Legal Tech Round Up: Smart Contracts, Legal Design + More

It’s been a busy few weeks (…years….) for legal tech land, and this week is no different. So, Artificial Lawyer has made a round up of a number of different news stories.

Norton Rose Fulbright joins the Accord Project

Global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright has announced that it has partnered with the Accord Project, the collaborative legal industry organisation developing open source smart legal contract technology.

The Accord Project has been created to connect key players in the world of smart contract technology, blockchain and legal tech companies in order to develop common standards for legal smart contracts.

The project has been created by US-based legal tech pioneer Clause in association with IBM, R3, Hyperledger, and a number of other technical, standards and legal organizations.

Martin Scott, managing partner, Norton Rose Fulbright Europe Middle East and Asia, said: ‘Our partnership with Accord will allow us to establish robust standards for the use of smart contracts, and drive process efficiencies as part of how we deliver legal services generally.’

Peter Hunn, co-director, Accord Project and founder of Clause, said: ‘We are delighted Norton Rose Fulbright has joined the Accord Project. Law firms are drawn to using the industry standard for smart legal contracts, bolstered by the technology partnerships the Project has in place.’

The news follows an increasing number of major law firms around the world joining the smart contract group, which has also partnered with IBM’s blockchain platform (see story).

PactSafe Bags $5.5m in Series A Funding As Legal Tech Investment Boom Continues.

PactSafe, a cloud-based contracting platform that has pioneered novel ways to sign contracts, such as ‘smile to sign’, today announced the completion of a $5.5 million Series A funding round.

The round was co-led by Mercury Fund and Signal Peak Ventures, along with repeat investors Elevate Ventures and Vulpes Testudo.

Brian Powers, CEO and Founder of PactSafe, said: ‘The problem most businesses face when improving contract workflows – going ‘all-in’ on just e-signatures rarely moves the needle.’

‘With this investment, we will continue our history of creating solutions that drive efficiencies and save our customers enormous amounts of time. Since PactSafe’s inception, we’ve processed millions of legal events, allowing our customer to save 1.8 million work hours by using our platform. Our goal is to give companies time and peace of mind back,’ he added. 

(For some more info on PactSafe, check out the piece in Artificial Lawyer here.)

Justis Hosts Legal Design Sprint in London

Justis, the case law data company, and the City Law School are hosting a student legal design sprint on July 26th, in London. Please go along and check it out. Rather than paraphrase the info they sent to Artificial Lawyer, please see their brochure in graphics below.

And, finally,

Luminance Bags More Clients for its AI-Driven Doc Review Tech

The UK-based company Luminance now says it has more than 100 clients worldwide for its AI review tech, including US law firm Holland & Knight, and more recently UMBRA – Strategic Legal Solutions in Indonesia, as well as Baltic law firm COBALT which has offices across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Rather than give you the usual comments, please see below a nice little graphic Luminance made to illustrate their recent growth.

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