily on IT to support a project and even select the right technology for the function.Finance Department&nbsp;Key roles include Chief Financial Officer, Director of Finance ApplicationsThere are certain key projects – billing, invoicing, client intake, business intelligence platforms – where the finance department of a law firm will act as one of the key decision-makers in procurement. These can be difficult projects from the vendor side because, when finance is involved, they are rarely the only important stakeholder. For business intelligence projects, any number of other departments could be equally critical in decision-making, and for lawyer-facing finance projects the lawyers and law firm leadership must be involved as well as the finance department and, possibly, KM or innovation.Similar to business development projects, finance does not have the skills to develop technology requirements and select technology platform that are fit-for-purpose, so IT leaders are important decision-makers in finance projects.Other Business UnitsDepending on the project, other business units might be stakeholders or even key decision-makers in relation to the procurement process. Talent or recruitment, for example, will be intrinsic to decision-making around the implementation of recruitment technology or work allocation systems. The diversity and inclusion team is relevant to procurement of any client-driven panel management solutions or tools allowing for the tracking and distribution of legal operations metrics.&nbsp;Similar to projects involving finance or business development, these business units rarely have the expertise to develop requirements and decide on the right solution for internal needs. IT will always be instrumental in these projects, though the relevant business unit will drive the business case for investing financial and human resources in procuring and rolling out the new technology.IT&nbsp;Key roles include Director of IT Applications, Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology OfficerAny technology investment by a law firm will ultimately come through the IT department at some stage. Many vendors make the mistake, however, of believing that the CIO is the most critical stakeholder in procurement decision-making for all technology decisions. This is not the case, though the CIO or CTO should certainly be treated as a critical stakeholder.Unlike KM, Innovation and various other departmental stakeholders, the IT department often does not have the understanding of legal work that allows for decision-making around practice-specific or legal workflow technology. It is therefore common for projects involving that sort of technology to involve lawyer end-users and the KM or innovation teams as decision-makers, with IT pulled in for resourcing and implementation. A rule of thumb is to treat IT as more critical in those projects that involve foundational or administrative technology, or that are being driven by business functions at the firm that do not have the experience with technology to support decision-making around product-fit.&nbsp;A relationship with the CIO is always a good thing. Just don’t treat it as the only relationship that’s important.Partners and LawyersWith any practice-facing technology, the temptation is to go straight to the lawyers to sell – both because they are the end-users, and because law firms are partnerships. The partners are part-owners of the business, so they must be decision-makers in purchase decisions, right? Wrong. Procurement decisions do not go through partners, though partners can be influential drivers.&nbsp;There are a few pitfalls with selling to partners. It’s worth noting the following:• Partners understand their own legal practice, so with research resources they will have a good sense of what is already available to their group and whether something new will be helpful or not – and they will likely act as advocates for getting a solution in if they think it will help them when giving advice to clients. This means that, for research solutions, having an open line with relevant lawyers is important. • Partners rarely understand technology. They don’t know what the firm currently licenses, they have no sense of overlap between tools, and although they might think something looks cool when they see a demo, they don’t understand the complexities of requisite integrations, server requirements, resource lift, existing business plans, the firm’s attitude toward SAAS solutions etc.&nbsp; • Partners usually recognize their deficiency in this area, so after seeing a demo, they will go straight to the people who do have the requisite expertise – IT, KM or innovation. Regardless of whether you approach them first or not, it is these decision-makers (not the lawyers) who will end up deciding whether to take a project forward and who will drive procurement processes. • Some firms will blacklist vendors who go straight to the lawyers without first touching base with centralized teams in KM or innovation, because doing so can cause chaos and political turmoil for these teams internally.Key advice: if you have a research product, touch base with the relevant partners, as well as research services. If you have a foundational technology solution, work with IT. If you have a practice technology solution, speak to KM and Innovation. A solid KM and Innovation team will bring relevant end users into the discussion and develop champions among them to support the business case for procurement.Law Firm Leadership&nbsp;Key roles include Managing Partner, Executive Director, Chief Operating OfficerAlthough law firm leaders such as managing partners, executive directors or COOs will rarely be visible during meetings around procurement in large law firms, they are key decision-makers for certain aspects of technology investment. Most often, the executive director (ED) or COO (a firm will usually have one or the other) oversees the budget for business expenditure and will therefore be called upon to provide approval for any significant technology investment.In firms where there is a tight annual budgeting and business planning process, the ED or COO won’t necessarily need to be involved in each individual decision because budgets and projects for the year will have been approved prior to the start of the financial year.&nbsp;Managing partners are less likely to be called in on budgeting decisions but may be involved in the selection or decision-making process for enterprise wide technology that impacts all lawyers, such as a new document management system.In smaller firms, the managing partner or COO is more likely to play a key role in all decisions about new technology, not just for approving the budget but also deciding whether or not a project goes ahead and whether a particular investment is an appropriate strategic priority for the firm.Information Security&nbsp;Key roles include Chief Security Officer, Director of Information Security With cyber risk increasing every year, information security (infosec) will always play a key role in reviewing technology that a firm is considering procuring. Sometimes infosec is part of the IT department, but in some firms it’s a separate function.Although infosec is not a decision-maker in that they will not be deciding which technology the firm should invest in, they may have veto power if a vendor is unable to provide relevant security certifications and standards.&nbsp; This is typically a back-end function and it’s unlikely at most firms that you will have a direct relationship with professionals in infosec, but they are a critical part of the procurement process and understanding what you can do in advance to ensure a smooth run through the security review is important.&nbsp; Ensuring you have all relevant information and certifications regularly updated and that you provide this information promptly upon request (or take the initiatives and forward it prior to the request being made) will help you with this stakeholder group.General Counsel’s OfficeKey roles include General Counsel, Deputy or Associate General CounselThe general counsel or office of the general counsel (“OGC”), is only sporadically involved in procurement. The OGC manages risk, though in a less technical way than the information security team, and will therefore be brought in to discussions that require some decision-making around potential liability, for example. In some firms the OGC is active in procurement and has a mandate that includes review of most new technology solutions. In other firms, the OGC rarely touches decision-making around new technology. &nbsp;Subsidiary LeadershipWhere a firm has created a subsidiary structure that sits outside the firm but is related to it, it can be confusing to understand who the decision-makers are. In this circumstance the key end users may not be the lawyers within the firm, but external clients or even other law firms.The CEO or ED of the subsidiary will be a key decision-maker, and it’s likely you will also be dealing with a product manager who can provide you with information about use cases and end users. As all law firm subsidiaries are set up differently, with business models that vary from one to the other, the key here is to develop a relationship with the relevant project lead and ask enough questions to understand what you can do to make the procurement process easier. &nbsp;

Who’s Who in Law Firm Procurement: A Primer

For the past few decades, the traditional law library has been transformed by the digitization of statutes, regulations, and commentary. Law Librarians and KM professionals have become the curators of an ever-expanding universe of commercial, dynamic data sources including company profiles, competitor profiles, experience data, insights into judges, experts, and arbitrators, deal data, dockets, and news. These data elements, when aligned and merged with internal administrative systems, can deliver strategic insights to power the ongoing evolution of the business and practice of law.In my last column, I referred a panel at this year’s AALL conference, The Law Library’s Role in Data Integration, APIs and Attorney Workflow Initiatives, which provided a goldmine of practical tips, experience and wisdom. During that panel, Erik Adams, the Manager of Library Digital Initiatives at Sidley Austin, provided an excellent “Checklist for Evaluating an API”, which is reprinted below with his permission. Checklist for Evaluating an APIStarting points (These can be answered by non-technical staff.) □ Does the API satisfy an information need? □ Is there another API or resource with the same information? □ What will the API cost? □ Will the API support a service provided directly to your institution’s users (i.e. law firm clients), or will it support an internal group?&nbsp; □ Can the costs of the API (if any) be recovered? □ Will the API have a large number of users, or will it be a niche product? □ Are any of your peer institutions using the API?Non-technical things to look for (A vendor representative can probably answer these questions if the answers are not easily found on the Internet.) □ Is there documentation for the API? □ Is there formal support available directly from the vendor?&nbsp; □ Is there a community of users that can provide informal support (i.e. a Reddit forum or a vendor hosted discussion web site)? □ Are there user groups or conferences for the API?Somewhat technical things to look for (A vendor representative or friendly developer will be needed for these questions.) □ Is there sample code that demonstrates how to use the API?&nbsp; □ Is the sample code in the programming language preferred by your institution (i.e. for C# and .Net for law firms, Python for academic institutions) □ Will the data need to be processed or combined with data from another source to be useful?Really technical things to look for (A developer will be essential for these questions.)&nbsp; □ Can the new API be easily integrated into existing systems? □ Is the API easy to understand?&nbsp; □ Is the documentation good?&nbsp;Getting StartedIt can be daunting to know where begin with data APIs. In spite of being such a trend, there is little practical guidance around on how to actually implement them. Fortunately, the AALL panel provided some basic advice for getting started on an API project.&nbsp;<ul><li>Identify use cases with internal and external stakeholders.&nbsp;</li><li>Evaluate both the data and the potential vendor.&nbsp;</li><li>Gather requirements and define the problem you want to solve or the process you want to improve.&nbsp;</li><li>Collect current data sources including taxonomies and vocabularies.</li><li>Consult subject matter experts regarding content and technology.</li></ul>The panel also discussed a variety of use cases for APIs. A client dashboard can integrate internal and external client data including a company profile, news, recent litigation, internal client billing information, documents in progress. APIs can track and analyze competitive intelligence and business development projects. News and docket feeds can be customized and integrated with internal data and distributed for business development. Client portals can provide custom reports, documents, and curated data from internal and external sources. APIs can also be used to automate the updating of databases or spreadsheet data.One Piece of Advice from Each Panelist…I asked each panelist to provide me with one piece of advice for readers who want to start an API project.Dave DiCicci (Senior Director of Product Management at LexisNexis):“Your API planning should be a highly collaborative process. Meeting with your vendor to whiteboard and document your workflow and the proposed solution helps you find an accurate solution to your organization’s unique challenges. With LexisNexis, it’s a highly consultative process. We like to have conversations with firms to understand exactly what their desired use cases are before we suggest the right API solution. In March of 2022, we launched the interactive LexisNexis Developer Portal to educate developers and allow them to make test calls against live data so they simplify the coding process."Erik Adams:&nbsp;“I would say my top piece of advice is that an API is not the be-all end-all goal. This applies both to businesses looking to use APIs, and to the businesses rushing to create them. We talked about this in the session: APIs are building blocks (like LEGO!), but by themselves they don’t really do anything. Like any technology, they are part of a puzzle and it takes investment by people with industry expertise and technical know-how to make APIs actually contribute to a business.”Keli Lea Whitnell (Senior Experience Database Manager at Troutman Sanders): “The vendor is just as important as the API/data (maybe even more important), so don’t discount the small and hungry vendors! Ask questions about the vendor in addition to the data: What is your development process/pipeline and product vision? Are you selling access to someone else’s data or proprietary data? How do you incorporate client feedback? How do you resolve reported data issues, including missing and incorrect data?”Emily Rushing (Director of Competitive Intelligence at Haynes &amp; Boone LLP):“Integrations of internal and external data can drive efficiencies and innovation in law firms, and librarians should be central to the discussions around that content and its use. Quoting the the chef in Ratatouille ‘Anyone can cook!.’ You don’t have to be a data scientist to create value for your firm and its use of APIs.”Pam Noyd (Information Resources Manager at Foley &amp; Lardner LLP):“If you’re just starting to work with APIs, be assured that you know more than you think you do because we’re already using APIs in our daily lives. Librarians know the resources and have established vendor relationships so don’t get bogged down by or be afraid of the technical aspects. In the simplest of terms, it’s about the data and bringing it into a platform for your users to digest. Engage internal and external stakeholders early and often.”ConclusionIt occurred to me that maybe the pandemic fostered the API revolution. Many library and KM teams were at the forefront of pandemic related projects. Tracking the ephemera from every level of government, aggregating, and parsing the data. Creating client-facing dashboards addressing COVID regulations for labor, insurance, privacy, civil rights, hospitality. In addition, the shutdown of a physical library certainly freed library directors and their teams from the management of physical collections. In addition, a remote workforce mandated the development of digital library solutions. Librarians and knowledge managers need to be key players exploiting the goldmine of commercial data sources for firm-wide API initiatives.&nbsp;

How To Evaluate and Get Started with Data APIs

Trend Alert: Smart Drafting

Move over algorithms and analytics… API was the hot buzzword at this year’s AALL Meeting and Conference in Denver. &nbsp;It seemed that every vendor had an API to pitch. I attended a “Standing Room Only” program, The Law Library’s Role in Data Integration, APIs and Attorney Workflow Initiatives, which provided a goldmine of practical tips, experience and wisdom. The program was moderated by Dave DiCicco, Sr. Director Product Management LexisNexis. The panelists included: Erik Adams, Manager of Library Digital Initiatives. Sidley Austin; Pam Noyd, Information Resources Manager, Foley &amp; Lardner LLP; Emily Rushing, Director Competitive Intelligence, Haynes &amp; Boone LLP; Keli Whitnell, Senior Experience Database Mgr. Troutman Sanders. The &nbsp;law library has been in a process of deconstruction. Over the past decades codes, cases and commentary have been untethered from print. Now algorithms and analytics surface patterns of data extracted from commercial and internal sources. Even before COVID-19 accelerated the death of the print library, law librarians had begun developing portals using APIs to deliver widgets, single purpose solutions for pulling data. But a new generation of API tools and market forces have driven APIs into the spotlight. Moderator Dave DiCicco positioned APIs in the context of law firms now having to compete with the Big Four consulting firms as well as alternative legal service providers (ALSPs). The Big Four have been in the business of managing and exploiting their experience and internal intelligence for decades. It is a matter of urgency for law firms to be able to compete with the efficiencies and streamlined services that those organizations offer. What is an API? &nbsp;An API is an application program interface that allows the automatic transfer of data from one program to another. We use them every day in commercial apps on our phone such as weather, PayPal, Netflix, and Expedia. Dave DiCicco compared APIs to LEGO. They allow firms to creatively reorder data extracted from a variety of sources in order to create new insights and workflows. Which Vendors Provide APIs? The short answer is – just about everyone. The list includes LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Fastcase/Docket Alarm, Bloomberg Law, Foundation, Trellis, Boardex, GovHawk, IBISWorld, Dun &amp; Bradstreet, Smartsheet, UniCourt, Pitchbook, iManage, Capital IQ, Clio, Lex Machina, Statescape, Courtroom Insight and even government agencies such as the SEC…. The list will continue to grow. &nbsp;How Can APIs Benefit Law Firms? Law firms are notoriously siloed organizations. These data silos include accounting, HR, marketing, professional development, conflicts, docketing and the library or Information Center. It is clear that using APIs to integrate internal and external silos can offer benefits in terms of risk management, business development, strategic planning productivity, and competitive intelligence.Why legal information and KM professionals are critical to maximizing the value of APIs.<ul><li>Librarians know how to evaluate the quality of information.</li><li>They are trained in taxonomy and can identify differences between internal and external taxonomies.</li><li>They are trained to conduct research interviews and are thus able to assess what information an organization needs to make discoverable to its key users.</li><li>They have relationships with major content providers.</li><li>They know how to negotiate contracts for digital content and can identify issues which could impact the cost, quality and usability of the data.</li></ul>Getting Started The panel provided some basic advice for getting started on an API project:<ul><li>Identify use cases with internal and external stakeholders.&nbsp;</li><li>Evaluate both the data and the potential vendor.&nbsp;</li><li>Gather requirements and define the problem you want to solve or the process you want to improve.&nbsp;</li><li>Collect current data sources including taxonomies and vocabularies.</li><li>Consult subject matter experts regarding content and technology. &nbsp;</li></ul>No one is better positioned to be the facilitator of a firm-wide API project than the professional researchers also known as law librarians. They have excellent knowledge of the commercial data already available at the firm and can easily understand how that data can add value to workflow and insights needed by administrative departments and practice groups across the firm. They hold a goldmine of data which is ready to be exploited for the business and practice of law.This article is the first in a series of reports on data APIs produced by LTH, culminating in a panel on the subject at the inaugural <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/inaugural-legaltech-hub-conference/">LTH Conference</a> on Friday, October 21 in New York. The second installment of this article, including a checklist for evaluating APIs, will be published on Friday, August 19. &nbsp;

If Data is the New Gold, then Law Libraries are a Goldmine: Panning for Gold with APIs

One of the benefits of working at an organization like Legaltech Hub that is continuously mapping and indexing the legaltech ecosystem, is getting a front-row seat to the emergence of new start-ups.&nbsp;From time to time, we’ll share with you some of the more interesting developments and new solutions we’re seeing in the market.Below, an outline of five new tools that we think everyone should know about.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/predicta/">PreDicta</a>Litigation or judicial analytics have been around for a while, and have recently had a resurgence of interest with the advent of data APIs allowing firms to more easily integrate external data sources to supplement internal data.These solutions reveal statistical patterns in historical data and allow lawyers to see, for example, how many motions of a particular kind in a certain court were decided successfully. Few of them, however, have taken the extra step of predicting outcomes of current or future cases.&nbsp;What it does: PreDicta takes that next step and predicts the outcome of motions before a court with a close to 90% accuracy rate. Users enter the case number of a live court case, whereupon PreDicta automatically looks up the case, including court, jurisdiction, and judge. Based upon historical data combined with a number of personal attributes of the judge (political leanings, gender, etc), PreDicta then provides an outcome prediction along with an accuracy rating indicating the certainty of its prediction.If you don’t have a case number, you can still use the technology by entering details about the case, including the judge or court before which it is being heard, in order to get a prediction.PreDicta covers just federal cases, and currently only provides predictions in relation to motions to dismiss. Legaltech Hub understands that the founders are moving rapidly to expand its ambit to include additional motion types.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/proceedy-timeline-by-proceedy/">Proceedy</a>Structure diagramming tools were a hot trend in 2021; will visual timelines be the equivalent for 2022?What it does: Proceedy Timeline allows lawyers to automatically generate visual timelines of a case, highlighting important events and connecting them to relevant parties in the case. By lining up important events in a timeline you will not only be able to illustrate the course of events to other parties, but also quickly and easily get an overview of the case.&nbsp;While Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis have long offered solutions allowing for the development of visual chronologies in a litigation matter, Proceedy provides a more modern, data-driven solution. Users can assign a starting date, end date, and time, to each point on a timeline, and each of those points can be connected to the people, issues, and documents in a case. Complex chronologies involving multiple timelines distinguished by theme can be easily generated.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/aidot-system-document-comparing-by-v500-systems/">AIDot Document Comparing</a>Over the past years, Litera has acquired most of the document comparison tools on the market, integrating them into Litera Compare. Only a few viable solutions continue to be independently available, including <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/novo-compare-by-evolution-software/">Novo Compare</a> by Evolution Software and Singapore solution <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/comparenow-by-alpha-legaltech/">CompareNow</a> by Alpha Legaltech. For firms that want to be able to perform comparisons at scale, the Litera Compare server has really been the only option on the market.Enter AIDot System Document Comparing by v500 Solutions, a new solution launched just this year to tackle precisely that problem.&nbsp;What it does: AIDot’s Document Comparing allows for at-scale comparisons, boasting the ability to “easily” compare 100 complex documents (500-pages each) simultaneously against the master copy and unlimited criteria specified by legal professionals. Powered by sophisticated AI technology (including GPT-3 NLP), this SAAS solution understands content, sentiment, semantics, and syntax of information within the compared documents.Document Comparing works across document formats, including PDFs.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/syncly/">Syncly</a>Data projects have been prioritized at many firms, with stakeholders recognizing that the inability to integrate data across systems makes it difficult to derive insights or advantages from the rich internal data that is now available at most modern organizations.The continued fragmentation of the legaltech ecosystem and the uptake during the pandemic of collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and HighQ also means that firms continue to rely on solutions that integrate between platforms.&nbsp;What it does: Syncly promises to solve these problems. Purpose-built for the legal industry, Syncly is a platform that allows law firms to create cloud-to-cloud integrations and workflows to securely create and move data within a law firm or law department from system to system.&nbsp;Syncly's plug &amp; play integration technology promises to allow users to build secure integrations “within minutes”, saving time and money otherwise spent engaging specialist developers.Integrations so far developed include: iManage, HighQ, Sharepoint, Netdocuments.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/the-workshop-platform-by-klaxoon/">Klaxoon</a>With many firms heralding a partial return to the office, the landscape of work has become more – rather than less – complicated. Effective hybrid working is difficult, with few platforms geared towards supporting it.&nbsp;Over the past two years, there has been a steep uptick in legal teams using flexible tools such as <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/https:/www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/miro/">Miro</a> and <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/mural/">Mural</a> to support workshopping and hybrid teams. Klaxoon has been developed specifically to address these needs.&nbsp;What it does: Klaxoon's Workshop Platform is a hybrid and complete workspace that promises to enable the smoother and more efficient running of every type of workshop: ideation workshops, design thinking, project management, customer meetings, team rituals, training sessions, business reviews, etc. The platform can be used on any device and provides for a variety of communication methods (text, image, video, gifts, questions, presentations, polls), giving rise to a solution that Klaxoon says is “ultra-collaborative”.&nbsp;Unlike the other solutions listed here, Klaxoon is not a new platform but is new to legal.&nbsp;

Five New Start-Ups You Should Know About

Law Schools in the United States have been historically focused on teaching students using caselaw research tools and techniques. In real practice, lawyers need to add a few more tools to their toolkit. During the past decade there has been an explosion of new tools, powered by algorithms and analytics which streamline a variety of traditional tasks which in the past took hours of time. During this period clients have also demanded that law firms leverage tools to make them more efficient. I have outlined below seven important new tools that can help a junior lawyer improve their work product while also saving time and avoiding errors.&nbsp;<ol><li>1. Brief Analyzers: Brief analysis tools go beyond cite checking. They not only identify whether the precedents cited in the brief are still “good law,” but they also use AI, natural language processing, and neural networks to recommend cases that you may have missed during your research. <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/research-by-casetext/">Casetext Cara</a> (part of Casetext Research) was the pioneer in this technology, but Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, and Lexis have all now developed brief analysis tools.</li></ol>&nbsp;When to use: There are three main use cases: when you are updating an older brief, and when you are finalizing a newly drafted brief (an important final step in the review process). Brief analysis tools can be used to locate weak or omitted precedents in an opponent’s brief.&nbsp;2. Know-how Tools: <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/practical-law-us-by-thomson-reuters/">Thomson Reuters Practical Law</a>, <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/practical-guidance-by-lexis-nexis/">LexisNexis Practical Guidance</a>, and Bloomberg Law Practical Guidance (integrated and available on the Bloomberg Law platform) are considered “know-how” tools. Treatises provide theoretical analysis; know-how tools provide a wealth of step-by-step guidance on how to perform a specific task. These guidance materials include checklists, flow charts, toolkits, practice commentary, and model documents. Know-how guidance materials can also be found in the Practicing Law Institute PLI Plus and Wolters Kluwer VitalLaw platforms.&nbsp;When to use: When you are trying to get up to speed quickly for a new assignment or when you are looking for a model document, form, process guidance, or checklist.&nbsp;3. Jurisdictional Surveys: Fifty-state statutory and regulatory survey functionality is available in Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and Wolters Kluwer SmartCharts (part of VitalLaw). These tools can save hours of research time by quickly generating a chart which compares laws on specific issues across multiple jurisdictions. Products typically provide a link to the full text of each law or regulation.&nbsp;When to use: If you are given an assignment to locate and compare the statutes or regulations on a specific issue across multiple states or even all 50 states, use a 50-state/jurisdictional survey tool.&nbsp;4. Docket Tracking and Case Alerts: The clerk of each court compiles case filings in a docket. Many states, counties, and local jurisdictions provide online access to dockets, but some do not. Lexis CourtLink, WestLaw Docket Track, Bloomberg Law, Docket Alarm and Courthouse News all offer docket tracking options.&nbsp;Tracking. Docket tracking functionality allows you to receive updates on a specific case. Tracks will generate an email alert whenever there is a new filing in that case. Most systems cannot send updates in real time. Instead, the program checks the docket at a set time each day. Check with your firm’s librarians / research analysts to determine the best resource for the specific tracking need.&nbsp;Alerting. Courthouse News, Docket Alarm and Bloomberg Law provide alerts when a particular individual is named in a complaint, when a company is sued, etc. Costs for trackers and alerts vary across platforms; so check with the librarian / research analysts in your organization to determine the most cost-effective way to set these up.&nbsp;When to use: When you are asked to monitor a specific case for new filings, or when you are asked to monitor new cases on a person, organization, or topic.&nbsp;5. Redlining Codes: There are several tools that can quickly redline and compare how the language in codes or regulations has changed over time. These tools are available in Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, and VitalLaw.&nbsp;When to use: It is sometimes necessary to pinpoint the language of the law at a specific point in time. Code redlining tools highlight changes between versions of a law or regulation.&nbsp;6. Litigation Analytics: Litigation analytics are an important new source of litigation intelligence. Litigation analytics aggregate docket data from multiple courts. Typical data elements include: party names, judges, attorneys, causes of action, motion type, and time to motion grant/denial An algorithm is used to extract, analyze, and generate reports. Lex Machina, Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, Trellis, Docket Alarm and Docket Navigator include litigation analytics. Gavelytics is a solution focused entirely in this area in the United States. In Canada, Court Analytics by Loom Analytics provides a similar capability.&nbsp;When to use: Most common uses are: gaining insights to the experience of your law firm, your opponent, or the judge assigned to your case; understanding how litigation outcomes differ depending on the court or judge; developing a litigation strategy; managing client expectations; or preparing for a pitch.&nbsp;7. Deal Analyzers/Deal Analytics/What’s Market: Transactional lawyers need to know what the most common deal terms and clauses are for a particular type of deal. A new class of drafting tools helps lawyers locate exemplar documents or clauses. These tools can redline and compare documents, identify the prevailing “market standard,” and generate deal analytics using filters such as parties, underwriters, deal value, industry, clause types, etc. These tools are available from Lexis Nexis Intelligize, Thomson Reuters Practical Law, Bloomberg Law, and Wolters Kluwer M&amp;A Deal Analytics.&nbsp;When to use: The use cases are limitless, but here are some sample scenarios:<ul><li>- During the drafting process, see what clauses your firm has used in similar prior deals.&nbsp;</li><li>- Compare your draft document with the market standard using custom criteria.</li><li>- See what clauses a counterparty has agreed to in the past.</li><li>- Generate a league table highlighting your firm's experience in an industry or involvement in certain kinds of deals.</li></ul>&nbsp;Bonus: Parallel SearchCasetext's Parallel Search uses advanced neural networks to provide a new kind of search. With help from a neural transformer model trained on the law, Parallel Search uses complete sentences to find you results with matching concepts, even if they use none of the same keywords. Use Parallel Search as a first stop for your legal research.&nbsp;Advanced Research and Workflow Tools&nbsp;<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Product Type</td><td>Westlaw&nbsp;</td><td>Lexis&nbsp;</td><td>Bloomberg Law</td><td>Other</td></tr><tr><td>Litigation Analytics</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>Lex Machina</li><li>Docket Alarm</li><li>Trellis</li><li>Gavelytics</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Brief Analysis</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>Casetext Cara</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Practical Guidance</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>PLI Plus</li><li>VitalLaw</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Dockets</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>Pacer</li><li>Courthouse News</li><li>Docket Alarm</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Redlining Codes</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>VitalLaw</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>50-State Comparison</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>VitalLaw</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>Deal Analytics Clause Redlining What’s Market</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>✓</td><td><ul><li>LN Intelligize</li><li>TR Practical Law</li><li>WK M&amp;A Clause Analytics</li></ul>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>Neural Network Search</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>Casetext Parallel Search</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>&nbsp;

Power Tools for Summer Associates: Seven Research / Workflow Tools You Didn't See in Law School

The problem of technology adoption in law firms has been a hot topic lately. This is not a new problem, nor is it one specific to technology. It’s a problem that likely dates back to the first time anyone tried to introduce new technology, new process, or indeed any change at all into a commercial legal environment.&nbsp;&nbsp;It’s also not a problem specific to legal. The problem of adoption is fundamentally a problem of change management, and the notion of resistance to change has been written about at length for decades.&nbsp;Change management in legal organizations does come with its own set of particular hurdles. Many of these are structural: the billable hour, budget requirements, partnership culture. These hurdles must be addressed, but they are systemic and will take years to shift. Other sources of resistance are the result of immature procurement processes, and a fundamental lack of understanding or internal expertise regarding successful culture change methodology. This latter category of obstruction is easier to tackle, and all firms seeking to keep pace with changes in the market will have to do so.&nbsp;The notion that there is some magic adoption tool or method that can be applied to turn things around when a solution has been rolled out unsuccessfully is, however, wishful thinking. That’s because the most significant reason for low adoption of technology and new process in law firms is timing.&nbsp;&nbsp;Most firms and organizations address adoption as an afterthought, or as the last piece in the implementation puzzle, rather than as the cushion in which every element of a project must be enveloped from beginning to end. Treating adoption as something that can be stuck on to the end of a project like pinning the tail on a donkey will ensure that the project has minimal impact on the organization. And yet in many legal organizations, that is what adoption has come to mean.&nbsp;Law Firm Projects&nbsp;Consider a typical technology onboarding process in many firms. A business unit initiates a project to implement a new technology platform. Frequently, the impetus for the project stems from one of the following:&nbsp;<ul><li>A need to upgrade an existing system,</li><li>New circumstances (e.g., Covid) give rise to a need for new solutions (e.g., platforms allowing for remote collaboration), or</li><li>Hype around a new technology gives rise to a perceived need to invest.</li></ul>&nbsp;Upon initiation of the project, the responsible department undertakes a brief scan of the market (usually by polling known professionals at similar firms) and undertakes an RFP process with three to five vendors. The requirements set out in the RFP are generated by the responsible department, focused around the needs of administrators of the technology, with minimal consideration for user needs. The perception usually is that it’s poor form to interrupt busy lawyers to ask them about a project that is considered a “business project” even when the end users of the technology will be lawyers. There is a similar reluctance to roll out new or newly configured technology until the configuration has been finalized. There is frequently a sense that showing imperfect or unfinished projects to the lawyers will reflect poorly on the business unit executing the project, which means that roll-out will occur only once the technology has been fully implemented, with bugs having been tested and ironed out. User acceptance testing, in this type of project, is almost always undertaken by a team within IT or a subset of users in another business unit – not by the actual end users themselves. Members of the IT department are often considered an appropriate pilot group. The first time lawyers see the new technology or interface is during training, once the roll-out has commenced. They frequently don’t know that the new technology is coming down the pipeline until they receive invitations to training sessions.&nbsp;&nbsp;I have seen this model of project implementation many times, not just for foundational software but also for solutions that were so obviously lawyer-facing that the absence of lawyers in the project framework seemed astounding. One such example was in relation to the roll out of a business intelligence platform designed to show lawyers key attributes about their matters – yet no one on the project team had thought to discover from the lawyers which attributes they considered critical. &nbsp;&nbsp;Organizations and business units operating in this way don’t intend to omit adoption or change management efforts from project planning. Indeed, it is usually built in to the plan as part of the roll-out. Once the software is ready, the executing business unit will apply their version of an adoption strategy – training and a communications plan with follow-up tips and advanced training available, for example. The expectation is that the training itself, and the communications around it, are sufficient to generate adoption and usage in the lawyer population. More than this – in many firms, “adoption” is defined in this way: it has come to be synonymous with a post roll-out communications program. The team conducting such training may even be called the change management team.&nbsp;&nbsp;After roll-out, if “adoption” hasn’t been done well or is proving unsuccessful, additional communications and training might be deemed necessary. Frequently, however, the organization will stop after the initial training program has been carried out. The training is often recorded and made available on a central learning platform. The project is deemed complete, even successful.&nbsp;The Need for Change&nbsp;From a usage perspective, however, the framework for project implementation outlined above almost always fails. It should surprise no one that the model does not work to drive adoption. It’s why so many document management systems have limited usage and why, after investing heavily in new timekeeping software that can automatically capture lawyers’ time, firms may find that few of their lawyers have switched on that capability. It’s why lawyers will frequently be surprised to find that their firm has licensed a particular technology solution, unaware of its existence even after what the firm has deemed a successful roll-out.&nbsp;&nbsp;The measures that law firms and business units running technology projects consider to constitute the adoption phase of a project are woefully inadequate. Project implementation in law firms is broken when adoption is considered an end game, an add-on, or even a fix applied post roll-out.&nbsp;&nbsp;Approaching adoption at the end of a project does not address even the basic initial steps of change management philosophy, and calling a team that conducts training or issues launch communications a change management team is an extraordinary misnomer. The organization has done nothing to explain to the lawyers in advance why the new technology or process is worth taking the time to learn, or what problem of theirs it is solving, or why they should care. At no stage of the project has the project team considered the lawyers – the users – as central to the project. As the end users of the technology, the lawyers are the most critical stakeholders of all, and yet they have been absent from the entire project. Ironically, the assumption made early in the project that interrupting the lawyers would be unwelcome has guaranteed that the project is undertaken in such a way as to make the lawyers feel like second-tier citizens. They haven’t been consulted about the new technology, and have been kept out of all decisions made about it – when instead, they are the users who should have been absolutely central to every such decision. Without the lawyers’ input, the organization has no way to know whether the technology selected or new configuration set up meets key user needs, or fits within legal workflows.&nbsp;&nbsp;When law firms talk about adoption problems, they mean that in spite of having done the “change” work at the end of the project, they are having difficulty getting usage on technology platforms. It is considered to be a problem that occurs after the roll-out of software. But anything done at the roll-out stage to “drive adoption” is paying no more than lip-service to change management. If you have an adoption problem, it started well before roll-out – it started before the project even commenced, when a decision to bring on new technology occurred in the absence of consultation with the end users of that technology.&nbsp;&nbsp;In order to be truly effective, adoption has to be addressed before a project has kicked off. Business units in legal organizations need to get over their fear of the lawyers – fear of interrupting them, fear of presenting something imperfect for their consideration – and instead step up and speak to lawyers like the critical stakeholders they are, from the very beginning of every project.&nbsp;&nbsp;To receive the next post in this series and learn about successful strategies for adoption and change management, subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of this page.

A Matter of Timing: Your Adoption Problem Isn't Happening When You Think It Is

Driving adoption of new technology and new processes continues to be a significant challenge in law firms and corporate legal departments. Even though it's clear that a new system will markedly improve the way a lawyer works, increasing their efficiency and productivity, it can be difficult to get billing lawyers to pause for long enough to learn how to use the new technology and integrate it within their workflows. Firms and legal departments are responding to this challenge by hiring professionals internally whose responsibilities include change management and adoption, or by bringing in external consultants to support change management and adoption efforts around a specific project. To shine a light on tried and true methodologies for driving adoption, we went out to speak with &nbsp;experts and have collected their top tips for addressing this challenge. This is the second piece in our series of Adoption Best Practices. The first part can be found <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/industry-analysis/adoption-best-practices-the-experts-speak/">here</a>.Adam Curphey, Senior Innovation Manager at Mayer BrownTwo things are vital for adoption: context and the “what’s in it for me” consideration. Context-wise, you need to show that the tool solves a problem in the exact practice/area of your intended user. If I had a dollar for every time a lawyer has said they support an innovation but can’t see how it applies to their practice, I would have…er…about fifty dollars. Contextualization is key. The “what’s in it for me” problem is trickier, but make sure you are selling the relevant advantages to the right people. A lawyer incentivized to work more hours might not want a time-saving solution, while a junior lawyer might not care about a tool that increases revenue if it makes their lives harder. What excites you about a solution is not necessarily what excites your intended user. In short, show your intended users how your solution works for them.Sam Spivack, Managing Director at BRYTERTaking adoption as a day by day piecemeal approach and not trying to solve everything at once is crucial. Your team should definitely have a grander plan, but you should start with honing on the specific pain point and then focus the adoption process around that. This means you need to really understand what you want to accomplish and the end goal. Don’t start with what this solution will do for the firm in five to ten years. Instead, consider the most immediate pain point you want to solve within the organization. This generally means there are key metrics and KPIs to assess against, which in turn will help build the business case. Moreover, vendors should be seen as partners in this process. The best technology companies invest in the support and consulting of their companies to really become a part of the team.Patrick Dundas, Special Counsel at Schulte Roth &amp; Zabel LLPIf I had to give this one adoption tip it would be to continue bringing the product to the front of the minds of the expected users. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so KM needs to press the flesh and continue trying to get face time with the attorneys. Although adoption can occur when the product is launched, it's constant, especially in a quick turnaround environment like law firms. There are many market offerings for proofreading documents, for example, that use AI to identify little proofreading edits, such as finding defined terms that aren't defined, or inconsistencies in a document. We’ve had about twenty different versions of this product in the past twenty years, but every two years, a significant portion of our workforce is replaced. As soon as one generation is trained, another generation comes. It's not uncommon when I'm talking to someone that they have no idea these tools exist. Adoption is a constant process of training. Hopefully, most firms have a dedicated training department where it is their mission to support adoption over the long term. When it comes to knowledge management and new tech, success often boils down to keeping a very open and consistent line of communication where you are continually asking people about their challenges in their practice area. Oftentimes, they'll mention things that we already have solutions for.Jason Dirkx, Director of Practice Innovation and Technology Solutions at Paul HastingsInvolving the stakeholders, or the attorney using the tool, in the procurement process as early as possible helps with adoption as they become champions for the product. This gives stakeholders the opportunity to see the technology capabilities from early on and have ownership in the decision to move forward with a pilot. This makes the stakeholders much more invested in seeing the partnership succeed and they become active champions within the organization.Adam Dedynski, Knowledge &amp; Development Professional Support Lawyer at White &amp; Case LLPCommunication, communication, communication. Lawyers are inundated with information so you need to make sure that any communication about your new KM technology or process is well crafted, timely, targeted, uses the best or mixed channels, and is appropriately repeated. Always remember your audience, as it needs to be very clear from the outset: “what’s in it for them?”. Are you a knowledge management or legal innovation expert or a legal tech vendor with ideas on adoption? Submit your best adoption tip to <a href="mailto:info@legaltechnologyhub.comLegalTechnology">info@legaltechnologyhub.co</a>m for an opportunity to have your tip featured!&nbsp;

Adoption Best Practices: The Experts Speak (Part 2)

We tend to fear what we don't understand. AI is no different. Our lack of understanding of the technology, and what it can and can't do has unfortunately led to sensational fear-inducing claims that lawyers will be replaced by robots.&nbsp; There is an inherent inevitability with technology. Just like computers, AI will eventually permeate every sphere of our professional and personal lives. AI isn't here to compete with legal professionals by replacing them. Rather, it will augment the legal profession in a way where manual grunt work is reduced so you can focus on more creative and higher-value work.&nbsp; In order to move beyond the buzzwords and educate colleagues in the legal space, the Simple Guide to Legal AI series is designed to help convey basic concepts and ideas around AI in a friendly and easy-to-understand manner. The better we can understand AI as a community and the more informed we are about what it can and can't do, the more effective our engagement with it and our use of it will be. Knowledge is empowering and enables us to act from a place of curiosity and explore what is possible. AI is here. The question is - are you ready to step into a future of collaboration with it?____________________________________The words AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning tend to get thrown around a lot. So much so that they have become buzzwords and don't really hold much meaning anymore. Every law firm now seems to be "doing" AI, but not many lawyers actually know what it means. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technique that leverages computers and machines to replicate the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. Machine learning (ML), on the other hand, is a branch of AI that uses data and algorithms to enable machines to learn how to perform specific tasks as a human would do. There are also AI systems that don't involve ML, such as systems which use symbolic reasoning. Deep learning (DL) is a branch of ML where algorithms are made up of several layers of neurons to mimic the structure of the brain. DL is a super specific category of ML and includes models like BERT, GPT-3 and Transformers. Uwais is the Founder of simplexico - The Legal AI Consultancy. He has over 5 years of experience designing, building and delivering Machine Learning and NLP solutions across leading legal tech start-ups and a corporate innovation lab. He has held roles as a Machine Learning Engineer at Eigen Technologies, and as a Senior NLP Data Scientist at Thomson Reuters Labs and ThoughtRiver. Uwais also holds a BSc and MSc in Physics from Imperial College London. Connect with Uwais <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/uwaisiqbal/">here</a>.

A Simple Guide to Legal AI - Part 1

The Different Types of AIA common categorization of the different kinds of AI is based on what the AI system is capable of doing. Researchers usually break AI down into two kinds: Strong AI and Weak AI.Strong AI refers to an AI system which has reached a level of human intelligence. The system can learn, perceive, understand, and function completely like a human being.At the moment, we haven’t developed such systems so Strong AI is still something purely theoretical. Many researchers are sceptical as to whether Strong AI systems are even possible.&nbsp;Strong AI is also known as general AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI).Weak AI refers to an AI system that can perform a specific and precise task like extracting a field from a document or clustering a set of documents. The AI systems we have today are all examples of Weak AI.Weak AI is also known as Narrow AI.The claim that AI will replace lawyers certainly grabs attention and is great for headlines. However, it's a claim about Strong AI. Strong AI systems are still a theoretical estimation - we don’t know if we’ll ever get to that point. It’s fair to say that lawyers are still around today and will be around for a lot longer than we think.Where AI can be useful in the legal profession is in the form of Weak AI. With a focus on specific tasks, AI systems can be developed to help scale expertise and save associates from hours of grueling grunt work.Natural Language Processing and its BranchesNatural Language Processing (NLP), not to be confused with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (also NLP!), is a branch of AI that enables computers to understand human language in both written and verbal forms. NLP sits at the intersection of AI and computational linguistics and draws on research from both fields.Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a sub-branch of NLP which uses syntactic (grammar) and semantic (meaning) analysis of text and speech to determine the meaning of a sentence.Natural Language Generation (NLG) is another sub-branch of NLP. While NLU focuses on how machines can understand text, NLG focuses on how machines can generate text in a way that is indistinguishable from human composition.NLP evolved from computational linguistics where the methods traditionally used were based on a statistical analysis of words in a text. More recently, with the development of Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms, NLP has been supercharged with models like BERT and GPT-3 that can process, understand and generate text in a way that hasn’t been possible previously.Some common applications of NLP in legal include:<ul><li>Extracting key fields from a collection of contracts as part of a due-diligence use case</li><li>Automatically organizing and clustering documents as part of an eDiscovery use case</li><li>Classifying documents against a pre-defined legal taxonomy</li><li>Comparing clauses to identify deviations in wordings and surface risky positions during contract review</li></ul>NLP should be of particular interest to legal professionals and the legal sector more broadly. The medium of any legal work is the written word. With the broad adoption of technology, this written word is created, processed and stored in digital formats.Law firms and legal departments don’t realize this, but they are sitting on mountains of well-drafted, high quality and high-fidelity textual data. NLP can be leveraged to put this data to work in applications that could reduce manual grunt work and enhance and improve existing workflows.The Different Types of Machine LearningThe different algorithms and approaches in Machine Learning can be summarized in three broad types:<ol><li>Supervised Learning</li><li>Unsupervised Learning</li><li>Reinforcement Learning</li></ol>Supervised Learning is a type of ML where a model is trained on a specific task. A typical example of a supervised learning task is classifying spam emails. The model is supervised meaning that it is given lots of examples of emails along with information about whether the email is spam or not. From the labelled data, the model can learn what spam emails look like so it can then successfully detect and classify spam emails. There is a barrier to entry in order to use supervised learning since it requires a training dataset that is labelled by humans. In the legal industry, supervised learning underpins many contract review and contract analysis tools.Unsupervised Learning is a type of ML where the model is completely data-driven. A typical example of an unsupervised learning task is automatically clustering documents, such as in eDiscovery applications. The model is unsupervised so it learns how to cluster based on patterns that exist within the data itself. Unsupervised learning is attractive for many applications because of the low barrier to entry. All that is needed is the raw dataset. It doesn’t require data to be labelled by humans.Reinforcement Learning is a type of ML where the model is trained to learn from mistakes in a simulated environment. Reinforcement learning is typically used in robotics and manufacturing applications. The model learns to perform a task by reinforcement; positive outcomes are rewarded and negative outcomes are punished. It is quite similar to how pets are trained to perform particular actions by reinforcing correct behaviors with rewards.Supervised learning is particularly important since it is a way of capturing expertise that can then be scaled using a model. Within the legal space, there are many specific tasks that require particular expertise. For example, extracting fields from a set of contracts is a specific task that can be taught to a model using supervised learning. Supervised learning could be used to train models to learn how to perform these specific tasks and legal expertise could be scaled so the burden of manual work is considerably reduced.<img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/A00_F7639_6405_48_EB_AB_30_612_C9_D3779_FA_25f6ec7d29.png" alt="A00F7639-6405-48EB-AB30-612C9D3779FA.png" srcset="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/thumbnail_A00_F7639_6405_48_EB_AB_30_612_C9_D3779_FA_25f6ec7d29.png 156w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/small_A00_F7639_6405_48_EB_AB_30_612_C9_D3779_FA_25f6ec7d29.png 500w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/medium_A00_F7639_6405_48_EB_AB_30_612_C9_D3779_FA_25f6ec7d29.png 750w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/large_A00_F7639_6405_48_EB_AB_30_612_C9_D3779_FA_25f6ec7d29.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">Putting it all togetherIn the context of law firms and legal teams, there are particular manual tasks that can be taught to machines. In particular,&nbsp;NLP with supervised learning can be used to train weak AI systems to perform specific tasks like comparing two clauses to identify deviations in wording or extracting dates and party names from a set of contracts. These kinds of weak AI systems can help scale legal expertise and reduce the need for manual grunt work.Uwais is the Founder of <a href="https://www.simplexico.ai/">simplexico</a> - The Legal AI Consultancy. He has over 5 years of experience designing, building and delivering Machine Learning and NLP solutions across leading legal tech start-ups and a corporate innovation lab. He has held roles as a Machine Learning Engineer at Eigen Technologies, and as a Senior NLP Data Scientist at Thomson Reuters Labs and ThoughtRiver. Uwais also holds a BSc and MSc in Physics from Imperial College London. Connect with Uwais <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/uwaisiqbal/">here</a>. &nbsp;

A Simple Guide to Legal AI - Part 2

On September 15th I presented the results of my “2022 Dewey B Strategic Start Stop Survey” at an HBR-sponsored LINKS program. I co-presented the results with HBR Managing Director Kris Martin. &nbsp;The Dewey B Strategic “Start Stop Survey” was launched in 2013 but was suspended during the pandemic. The 2022 survey was intended to gather feedback on both products and projects that readers started or stopped since the start of the pandemic (March 2020) through August 2022. This post will focus on the vendor and product related results. Forty-three firms responded to the survey.The survey questions asked respondents to identify products purchased or cancelled and the best products or features added. We also asked what product readers would like to see developed. A new topic that was addressed in this survey focused on identifying vendor “worst practices.”&nbsp;What practice do you want vendors to stop doing? Summary: Survey participants were asked what practices vendors need to stop. The number one issue identified by survey participants was bundling.Bundling is a practice that requires firms to purchase one or more products that they do not need in order to purchase the product(s) that they do need. Many vendors describe their relationship with law firms as a partnership. A partnership would involve acknowledging the needs of both parties. Bundling completely ignores the needs of the law firm in order to artificially inflate the revenue of the vendor. As one responder put it – legal publishers need to start acting “less like cable providers.”Law firms want vendors to focus on supporting the specific practice needs of the law firm – not throwing useless content into a “package” that will be used by no one at the law firm.No force majeure escape for print contracts. One particularly enraging practice emerged during the pandemic. Vendors refused to allow law firms to cancel print even though the majority of lawyers transitioned to digital treatises during the Pandemic. There was no one at the office to unpack the boxes of updates, no one to file the supplements, no one to take the books off the shelves for research purposes. This was a missed opportunity where vendors could have created some good will and maybe swapped print for other digital products that might have offered real value.Customer Support Chaos. Survey participants reported a variety of heartburn-inducing practices, including cold calling and pitching lawyers directly, high turn-over of reps, reps that don’t understand what the firms subscribe to, and various kinds of billing snafus.Failing to Provide Usage Statistics. Although most legal information vendors have added analytics content, they fail to see how valuable product usage analytics would be to their customers. Vendors charge for upgrades but then claim they can’t report on how much and by whom these costly new features are being used. Although most firms have usage tracking software, those products can only track the volume of traffic opening the product. Monitoring products cannot report on which features or content is accessed inside the product - presumably vendors have that data but do not volunteer this type of data to subscribers. Vendors respond to requests with a variety of “can’t” and “won’t” explanations.Pricing. Complex and opaque describe the tone of market frustration regarding pricing. Complex price plans are no doubt related to the convoluted explanations of bundling and “packaging” of digital content with no obvious benefit. Survey responders are exhausted by the complexity of pricing plans and lack of transparency in failing to identify individual itemized costs.Greed: Escalation Clauses AND Cost of Living Adjustments. One shocking post pandemic – pre-recession tactic is the sudden inclusion of COLA increases. The major benefit of muti-year contracts for a law firm is to make future budget increases predictable. The vendor also benefits by having predicable long-term revenue and no risk of losing a customer. In my opinion the introduction of COLA increases is a “heads we win, tails you lose” strategy, which law librarians should reject. No price guarantee – no multi-year contract!Repackaging Existing Content as a New Product. Some legal vendors are removing or repackaging existing content as new products or content sets at additional cost to the subscriber.What Do Law Firm Librarians Want From Vendors?<ul><li>Proactive customer service including quarterly calls, true partnership with the firm, and better training on new products.</li><li>Flexibility in content pricing and selection. Specific issues to address are global subscriptions and mid-contract adjustments based on the firm’s needs.</li><li>À la cart pricing so firms can purchase what they need and control their budgets.&nbsp;</li><li>Pricing transparency and consistency.</li></ul>What Products Did You Roll Out During the Pandemic? Over 80 different legal products were mentioned as having been purchased and launched during the pandemic.&nbsp;Too many to list here but the categories of products include:<ul><li>News resources</li><li>Corporate resources</li><li>Analytics products</li><li>Data access and organization products.</li></ul>What product(s) did your department/organization reduce licenses for or are planning to reduce licenses for? &nbsp; &nbsp;No vendor is exempt from scrutiny especially with the financial turbulence on the horizon. Large and small legal information providers are being scrutinized. Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, Wolters Kluwer , RIA Checkpoint, Lex Machina, Practical Law, Business Law Journals, Hoovers, Monitor Suite, and Reorg Research were specifically mentioned by survey respondents. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; What was the best new feature/function added to an information resource?&nbsp; <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/allsearch-by-casetext/">Casetext Parallel Search/Allsearch</a> was the new product/feature that was mentioned most often by survey responders. Allsearch, which is powered by neural networks, can answer questions on a wide range of legal and nor legal content.Westlaw QuickCheck and Brief Analyser was the second most popular new feature.Additional features highlighted by respondents: • <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/courtroom-insight/">Courtroom Insigh</a>t - integrations with WK and <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/docket-alarm-by-fastcase/">Docket Alarm</a> • Docket filtering on <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/bloomberg-law-by-bloomberg/">Bloomberg Law</a> • Search trees in Lexis+ • Lexis+ Fact &amp; Issue Finder • State motion metrics added to <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/lex-machina-by-lexisnexis/">Lex Machina</a> • Matter Maps in <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/practical-law-us-by-thomson-reuters/">Practical Law</a>Do you have plans to roll out any additional research/knowledge products in the near future? If so, which products? &nbsp;Summary: 15 people (33%) responded that they had no plans to add new products. This likely reflects the financial uncertainties created by the looming recession.The classes of products that other responders mentioned most often include:<ul><li>Docket products that manage, track or analyze docket data. Those products include: Docket Alarm, PacerPro, EXFX, Trellis.</li><li>Corporate products such as: Capital IQ, Pitchbook, Dealpoint Data, Capital IQ BoardEx, Crunchbase Pro, Market Insights, Statistia. &nbsp;</li><li>S&amp;P Global: Trucost, Covenant Review, Dealscribe, Preqin Insight, WK's Corporate Counsel Profiler, Sayari.com.</li><li>Patent Products: &nbsp;Minesoft's PatBase with PatDocs and Corsearch. IPlytics ipQuants SciFinder Cortellis Drug Discovery, Darts IP, Chemical Watch, IDI Core, World Trademark Review, sequencebase &nbsp; Royalty stat, patsnap, patbase.</li><li>ESG Environmental, Social and Governance Products are on the rise. Specific products mentioned are eSG Scores on Capital IQ, ESG module on Intelligize, Global ESG on Practical Law.</li><li>KM Products: Lexis Search Advantage and West KM</li></ul>What product(s) did your department/organization stop using or plan to stop?It is no surprise that the cancellation of print was the top target for budget cuts. This was clearly a pre-existing trend that was accelerated by the pandemic and remote work. Lawyers learned to live without books. But several survey respondents identified another issue that they agree is a contributing factor.Practical Guidance Products have eroded the dominance of treatises as the main source of expert guidance. Treatises focus on the “why” of laws and regulations at great depth. Practical guidance tools focus on the ’how” in brief. &nbsp;Practical guidance tools have offered a growth opportunity for legal publishers. They are now available from all the major legal publishers: Thomson Reuters (Practical Law) Lexis (Practical Guidance) Bloomberg Law (Practical Guidance) and Wolters Kluwer (Practical Content Dashboards)Top Categories of products to be cancelled:<ul><li>Print treatises, codes, statutes and deskbooks</li><li>Ebooks</li><li>Analytics</li></ul>The only category that surprises me is analytics. I do not interpret this as a decline in the importance of analytics products, but rather a “shake out” and churn of the market as firms eliminate specific analytics products based on redundancy of content or substituting a less expensive product for a high ticket product. Analytics products are here to stay in legal practice.What product would you most like to see developed in the legal information technology area?The number one product that was specifically identified by 25% of the responders is a nationwide standardized 50 state Docket, analytics and e-filing solution. This is the “Holy Grail” for every state analytics provider (Lex Machina, Trellis, Westlaw, Fastcase DocketAlarm). There is no nationwide data collection standard or technology. There are different FOIA polices governing the release of docket data and documents.Additional product ideas include:&nbsp;<ul><li>Hourly rate database for all law firm rates</li><li>All products should have SSO capabilities</li><li>Private company research tools</li><li>Regulatory analytics products</li><li>Contextual “just in time” training videos embedded inside every product.</li></ul>&nbsp;Bonus Content - Westlaw PrecisionSeptember 15th, the day of the Links Program, happened to be one day after the launch of Westlaw Precision by Thomson Reuters. We took advantage of that timing to conduct a live poll to gauge the market response to Westlaw Precision.Here are the results of the live poll: 85.4% percent had heard about the new product 69.93% were aware of Precisions Features When do you expect your firm to upgrade to Precision&nbsp; &nbsp;2022 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 3.08% &nbsp;2023 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 9.23% &nbsp;2024 or beyond &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 46.15% &nbsp;Will hold off until forced to change 41.5% If you are not planning to purchase now, why not? &nbsp;Currently in a long-term contract &nbsp; &nbsp;23.73% &nbsp;Cost &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;32.2% &nbsp;Waiting for product to be more fully built out &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 35.59% &nbsp;Don’t see the value &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 8.4%The good news for Thomson Reuters is that that majority of respondents see a value in the product. The market is extremely price sensitive as firms plan for 2023. If Thomson Reuters does ask the significant segment of existing subscribers to “convert” to a new contract that includes Westlaw Precision, those subscribers may face not only the price increase for new content, but also COLA increases which may not have been part of their existing contract.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

Post-Pandemic Legal Research Procurement Survey - What's Hot and What's Not?

As fall associates settle into the reality of legal practice, I am taking the opportunity to share a variety of research “best practices.” These rules can be applied across all environments: law firm, corporate, public service and government. New associates are facing the messy reality of needing to harness legal and factual issues that need to be addressed in real time an often on tight deadlines. No matter what kind of environment a lawyer is in, I recommend finding a research mentor of some kind. Large and medium sized law firm are likely to have a research team staffed by professional researchers, often with an MLS and/or a JD. Countless benefits can follow from tapping into their expertise to guide your research challenges.Research has changed dramatically over the past decade as technology has replaced standard print finding tools. Volumes of citators and digests have been supplanted by digital and AI enabled tools of breathtaking wizardry. No matter where an organization is on the technology spectrum the basic “rules" below should ease your research journey.1. Be certain that you understand the assignment. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. There is no shame in asking for clarification.2. Just Ask! A popular mnemonic “Just Ask” is used by many library teams to remind lawyers of the various issues to consider when doing caselaw research.J - Jurisdiction – Do you need to look at federal or state law? What court has jurisdiction? Do administrative regulations apply? Or some combination of these issues?U - Useful Tips - Does your supervisor have any advice for you to begin your research? (Notable cases, articles, books, experts in the firm)S - Scope - What exactly are you researching? What work product is expected? A verbal answer or a memo? How much time should you spend on the assignment?T - Terms of Art - Each area of law can have specific terms which have a special legal definition.A - Acronyms – Always clarify that an Acronym means. Many acronyms have multiple meanings.S - Sources - Ask if there is a leading treatise or seminal case. What statutes or regulations apply.K - Key Cost Constraints - Are you constrained by time/deadlines or what sources you may use?3. Ask a librarian or other research expert at the outset of your project if they can recommend sources or strategies?4. Use the research helpline for the online research provider used at your organization. Bloomberg Law, Casetext, Fastcase, Lexis. Westlaw, VitalLaw all have 800 numbers that researchers can use to get assistance. These platforms help in a variety of modalities including phone, chat, email, training videos and documentation.5. Consider the possibility that you have inadvertently been given some incorrect information, e.g., dates, spelling, jurisdiction, source, citation, etc.<ul><li>Try alternate spellings and date ranges</li><li>After 15 minutes of research contact the research team and ask for guidance.</li><li>Go back to the source and confirm the information.</li><li>Get the underlying document (e.g. news story legal reference) or source of information</li></ul>6. Determine whether someone else has already done the same research. Be sure to verify and update any information upon which you rely. Sources to look for:<ul><li>Internal work product</li><li>Law reviews, compiled legislative histories or 50 state surveys</li><li>Practical Guidance tools:<ul style="list-style-type:circle;"><li>Practical Law</li><li>Practicing Law Institute PLI Plus</li><li>Bloomberg Law Practical Guidance and Practice Portfolios</li><li>Lexis Practical Guidance</li><li>VitalLaw Practical Guidance Dashboard</li></ul></li></ul>7. Ask an expert in the subject area.<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Internal. Ask partner if there an attorney at the organization who has expertise on the issue. Some firms have an expertise database, but expertise can also be located by searching lawyer bios and the DMS</li></ul><ul style="list-style-type:circle;"><li>External. Get permission to speak to experts outside the firm.</li></ul>8. KM Tools. Find out if your firm has knowledge resources and precedents for specific practice groups. These resources can include model documents, checklists, templates and other workflow tools. WestKM and Lexis Search Advantage are two of the commercial products used by law firms for locating precedents and models, but many firms have created their own internal databases.<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Even if your firm does not have KM platform, examples of your firm’s documents can be located in commercial databases.</li><li>Lexis, WL, Bloomberg, Casetext and Trellis offer ways to search for publicly filed litigation documents.</li><li>Intelligize, Bloomberg Law Transactional Intelligence Center, Westlaw Business and Kaleidoscope all provide access to publicly filed corporate documents which can be filtered by law firm.</li></ul>9. Finalizing your Brief or Memo with Brief Checking Tools. Cite checking has always been a final step in reviewing a brief in order to validate the current “authority” of each cited case. A new generation of AI enabled brief checkers can not only validate the citations, but also identify missing or more persuasive authority. Brief checkers are available from Casetext, Westlaw Edge, Lexis Plus and Bloomberg Law.10. Ask a librarian for assistance in conducting any non-legal research. Law firm research teams often have access to specialized business, industry, news, scientific and technical databases. Sample questions which can be addressed by research teams are:<ul><li>Locating transcripts for analysts calls.</li><li>Providing historic intra-day trading information on a stock.</li><li>Locating expert witnesses</li><li>Social media profile searching</li></ul>11. Triangulate: If your case rests upon certain data, try to obtain three different sources.12. Make sure to check all applicable areas of law: statutes, regulatory materials, and cases.13. Always check how current the source is. Always look the most recent online information!14. Use caution when looking for data on the open web. Make sure to have located an official government or organizational website.15. Everything you need is not on the Internet. Librarians can assist in locating out of print materials and non-digital materials.16. Be creative.17. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.&nbsp;Closure: Knowing to Stop When…1. You keep encountering the same precedents (research becomes circular).2. You have located and consulted the most specialized sources for your topic.3. You have located and consulted the most current sources for your topic.4. You have crosschecked your results in an alternative research system.5. The partner says so… .

The Rules of Research for New Associates

You have likely heard people on social media or in discussion at conferences talk about the importance of “digging into a problem” before jumping to a solution. It’s less likely that you’ve seen posts that explain exactly what is meant by this, why it’s valuable, or how to do it.The notion of focusing on the problem first is one that comes from service design principles. The adage is expressed in a few ways. Proponents are urged to “fall in love with a problem, not the solution,” or to become comfortable with “sitting in the problem space.” These adages exist because it is a natural human tendency to focus on solving a problem rather than discussing the causes of the problem itself.In the design thinking process, problem definition comes before ideation, or brainstorming, in the problem-solving process. It’s the second step in a five-stage process that starts with empathy (see below).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:67.88%;"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/Design_Thinking_f849f020b0.jpg" alt="Design Thinking.jpg" srcset="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/thumbnail_Design_Thinking_f849f020b0.jpg 245w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/small_Design_Thinking_f849f020b0.jpg 500w," sizes="100vw"></figure>I have run many design thinking workshops with lawyers, law students, and legal business professionals. It’s remarkable how difficult people find it to focus on the problem instead of jumping to solve it. I often walk around the room during the define stage of the exercise, because it’s when people need support. I lean in to hear how groups are thinking about their problem and you wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve had people say to me: “well, we’re developing an app that…”. Even with explicit instructions to explore the problem and define it, they move instinctively towards solutioning.This happens in practice, too. I’ve worked with multiple teams whose remit included problem-solving for lawyers and legal teams. Before we had the headcount to bring on professionals who understood service design and would run the early stages of problem-solving, we frequently encountered issues with members of the team who had listened to the first complaint or report about a pain-point and launched into the development of a solution without asking any further questions. Inevitably, this led to difficulties down the track when they realized they had misunderstood the problem or hadn’t understood the nuances of it sufficiently to be able to provide a solution that worked.&nbsp;<img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/Screenshot_20221114_105014_77a757dd04.png" alt="Screenshot_20221114_105014.png" srcset="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_20221114_105014_77a757dd04.png 245w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/small_Screenshot_20221114_105014_77a757dd04.png 500w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/medium_Screenshot_20221114_105014_77a757dd04.png 750w," sizes="100vw">&nbsp;User DiscoveryDefining a problem starts with understanding the users who are affected by it (the empathy aspect of design thinking). Assumptions are often made in commercial legal environments that lawyers are all the same and experience a pain-point in the same way. Many of the people who have been hired to do the problem-solving are also former lawyers, so they believe they understand how the pain-point is being experienced, even though they practiced law at a different time and in a different context. This is one of the key reasons it’s important to have professionals on your team who come at problems from a variety of perspectives.&nbsp;In fact, different people experience problems in different ways, which is why service designers develop “personas” that allow for understanding a problem from multiple viewpoints.In order to ensure you or your team are not making assumptions, spend some time speaking with the people who have expressed the pain-point, or who are affected by the problem that has been reported. Give some thought ahead of time to the types of questions you will ask them that will show you where they’re coming from, how they feel about the problem, and exactly how they’re experiencing the issue.It can feel awkward in a professional setting to ask about the feelings or emotional response and needs that people have in relation to a problem, but understanding these is critical.&nbsp;Take, for example, a situation where a partner approaches your team to say that she needs a better way of tracking work. If you run off to solve this problem immediately, you might come back with a dashboard that gives the partner visibility of hours worked on her matters.&nbsp;If you had paused to first understand what her needs were in relation to this problem, however, you may have found out that she was concerned some of the people on her team were burned out and she wanted to make sure she could distribute work to take into account people who had worked too many hours over the past weeks and reduce their workload for upcoming weeks. That need is not fulfilled by mere visibility of actual work performed. It requires a solution that demonstrates distribution of hours and the number of hours that each of her team is working overall (which may not be captured in a view of the partner’s matters alone). Had you built a dashboard without having the additional information, you would now be in a position of having to rebuild.Asking questions like: “Why is this a problem for you?”, “What is your concern in relation to this problem?” or “Why are current reporting tools not working for you?” would have given rise to some of the details necessary for you to develop an appropriate solution.&nbsp;The Five Whys TechniqueThere are specific techniques that have been developed to help teams dig into problems. One of these is the “Five Whys” technique, also known as the root cause analysis. Developed by Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese inventor who founded Toyota, the original purpose of the Five Whys was to understand the root cause of a defect by iteratively asking “why” questions. In most circumstances, asking the question five times is sufficient to provide insight into the origins of the problem.Applied to the scenario above, imagine again a partner came to you to say she needed a better way of tracking the work her team was doing. Instead of jumping to build a solution, imagine the following discussion had taken place:&nbsp;You: “Why do you need a better way of tracking work?” (Why #1)Partner: “Because the systems we have are not good enough.”You: “Why aren’t they good enough?” (Why #2)Partner: “Because they don’t show me enough information about my team.”You: “Why do you need more information about your team” (Why #3)Partner: “Because I need to understand the work they’re doing.”You: “Why do you need to understand they work they’re doing?” (Why #4)Partner: “Because I’m worried some of them are being overworked.”You: “Why does this worry you?” (Why #5)Partner: “Because I’m worried about their well-being and concerned they may leave the firm.”&nbsp;In a real conversation, you may have interspersed some of these “whys” with some whats – such as “What type of information do you need about your team”. Notice, though, how the example reveals that it’s entirely plausible that the root cause of the problem will not be uncovered until you dig really deeply into it. Those Five Whys were necessary to get at the emotional need that the partner wants to resolve. Understanding that emotional need sets up you and your team for success as you go out to build a solution, because you’re armed with the right information.&nbsp;The Five Whys is a good technique to practice with your team. Practicing in team meetings will get people more comfortable with the discomfort of staying with the problem even when people feel they should be moving towards a solution.&nbsp;Fishbone Analysis TechniqueFor larger problems that affect multiple parts of an organization, the five whys technique might fall short because there are so many stakeholders. It is still a technique that can be used during stakeholder analysis and user discovery, but for larger projects that are trying to solve the root cause of a problem that affects the whole organization, the fishbone analysis technique allows for a more collaborative approach to problem definition.Developed by another Japanese manufacturer, Kaoru Ishigawa, the fishbone diagram – also known as a cause-and-effect diagram – is a visualization tool that helps teams analyze the cause of a problem or defect within an organization. Fishbone analysis uses guided brainstorming in combination with the fishbone mindmap shown below.&nbsp;<img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/Fishbone_4f40f63805.jpg" alt="Fishbone.jpg" srcset="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/thumbnail_Fishbone_4f40f63805.jpg 245w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/small_Fishbone_4f40f63805.jpg 500w,https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/medium_Fishbone_4f40f63805.jpg 750w," sizes="100vw">&nbsp;The problem is written at the front end of the diagram (like the head of a fish), with a horizontal arrow crossing the line of the page to point at the head.&nbsp;During a fishbone analysis session, stakeholders brainstorm the major causes of the problem, which are grouped thematically. Often major causes will involve things like the context or environment, the people, the process or method. These are drawn as the fishbones pointing to its backbone.Stakeholders are then asked to dig deeper into each of these major themes to examine them more closely and identify all possible sub-causes related to these themes that are giving rise to the problem, which are listed along each fishbone and depicted as layered branches in the diagram.&nbsp;Using the diagram allows for focused, guided brainstorming and discussion on each aspect of a larger problem, illustrating the many facets of it and allowing for solutions to be developed that are address the complexity of the problem.Examples of problems for which you might use the fishbone technique include:&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Determining why a legal department is consistently late in delivering work to a part of the business,&nbsp;</li><li>Understanding why a law firm’s business development plan is not working to bring new business to the firm from the right types of clients, or</li><li>Uncovering the root causes of a broken process that has become a bottleneck.</li></ul>&nbsp;While techniques like the Five Whys and Fishbone Analysis are useful, they are mere guidelines. Digging into a problem simply involves communicating more and better with relevant stakeholders to understand a problem from all sides before starting to solve it. Practicing by employing tried and tested techniques can help team members who have no prior exposure to service design become more comfortable sitting with a problem and exploring it before jumping to solve it. Doing so will ensure that you and your team operate better to solve problems together for your organization.

How to Dig Into a Problem

#CLM Simplified…Join the MovementSimplifying the processes that comprise Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is at the core of everything we do at the&nbsp;<a href="https://innolawgroup.com/">InnoLaw Group.&nbsp;</a>Although the term CLM has become common parlance in the LegalTech world to refer to the technology which automates some or all aspects of the contract lifecycle (which technology would be better referred to as a “CLM System”), we always start by reminding our customers that CLM is a function and is not in fact a system.&nbsp;Why does getting the context and terminology right matter? Well, if your company does not have all of the aspects of its CLM functions and processes in good shape, you’re likely to have limited success when introducing a CLM System, or any type of automation, into the mix.&nbsp;For this reason, it has been our mission to help lawyers and Legal teams understand, improve and ultimately simplify their CLM functions and processes, most often with the ultimate goal of preparation for the selection, implementation and successful adoption of a CLM System - ensuring that there is a strong foundation before automation.&nbsp;<img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_caecbed4e1.png" alt="Diagram

Description automatically generated">What to expect from this CLM Simplified series….This series is intended to provide practical guidance for corporate counsel to tackle their contracting problems. We will walk you through the steps needed to reduce the challenges of increasing contracting volumes and limited capacity to scale. From assessing legal risk tolerances and setting thresholds for legal review to templates, playbooks, and outsourcing and automation, we’ll review some effective tactics for reducing the legal workload and increasing business satisfaction.We prefer baby steps, taking one manageable, practical step at a time to enable effective and meaningful change while gaining internal supporters and sponsors.&nbsp;With this is mind, each newsletter has been crafted to provide you with our expert insights and practical guidance on all things contracting related, all of which will enable you to build a solid contracting framework foundation and improve the way your company handles contracting, which will enable and support successful automation of some or all aspects of your contracting lifecycles.&nbsp;It’s our vision to enable lawyers to live in a world with streamlined legal review of contracts based on efficient processes, optimal templates, simplified playbooks and continuous data-driven improvements. We hope this series provides you with some practical guidance to get you and your team on your way.&nbsp;The CLM Simplified Contracting Framework<img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_7753cb0ab6.png" alt="A picture containing text, building

Description automatically generated">Look out for our first newsletter on “Foundation before Automation: Legal Review Policy”.&nbsp;Author Profiles:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucybassli/">Lucy Bassli</a>&nbsp;– InnoLaw Group Founder&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_e4a8593fd4.png"></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_05b163717c.png"></figure>

CLM Simplified for Legal Technology Hub: Practical Contracting Guidance for Corporate Counsel

At the&nbsp;<a href="https://innolawgroup.com/">InnoLaw Group,</a> most of our corporate counsel customers first come to us for our expertise on all things related to Contract Lifecyle Management (CLM) technology. They’re usually feeling overwhelmed by the volume of work being thrown at them, as well as the increased demands from the business and c-suite for increased efficiency, insights, metrics and reporting on their work.&nbsp;Amongst the vast array of LegalTech options out there which are (over?) sold as the silver bullet solution to all their efficiency needs, CLM technology is at the forefront for the vast majority of corporate legal teams, for whom processing large volumes of contracts is an ever-growing daily requirement.As CLM consultants, some days it feels like our jobs would be better described as professional rain clouds, because right from the start, we have to rain on the “jumping to tech” as a quick and easy solution notion, get everyone to take a step back, get the shiny tech demo stars out of their eyes (for a little while at least) and remind them that there is foundational work to be done before tech can save you. To be clear, we know that it can – we also know that jumping right in and automating unclear or poor processes for the wrong reasons, never works out well.&nbsp;Throughout this series, we will provide you with our expert insights and practical guidance on all things contracting related in the hope that you will be better prepared to (i) improve the way your company handles contracting and (ii) if necessary, select and implement the right CLM technology for your company.Let’s begin with the most fundamental and foundational step of all, the Legal Review Policy.Legal Review Policies 101: Why, What and HowThe fundamental question which drives the need for a Legal Review Policy is “what contracts should the Legal team spend time on, and what contracts should it not spend time on?”&nbsp;&nbsp;The problem is that Legal team lawyers often find themselves trapped in a reactive role when they review the contracts sent to them by their company. Somehow the business owners determine what Legal should and shouldn’t review, yet the attorneys are in the best place to make that determination. So, why don’t more Legal teams take a proactive role in defining what should land on their plates?&nbsp;Eventually the sheer volume of commercial contracting work will mean Legal teams are restricted in how they spend their time. They often arrive at this step only because they reach a breaking point and cannot keep up with demand.For those who are unfamiliar with Legal Review Policies - a Legal Review Policy is a document which records what transactions Legal must review. It’s essentially a set of rules that let the business owners know which transactions Legal must get involved in and which transactions the business is empowered (by Legal) to handle on their own.The goal of a successful Legal Review Policy is getting Legal out of the way when there isn't significant risk to consider or mitigate. How much risk and what types of assumable risk are dependent on the nature of each contract as well as the organization’s culture and appetite for risk.Points to consider:&nbsp;<ul><li>Legal needs to take control over their inbox by creating a policy for the business to follow. This starts with writing down what Legal must review.&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul><li>Business owners must get Legal involved in certain transactions. Determine if the policy comprises a list of what the business may handle without Legal’s involvement, versus what the business may not handle without Legal’s support. Are you trying to give as much freedom as possible, or empower the business with only specific scenarios where they can contract without Legal’s involvement? While at first glance this may seem highly tolerant of risk and very unempowering to have a short and finite list of contracts that require Legal’s support, it can have the opposite effect.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul><li>Risk: the goal is to get Legal out of the way when there isn’t significant risk to consider or mitigate. Risk is dependent on the industry, geography, and culture of the company, so there is no one policy that will work across different companies, but there are a few common themes that legal teams should be able to agree upon, including but not limited to:&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:circle;"><li>Standard NDA templates should be handed to the business to execute on their own, without having to go through Legal.</li><li>Low value, low risk contracts without access to any sensitive information or materials should be enabled for the business to proceed independently.</li></ul></li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Separate the policy by contract types and create large buckets. Depending on the industry, more or special buckets may be needed, but at a minimum consider general categories such as: (i) purchasing (aka vendor or procurement) contracts; (ii) revenue generating contracts; (iii) information exchange agreements.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Determine the value of the vendor agreements and if there is an amount below which it is acceptable for the business to contract without any support from Legal. When considering this amount, include other variables that may present risk besides the allotted amount (e.g., whether the vendor will access any critical data or need to be onsite at the physical premises). Include these factors in the policy. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_d4b72e8115.png" alt="Diagram

Description automatically generated">&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Regardless of the type of contract, describe the transactions that are part of the policy. Sometimes, policies that use contract titles are too restrictive, when really the risk under mitigation is related to the underlying activity that requires legal review. Or sometimes, there isn’t a specific “type” of contract that is easy to describe in a policy, and it is easier to describe the transaction contemplated.&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Some third parties’ relationships are so complex that their contracts should always include legal review. Whether there are trust issues between the entities, or the nature of the business relationship is complex, in many situations a list of particular third parties may be included in a policy to ensure Legal’s involvement for negotiations with those specific counterparties.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>If there are other business-managed control points that can mitigate risks, then the legal review policy can include criteria met through other business processes as a way to side-step legal review. For example, if the procurement organization has a robust program for certain vendors which requires that they have a master agreement in place before any work is completed, then subsequent engagements under that master agreement may have the ability to proceed without any legal involvement, provided the master covers the contemplated risks for the predictable type of services the vendor will deliver.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>If there are templates available that the business can use - provided they are unchanged - that should be part of the policy, with links to where the templates may be accessed. (NDAs are a perfect example of this scenario. Every company should have an NDA template that the business is empowered to use independently.)&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Some aspects of the policy may require significant discussions and internal negotiations with other stakeholders and business owners. If this policy will create new obligations for the business as a prerequisite to the empowerment the policy is intended to achieve, then those obligations should be clearly defined. Some training may also be needed.&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Create a simple communication plan&nbsp;and follow it. As part of the communication plan, a broader change management plan&nbsp;may be needed if the policy creates significant enough changes to how people have contracted.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>You’ll also want to ensure that the policy is operational i.e. it works with how the company operates. For example, if the policy requires business owners to access information that is unavailable then the policy will be ineffective.</li></ul><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_e70c6398b7.png" alt="Timeline

Description automatically generated">&nbsp;<ul style="list-style-type:disc;"><li>Once the policy is designed conceptually, as in the above figure, the next challenge is to draft it in a way that is easy to understand for the entire business. Simple language is key. Remember, no policy that is written in legalese will be successful!&nbsp;</li></ul>&nbsp;No matter what the details of the policy are, so long as there is a clear and practical mechanism to empower business independence in certain contracting processes, then you’re off to a great start!&nbsp;As with all things legal, remember that your Legal Review Policy will evolve with time and require a degree of flexibility and periodic reviews – so don’t let the fear of getting it all done perfectly right from the start hold you back from taking the first step towards liberating your inbox and regaining control of your contracts.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Foundation before Automation: Legal Review Policy

Data is the fuel which powers AI. It’s commonly referred to as the ‘new oil’ of the digital economy which helps to paint a picture of how data will come to underpin and fuel many different applications in the future.Data can come in different forms, shapes and sizes. One way of speaking about data is in terms of its modality. There are a number of modalities data can take:<ul><li>Text</li><li>Image</li><li>Speech</li><li>Numeric</li></ul>In most circumstances, a dataset is usually unimodal meaning it only contains only a single modality. A dataset consisting of legal documents would be a unimodal textual dataset. Datasets can also be multimodal and contain multiple modalities. An image captioning dataset is multimodal since it contains the modalities of text in the form of captions as well as images.Like oil, before data can be used there are a series of steps that need to be taken to ensure that the data is prepared, refined and ready to be consumed. To help appreciate this better, data can be broken down into three different states:<ul><li>Unstructured Data</li><li>Semi-structured Data</li><li>Structured Data</li></ul>Unstructured data is how data is typically found in the wild. It’s oil that is still in the ground or vegetables that are still in the garden. Some work needs to be put in before it can be used. A typical example of unstructured data is a set of contracts that live within a document management system.Semi-structured data is data that has undergone some refinement but still has some rough edges. It’s oil that has been extracted from the ground but still needs to be purified or vegetables that have been picked from the garden but still need to be chopped and peeled before they can be used. An example of semi-structured data is a set of contracts with some associated meta-data about the parties - it has some structure but work is still needed before the data can properly be used.Structured data is data that is now ready to be used to fuel applications. It’s oil that has been purified and is now ready for consumption. It’s vegetables that have now been peeled, chopped and diced and are ready to be used in cooking. An example of structured data is a set of contracts with all of the relevant fields extracted into a table. Structured data usually comes in the form of a CSV file or a database table and is the starting point for creating higher-level business insights in the form of analytics, predictions or statistics.Just like with oil, there is a value chain with data. At every step in the chain, the value of the data increases as it goes from unstructured to semi-structured to structured data. The use case of extracting fields from contracts captures precisely this value chain of data - the goal is to go from unstructured data in the form of contracts and arrive at structured data in the form of a table with the extracted fields from the contracts to enable contract analytics that can inform future negotiations and help with compliance.While most data in firms and organizations is unstructured, there should be active efforts to work through the value chain to create structured data that can be used to unlock business value and deliver insights.&nbsp;There is an adage in machine learning: "Garbage in, Garbage out" (GIGO). Any AI model is only as good as the data it's trained on.&nbsp;If you're cooking with old and worn-out ingredients, the dish won't be anywhere near as good as you want it to be.&nbsp;Before venturing into the shiny world of AI, it's important to have a data strategy that enables long-term benefit and value from a firm's data.&nbsp;

A Simple Guide to Legal AI, Part 3: Data

We hope that you found the first edition of our newsletter helpful and that you’re on your way to getting your company’s Legal Review Policy created, updated and more effectively implemented. It’s our intention for the topics covered in this series&nbsp;to build upon one another, with the ultimate goal of providing you with enough practical guidance to&nbsp;build a solid contracting framework, which will enable the successful automation of some or all aspects of your contracting lifecycles.&nbsp;With a Legal Review Policy as a solid foundation, and having a better grasp on&nbsp;what contracts the Legal team should spend time on, and what contracts it should not spend time on, it’s time to turn your attention to another fundamental pillar of efficient contracting – contract templates.&nbsp;The CLM Simplified Contracting Framework<figure class="image"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_435380cad7.png"></figure>Designing and using templates is often the easiest place to start for legal teams that want to streamline their company’s contracting work. They are easiest because they fit precisely within the skillset of the attorneys. Attorneys know the words that go into contracts; actually, they know lots&nbsp;of words (maybe too many). Therein lies much of the problem.&nbsp;Contracts are complicated, and generally not very user friendly. So, bad templates are often the source of contracting woes. But a simple, easy to read, and reasonable&nbsp;template will go a long way to making the contracting process more efficient.&nbsp;Template considerations:<ol><li style="text-align:justify;">Make sure the template terms are within the normal ranges of what is commonly acceptable by both parties. Note that as with many other aspects of contracting optimization, what can be accomplished with templates depends on several factors.&nbsp;</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Not all contracts should be templatized. Bespoke agreements are by their nature, well, bespoke. So, they will need custom terms and special nuanced provisions. I know that no attorney drafts contracts from a blank paper, but the starting point for specialized contracts is often a prior executed contract (or a few) and is pieced together much like a puzzle.</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Focus only on the contracts that recur in the legal department. These are the higher volume, repeatable types of agreements that land on legal’s desk over and over again, sometimes in what feels like a never-ending deluge of work. They are exactly the types of contracts that need templates.&nbsp;</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Another consideration, besides sheer volume, is where the bargaining power lies. If your company has a difficult time using their own templates and you are most often negotiating from third-party paper, then you are likely better off spending time developing negotiation guides or playbooks.&nbsp;</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Even if rarely used, templates are a worthwhile exercise because it forces the legal team to contemplate their positions on key terms and come to a consensus on the right level of risk tolerance. There is no better forcing function to finally decide on the appropriate limit of liability than when everyone has an opportunity to voice their perspectives, with the understanding that a decision must&nbsp;be made. Thus, even a rarely used template is a useful document as a reference guide that defines the preferred terms for the company.&nbsp;</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Templates help expedite the contracting process because they speed up the initial production of the starting contract, and because they enable the business to handle certain contracts independent of the legal team.&nbsp;</li></ol>How templates are used, formed, stored and retrieved will vary, so there is no one right way of doing this. Every legal team should embrace the approach and policy guidelines that fit their culture, resources, and processes.&nbsp;Template tips:Before beginning the actual work of drafting template terms, take an inventory of the types of contracts that the department regularly deals with. Create a simple spreadsheet view that outlines commercial categories of contract types, such as procurement, real estate, services, etc.&nbsp;Templates kept in the protective hands of the legal team should be more than business self-service documents; they should be used as starting points for more complex contracts where the legal pro is crafting some original language or pulling pieces of applicable templates together to form a new bespoke contract as a starting point. (A bespoke contract will naturally become a sample, but that is different from a template.)&nbsp;Once a template is formed and has some comments or notes to explain certain aspects of the document or perhaps offers guidance on negotiating positions, it does not end there. A template, to be useful, must be maintained and regularly reviewed and updated based on where negotiations actually end up after using the template as the starting point. That’s how the legal team learns whether the template has value: if a template is regularly negotiated and significant portions are revised, then it is likely that the positions taken in the template are not very realistic.Clause librariesAnother form that legal-facing templates take is the collection of contract clauses that are commonly used. Clause libraries often come alive when automation is introduced into the contracting process. To automate template creation and initiation of contracting, clause libraries are the first step. Without a library of approved clauses and some logic on how and when to use them, it is extremely difficult to automate contract creation.&nbsp;Clause libraries can also be used for simple, common terms like governing law. There may be only three to four acceptable governing law combinations of jurisdiction and venues, which makes it easy to simply “copy and paste” the right combination into a contract. Or a force majeure clause (increasingly important in the post-pandemic world) is one that can be easily used as-is in a variety of contract types, in which case the clause library is used as a repository of clauses that can be applicable across contract types, lines of business, and perhaps even some geographies.&nbsp;While someone using the clause library still requires a substantive understanding of the contract where a clause is added, having the pool of clauses to pick from will exponentially speed up the drafting (aka the “contract creation” phase of the CLM) process.&nbsp;NDA TemplatesUntil such time that the commercial world agrees to a universal NDA, every law department must have an&nbsp;NDA template for use by the business without legal involvement. An NDA template must be short, simple, and contain mutual obligations. It should be created in such a way that changes to the terms are not allowed and only a few core fillable sections are open to the business.&nbsp;Once the C-suite understands that the legal team is not a gatekeeper for all contracts, it is very helpful to set that tone from the top down. Often, Legal feels it must protect the business from itself, and thus over-functions on every aspect of contracting. But with the right leadership, the business can be empowered and&nbsp;accountable for when some contracts either slip through the cracks, or simply aren’t negotiated in an ideal way.&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized image-style-side" style="width:50%;"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_fa5998293b.png"></figure>Finally, More Template Tips:<ul><li style="text-align:justify;">Don’t create too many</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Consider the difference between a sample and a template</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Pick higher volume contracts to templatize first</li><li style="text-align:justify;">Make templates for those engagements where your company has negotiation leverage at the start&nbsp;</li></ul>Templates are not a magical answer to the contracting problem, but they are a great start!&nbsp;&nbsp;

Foundation before Automation: Contract Templates

Data – and specifically how well you can leverage data, apply analytics and implement new technologies – is increasingly becoming a key competitive advantage for law firms, legal recruiters, corporations and legal service providers.So how do you create a robust and strategic data strategy? And what if you already have a lot of data at your fingertips but you don’t know what to do with it?A good data strategy is about what your business wants to achieve, and how data can help you get there. To be truly effective, data must address a specific business need, help your organization reach its strategic goals and generate real value.Here are some ideas to create a more strategic approach to leveraging your competitive intelligence to aid in your business development efforts.Perform an audit of your current CI landscape – What databases and systems do you already have? And of those, which ones do you actually use? Are you leveraging them to their full capabilities? Now is the time to take stock of everything your organization is already paying for and ensure that you actually need it, use it, know how to leverage all that it can do and know where you have blind spots and needs that aren’t being met.Once you have the answers to the questions above, schedule time with each of your data vendors to get a refresher course on the latest updates on each platform and to find out how your team can better utilize the tools. Come prepared with questions, pain points and even a wish list for the platform. Chances are that you and your team will learn something new as a result.Do an internal audit to maximize existing resources. Share information with other internal departments on what tools each of them already has with the goal of assembling a master list and leveraging existing tools. We can’t tell you how many times we hear that a marketing department is interested in a demo of our tools when the same firm’s recruiting department has had a subscription to our products for several years. It’s in the firm’s benefit to share resources among the organization.Create a clear data strategy. Now that you know the kind of data you have and what data you need, you can outline specific goals for using the data that align with your business needs and upcoming projects.This is important considering the sheer volume of data available today. We see many clients go into “data paralysis” mode where they have collected so much data to analyze that they are almost frozen by it because tackling it seems insurmountable.Legal data can of course be used in many ways, including:• Legal recruiting (associate and lateral hiring) • M&amp;A targeting (finding firms that would be a good fit) • Business expansion (new markets, new practices, new cities, etc.) • Competitive intelligence • BenchmarkingOutline your organization’s most important needs and then find ways to use data to support those initiatives. For example:• Increasing associate hiring • Finding partners in a particular practice or geographic region • Seeking new markets in which to expand • Creating new practice areas • Looking for merger partners • Setting up an alumni relations program • Increasing diversity hiring • And so much moreThe point is that data – when it’s strong – can help support any kind of business growth, marketing or recruiting initiative.Collect relevant data. You have the systems in place but how are you going to collect the data you need for the specific project and need you have? Think about collecting the data, storing it, processing/analyzing it, pulling out the insights from the data and presenting the data. First, start by identifying the questions that you want your data to answer, then shape the narrative of your project based on the raw data. &nbsp;Synthesize and present your data. The next step is how to turn your raw data into insights while ensuring you present it in a way that effectively engages and persuades your target audience. This involves knowing your audience and how they would best respond to the information at hand. Do written reports resonate with them? PowerPoints with charts and graphs? Or are they more captivated by storytelling? Always think about how to best convey the information you have or all the work you put into researching and creating your insights can fall flat.Put processes in place to maintain the accuracy of your data moving forward. Now that you’ve spent all this time and effort getting your data in good shape and figuring out the data you need, it’s crucial to ensure you have the right tools and processes to maintain your data and make it actionable. Decide the cadence of reporting certain data and assign stakeholders responsible for the process. Create easy-to-update templates so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time when synthesizing the data and so you can easily benchmark each report against the others.When it comes to people data, your Client Relationship Management (CRM) system not only helps with managing contacts, but when fully deployed and utilized, it can also improve client service, streamline your lead generation process, and uncover hidden relationships. Of course, the key to having a successful CRM system is participation by key stakeholders and having updated data. Take the time to ensure your contacts are regularly updated and segmented. If you find this task to be too much to manage internally, you can outsource it.In Summary There is no shortage of data available to law firms and legal service organizations today. The key is to be strategic about collecting it, updating it, synthesizing it and sharing it. Those organizations that view data as a strategic asset and develop robust data and analytics strategies are the ones that will have strategic advantage in today’s competitive legal market.&nbsp; &nbsp;Laura Leopard is the CEO of Leopard Solutions, an innovative data intelligence provider helping law firms, legal service providers, and corporate counsel build and strengthen relationships and uncover new opportunities using data. Leopard Solutions draws upon 20 years of law firm research and attorney data combined with predictive analytics to measure, benchmark and accelerate business development and law firm growth.&nbsp;

How to Effectively Leverage Your Current Data to Enhance Your Competitive Intelligence and Business Development Efforts

What we have here, is failure to communicate.&nbsp;There is nothing more obvious than the notion that the relationship between a lawyer and his or her client should be based on good communication, but communication seems to be a consistent problem on both sides. I routinely hear outside counsel say they wish their in-house counsel talked to them more about what they need so they could collaborate better. At the same time, I hear in-house counsel say that they wished their outside counsel talked to them more about what new things they could bring to the table to help them so they could collaborate better. There is a fundamental disconnect in the way we are doing law.I found myself using the phrase “the biggest disconnect in the legal industry” a few years ago after hearing stories like these:&nbsp;<ul><li>A law firm tweeted, wondering if in-house counsel would be interested in predictive assessments of coming legal trends. About a week earlier, a general counsel had told me that his company’s executive committee had made it clear that predicting and preparing for new legal issues should be his top priority.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul><li>In a 2020 Zoom meeting I attended, a large group was asked if they had any vendor who had “delighted” them recently. Only one person answered. Someone’s outside counsel had called and told them that they did not need to pay 2020 invoices until 2021 if they didn’t want to. While that also would have delighted me, lawyers on the call said they didn’t see how they could do that. No one indicated that they had reached out to clients in any innovative ways, let alone “delightful” ways.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul><li>In the same Zoom meeting, in-house counsel spontaneously started complaining about all their outside firms sending them emails about how to revise and renegotiate “force majeure” clauses for the pandemic. Although there was some laughter, there was a sense of great frustration about firms guessing what in-house counsel might think was important rather than talking with them about priorities.</li></ul>&nbsp;<ul><li>I see regularly in surveys of chief legal officers that the most common answer to the question “What innovation did your outside counsel bring to you?” is “none.”</li></ul>&nbsp;For many in-house counsel, the disconnect is even worse. They are both consumers of legal services from outside firms and providers of legal services for internal business owners. Internal business owners also want their in-house counsel to be suggesting innovations and improvements, often have something in mind, and yet are not having conversations about problems and solutions.That creates the biggest disconnect in law department innovation.When I ask why people are not initiating these discussions, I hear a lot of reasons: waiting for the other group to make the first move, too busy, too anxious, and many more. Mostly, I get the sense that lawyers don’t want to admit (or show) that they might not have answers for everything, even in these uncertain times.&nbsp;One word: fear (of what they might hear).In one sense, the threshold for innovation efforts in law is low and the opportunity to differentiate from other firms is there for the taking, simply by taking the initiative. The examples illustrate the desire of in-house counsel to see their outside firms take the lead in innovation and technology initiatives and their disappointment with the perceived lack of leadership. The same dynamic is at play internally.Many lawyers hate to “sell.” Most in-house counsel hate to be “sold to.” However, pitching innovation efforts should not involve selling in the classic sense. It should consist of many of your best lawyering skills: asking good questions, active listening, investigating, getting to the core problem, looking at options, and patience. You want to understand what your client wants before you jump in with a solution.Too often, lawyers want to lead with technology “solutions” like “contract lifecycle management.” Yes, there is a need, but those projects are not at the top of the in-house priority list, are nightmarishly complex to implement, and involve many moving parts within a company’s existing IT and procurement structure.If, instead, the innovation process ended with a pilot project of a dashboard of highly relevant data, an expertise locator, or a list of places where routine legal review could be eliminated, a firm might have delighted in-house counsel and internal business owners. Each of those solutions address pain points, solve business problems, and are relatively easy experiments and pilots. Each of these also illustrate how you have come in to listen, discover and suggest some options that have worked elsewhere, not to sell a pre-conceived innovation “solution.” And they provide value to the client.If you initiate these, your firm is likely to stay on the panel list when the inevitable panel convergence efforts begin again. If you suggest these for your internal business owners, they will definitely remember you favorably at review timeWith that in mind, what approaches work best when discussing innovation projects or processes with a client? The following checklist provides practical guidance to help bridge the communications gap between lawyers and their clients.&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Bring it Up First.&nbsp;Simply initiating the conversation might be a differentiator for you. Put innovation in the context of improving the relationship, controlling or cutting legal spend, or a new business benefit. Offer to listen. Don’t charge for the meeting. Get on your client’s calendar. You will be surprised by the receptivity you find.2. Understand Your Client’s Internal Goals and Objectives.&nbsp;In-house counsel, law departments, and internal business units have annual objectives and goals. Understand what those are and make them part of the equation.3. Pitch Pilots.&nbsp;Upwards of 90% of innovation projects fail or drastically change from the initial concept. It’s part of the normal process. The more pilots, the better. Pilots give you and the client prototypes to test, examples of possible projects to share with others, and quick wins that build momentum. Pilots show off your creativity, business acumen, and understanding of client goals.4. Bring the Whole Team.&nbsp;Get the right teams talking, especially in panel convergence presentations. Your client will want to hear from the people who can answer their specific questions about process improvement, project management, productization of services, and other innovation initiatives. From my experience, in-house counsel does not want a return to the days when a senior partner unfamiliar with the details is in charge of pitching overconfidently a service he clearly does not understand.&nbsp;Innovation initiatives from outside counsel have moved from nice-to-have to must-have. The same is true for in-house counsel and their business owners. Law departments are looking for help to show innovation results to their C-suites and meet corporate and department goals and objectives. Increasingly, company survival is at issue and legal budget and personnel reductions are likely on the horizon.Think about it. if you were a general counsel under orders to cut costs, wouldn’t you try to keep your own team together and reduce spend on outside counsel who do not bring anything new to the table?A final point. People want guides who give them plans to achieve what they need and let them be the heroes of their own innovation stories. Think of yourself as Yoda, not a superhero swooping in to save the day. If you can provide that, you will cement long-term client relationship and open the doors to new legal work as a preferred law firm, a trusted business advisor, and a valued partner.What can you do, today, to bridge the biggest disconnect in law department innovation?&nbsp;Dennis Kennedy is the Director of the Michigan State University Center for Law, Technology &amp; Innovation, the author of the book, Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law, and the founder of the Law Department Innovation Library (www.ldilibrary.com). He writes and speaks frequently on legal innovation and technology topics. He has co-hosted The Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast on legal technology with Tom Mighell since 2006. LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennismkennedy">https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennismkennedy</a>&nbsp;Featured Product: <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/josef/">Josef</a> is a no-code platform that puts the power to create digital legal tools in the hands of lawyers, corporate counsel, and legal ops professionals. With Josef, legal teams of all sizes can easily create and launch their own legal bots to save time on repetitive tasks, improve the client experience, and focus on higher-value strategic work. Find out <a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/josef/">more</a>.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><a href="https://www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/josef/"><img src="https://media.legaltechnologyhub.com/image_5beb7d8cee.png"></a></figure>&nbsp;&nbsp;