News Wrap: Relativity, DLA Piper, Kennedys IQ, Elevate

As ever, there is more news than you can shake a legal tech stick at, so here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening.

DLA Piper Launches Aiscension For Cartel Risk Analysis

DLA Piper has launched Aiscension, which is designed to find cartel risks among corporations. It is based on NLP software from Reveal, the e-Discovery company. DLA Piper will be offering the Aiscension service as part of its enhanced legal offering named Law&.

Aiscension works by having the NLP model trained by DLA Piper lawyers and optimised in collaboration with Reveal data scientists to identify and efficiently explore corporate electronic communications, which may signal cartel behaviour, they said.

Ilan Sherr, Legal Director at DLA Piper and Executive Director of Aiscension, said: ‘The efficiency and reduction in cost that Aiscension brings to the market opens up a whole new way for companies to view and mitigate cartel risk. Aiscension provides our clients with the ability to identify, at an early stage, whether they are at risk of being involved in potentially illegal activity.  This can enable them to take appropriate action at the earliest opportunity, and even prevent any damage from being done.’

And, Simon Levine, Global Co-CEO, DLA Piper, added: ‘We continue to build on the momentum of introducing bold and innovative products and services through our enhanced legal offering Law&, which directly addresses our client’s challenges and allows them to seize opportunities.’

Nice work and good to see firm-backed projects like this.

Kennedys IQ Adds NLP Analysis to Road Accident Compensation Assessment Platform

Kennedys IQ, the spun-out legal tech company of global law firm Kennedys, has boosted its end-to-end solution for injury compensators by using NLP to assess medical evidence and help with the recommendation of damages figures for insurance claims going through the UK Ministry of Justice Portal.

The system is the first of its type to help compensators manage Road Traffic Accident claims from the moment they are submitted via the portal all the way through to a stage 3 damages hearing at the end and any recoveries, if necessary, the firm said.

Richard West, partner and head of the innovations group at Kennedys and a director of Kennedys IQ, said: ‘Portal Manager shows what can be achieved when deep legal experience and expertise is combined with cutting-edge technology – a solution that is designed to enable our clients to be more self-sufficient, reducing their reliance on lawyers for attritional claims.’

And, Karim Derrick, Kennedys IQ’s product and innovation director, concluded: ‘Portal Manager is the latest stage of our ambitious programme of software development, putting elite legal thinking directly into the hands of client claims handlers via the IQ Platform. We’re helping claims handlers shift from information gatherers to insight enabled decision makers.’

Elevate Hires Founder of Allen & Overy’s Peerpoint Group

Law company Elevate has hired Ben Williams, the founder and ex-head of Peerpoint, the on-demand lawyer service of Allen & Overy. He joins as VP and General Manager of the company’s Contracts Services business unit.

In 2013 he founded Peerpoint and before that he was Head of Business Improvement at Allen & Overy, and led their internal consulting unit.

As part of that role, he launched the firm’s Legal Services Centre in Northern Ireland. He also led the firm’s early work on legal project management and process improvement.

In short, a very good hire for a business such as Elevate.

And Relativity Gets Some More Money (But Won’t Say How Much)

eDiscovery platform Relativity ‘has announced a definitive agreement for a strategic growth investment from Silver Lake’, which is a prominent investment fund.

The problem is that they won’t say for how much, so this is a massive anticlimax. They’ve floated a multi-billion dollar company valuation figure in the financial press, but without any supporting financial data at all. On that basis anyone could say their company was worth billions…..

Come on Relativity, if you’re going to make this kind of announcement at least have something concrete to actually tell us.