As many of us prepare to head back to the office in 2020, here is a soft start to the New Year in the shape of a quiz. Some questions are tricky, some are lighthearted, and others are designed to help get our heads in gear for the coming decade. Happy New Year to everyone! Enjoy.
NOW WITH ANSWERS ADDED – Correct answers are UNDERLINED in BOLD with a tick: √
(Note: for some questions there are multiple correct answers.)
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1 – The legal sector exists in order to….
A) Provide jobs for university graduates who weren’t great at maths.
B) Enable lawyers to purchase second homes in Tuscany.
C) Keep legal tech journalists busy.
D) Meet society’s needs for legal products and services, as and when required. √
2 – Which of the following isn’t the name of a legal tech company?
A) RAVN
B) Rain Bird
C) Sausage Dog √
D) Beagle
3 – Legal technology is called legal technology because…
A) If they didn’t add ‘legal’ to it lawyers wouldn’t use it.
B) No one knows why, it’s a complete mystery.
C) It relates to tech that has been customised to specific legal sector needs. √
D) Without it there could not be any legal tech conferences and we’d all have to go to ‘technology’ conferences instead, which might be a bit too general.
4 – One of the first ever legal AI companies for doc review and analysis, launched back in 2010, was…
A) Blue Whale Systems
B) Seal Software √
C) Happy Dolphin Analytics
D) Contract Pod Ai
5 – The main difference between legal tech and law tech is…
(ALL ARE CORRECT – √)
A) Legal tech is one syllable longer than law tech.
B) There is no meaningful difference, it’s just a pointless linguistic aberration.
C) Legal tech is used mainly across America, Europe and Asia, while Law Tech is used mainly in the UK.
D) Someone told me once, but I’ve forgotten what it was as it didn’t seem important.
6 – Which of the following would you probably not use to build an automated workflow?
A) Bryter
B) Neota Logic
C) CourtQuant √
D) Autologyx
7 – Which economist said: ‘The greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour…seem to be results of the division of labour.’
A) Adam West
B) Adam Smith √
C) Nick West
D) Nick Fury
8 – ‘The means of production’ was an area of economic study made famous by which 19th century figure:
A) John Maynard Keynes
B) John Locke
C) Karl Marx √
D) Bob Monkhouse
9 – The world’s leading legal technology conference organisers are:
A) The Right Stuff
B) Sigue Sigue Sputnik
C) Rocket Man
D) Cosmonauts √
10 – Smart contracts are called ‘smart’ because:
A) They can do The Times crossword in under 10 minutes.
B) Smart stands for ‘Super Mechanised Auto Readable Transcript’.
C) They have something to do with self-execution and coded legal clauses. √
D) Just calling them contracts was a bit dull, and smart sounded cool.
11 – Artificial Lawyer …
A) Was created soon after the Brexit referendum in 2016. √
B) Has always been there, it’s just that people only noticed in 2016.
C) Never existed. You are still inside a deep virtual reality experiment that you are soon to emerge from.
D) Is in a state of perpetual evolution and recreates itself each year. √
12 – Law firms appear to love legal technology, but many remain slow at implementing it in a meaningful way. This is because:
A) It’s basically all just a big marketing wheeze to make clients think something is happening.
B) They want to implement it, but they’ve lost the instruction booklet and the Allen key.
C) After creating Innovation teams, lawyers have realised this was all a massive misunderstanding and they don’t want to change anything at all really.
D) There is insufficient pressure from clients to change the means of production. √
13 – Which well-known legal tech company was bought by Thomson Reuters in 2019?
A) Luminance.
B) Juro.
C) Debenhams.
D) HighQ √
14 – Which part of Thomson Reuters was sold to Big Four firm EY in 2019?
A) Its catering division.
B) The massive car park at its Eagen base in Minnesota.
C) The Legal Managed Services group, AKA Pangea. √
D) The top secret experimental weapons development group.
15 – Back in the year 2000, the Big Four were previously known as:
A) The Big Five √
B) The Big Six
C) The Crazy Gang
D) Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po
16 – Back in 2015, Berwin Leighton Paisner was one of the first law firms to publicly talk about their use of a legal AI system. They used RAVN – as it was then – but lawyers at the firm liked to call their real estate lease analysis system by what name?
A) Bob the Builder.
B) Ronald McDonald.
C) Lonald. √
D) Lonnie Donegan.
17 – Which billionaire has played a key role in the creation of Luminance?
A) Richard Branson
B) Jeff Bezos
C) Mike Lynch √
D) Kylie Jenner
18 – The use of legal technology has so far led to how many job losses of qualified lawyers?
A) 100,000
B) 1 million
C) 10 million
D) None at all. √
19 – The billable hour is a great way to sell legal services because….
A) It’s always totally impossible to know how much any legal product or service will cost, so measuring cost only by time makes sense.
B) Clients love to have zero idea in advance of how much something will cost as it adds to the fun of being a General Counsel.
C) Clients love to pay far more than is needed for standardised legal work, and so the time-based system which is inherently expensive and inefficient really helps.
D) It makes private practice lawyers a lot of money and the clients have not yet pushed back hard enough. √
20 – It’s estimated that what percentage of SMEs in the UK never use a lawyer even when they have a defined legal problem, primarily because they are scared of the costs involved?
A) 10%
B) 30%
C) 50%
D) 70% √
21 – Which law firm launched a ‘parametric’ smart insurance contract for client use in 2019?
A) Slaughter and May
B) Clyde & Co √
C) BLM
D) Wachtel Lipton
22 – Deloitte recently launched Deloitte Legal Ventures, a tech engagement programme, which so far has involved how many companies?
A) 4
B) 6
C) 12
D) 14 √
23 – Which country held its first ever legal tech hackathon in 2019? (Hint: Artificial Lawyer’s editor was a judge there.)
A) Nepal
B) Samoa
C) Taiwan
D) Japan √
24 – In which country did the judges get rather upset about tech companies analysing their court decisions and then publishing the results?
A) North Korea
B) Russia
C) China
D) France √
25 – In which country did a local legal organisation go to court to stop a tech company providing DIY contracts online?
A) North Korea
B) Russia
C) China
D) Germany √
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Hope you enjoyed that.
There are no prizes for getting all the questions right, other than the kudos of knowing that you really have a great understanding of what matters in the world of legal tech and innovation.