Here’s a quick round up of some of the legal tech and legal AI bits and bobs that you may have missed during the summer holiday period.
Legal AI Co. Luminance Makes Headway in Home UK Market
UK law firm Penningtons Manches has selected Luminance’s AI technology, initially to enhance its due diligence processes for real estate transactions.
The move signals further progress for Luminance in its home UK market, having also recently bagged Eversheds Sutherland as a client. Ironically, although Luminance is very much a UK creation it is perhaps fair to say its greatest number of clients, from quite early on, have been spread around the globe, rather than in London.
Although its first client was leading English firm Slaughter and May, it didn’t initially then pick up a series of other UK firms as some may have expected. Now, however, things seem to be changing.
Tarnya Pilgrim, Associate Director at Penningtons, said: ‘We are seeing an increasing demand from clients to adopt new-era tools such as Luminance. We are delighted to have found an AI solution that not only meets our contract review needs for real estate, but which we can use across our legal practice.’
HighQ Acquires North American Tech Co. Legal Anywhere
Legal data collaboration company, HighQ, last week announced their acquisition of Legal Anywhere, which also specialises in enterprise collaboration and file sharing solutions for the legal industry.
In short this is a move to greatly expand the company’s reach, especially into the key US market.
Ajay Patel, founder and CEO at HighQ, said: ‘We have long admired the Legal Anywhere team and recognised in them a dedication to client service that perfectly fits our culture at HighQ. As we come together, our combined industry knowledge and passion for innovation will unite our teams and provide our joint client base the very best support, software and services possible.’
Global Law Firm Baker McKenzie Partners with US Legal AI Co. LexPredict
Baker McKenzie has partnered with US legal AI company LexPredict, to use its ContraxSuite technology, which is an open-source contract analytics and legal document platform.
ContraxSuite uses ‘AI and human input to augment and integrate the user’s experience with the documents they are working with’. Combining a lawyer’s talent with legal tech, the tool aims to increase efficiency and accuracy by analyzing contracts, extracting key information, automating certain alerts and reports, creating document comparisons, and revealing trends in contracting.
This collaboration will ‘modernize and improve the contracting process for mid to high-volume contracts’ for Baker McKenzie’s clients, said the firm.
R&D Partner, Ben Allgrove, who chairs Baker McKenzie’s Innovation Committee, said: ‘Our clients expect us to foresee their business challenges and anticipate what’s next – and by combining our legal expertise with technology, we are doing just that. This bespoke software reduces the time associated with reviewing legal documents and redirects our human talent to high-value work.’
Linklaters Launches Own eDiscovery Service, Uses Servient Technology
Global law firm, Linklaters, last week announced the launch of its own global eDiscovery service, leveraging US-based machine learning platform, Servient. This will be managed inhouse and will deliver an ‘efficient and seamless end to end service from document ingestion through to production’ the firm said.
Servient says of itself: ‘[We are] built on a Big Data platform that provides massive scalability for intelligent management of today’s unstructured data stores. Servient permits companies to quickly process unstructured data into the Servient archive and blends search with machine-learning workflows to discover knowledge and automatically organize the data.’
And, it adds: ‘As well as high speed processing capabilities and advanced search functionality, Servient incorporates ‘Continuous Active Learning’, which identifies documents that are most likely to be relevant as a review progresses, helping to prioritise and expedite matters. It is built and engineered using leading edge Spark and elastic, web-scale technologies to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and provides instant scaleability and global accessibility.’
Commenting on the launch, Ben Carroll, a Linklaters partner said: ‘We are delighted with the capability that Servient is demonstrating and the benefits it’s delivering for our clients. Linklaters has always embraced new ideas and technologies that enable us to provide a best in class service and the launch of this service is a real embodiment of that aspiration.’