AL Summer Quiz – The Answers

In the depths of August, Artificial Lawyer published its Summer Quiz about the legal tech market. There were 20 questions. Here are the answers.

  1. Which legal tech founder is a relation of the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer? – Vishal Sunak, US-based Co-Founder of NLP-driven CLM company, LinkSquares
  2. Which once famous UK-based legal AI brand ceased to exist this year? RAVN
To quote Edgar Allan Poe: ‘Nevermore, nevermore, said the RAVN’

3. DocuSign has bought three legal tech companies in the last couple of years, which are they? Clause, Seal Software, and Spring CM.

4. What is the average value, as a % of revenue, for R&D spending across most sectors of the economy? (And bonus question, in relation to legal tech, innovation and service delivery, how much is that in the legal sector?) 5% and for law firms it’s up to 1%.

5. What is the biggest legal tech company in the world by revenue, (if we include conglomerates where legal tech is a notable part of the overall enterprise)? Thomson Reuters, with its legal sector division bagging around $2.4bn per year, with its Westlaw, Contract Express, HighQ and other offerings.

6. How many legal tech IPOs have been announced in the last 12 months? Four: DISCO, Intapp and LegalZoom recently, and a bit before these Nuix in Australia.

7. Which Israel-based doc review company has an office staffed by lawyers in Utah? LawGeex

8. Which doc automation company from Finland is being used to help young lawyers in San Francisco learn about legal tech? Contract Mill.

9. US-based ‘legal tech app store’ Reynen Court has a staff member in Scotland – true or false? True – Sam Moore, hired from leading Scottish law firm, Burness Paull.

10. Blockchain solutions are used at scale for client work by how many of the UK 100 and US 100 largest law firms? Zero.

11. Which Magic Circle law firm recently re-integrated its spun-out legal tech division? Clifford Chance re-integrated the Applied Solutions legal tech group.

12. Nakhoda is the legal tech group of which UK-based law firm? (And special bonus: what is its main focus?) Linklaters, and it has a strong focus on automated doc creation and the extraction of key data at the point of creation.

13. The billable hour has only been the de facto method for billing legal work since the 1960s, i.e. only for about 60 years. True or false? True. Despite appearances, the billable hour is a relatively recent invention for lawyers.

14. The first legal tech product was in fact developed as early as 1956, and so we can say that ‘legal tech began’ in the 1950s. True or false? (Special bonus, this invention later led to the creation of what massive legal tech company?) True. And the company it eventually played a role in starting was LexisNexis.

15. Which no-code company is the oldest: BRYTER, Neota Logic, or AUTTO? Neota Logic – it was founded in 2010, AUTTO was founded in 2016, and BRYTER was founded in 2018.

16. Kira Systems, the well-known NLP doc analysis company, is over 10 years old – true or false? Yes, true, it was started back in 2011, although it will now be part of Litera following its acquisition this summer.

17. Luminance’s first CEO now works at which Big Four firm? (Special bonus question: and where does its second CEO work now?) Emily Foges moved to Deloitte, and then acting CEO, Jason Brennan, left to join the National Arbitration and Mediation organisation in New York.

18. The total number of lawyers who have lost their jobs in the last 12 months ‘because of AI’ is….how many? Zero.

19. Reports suggest that large commercial law firms have made more money recently than ever before, yet surveys also suggest many clients are putting pressure on inhouse legal teams to reduce spending. How is this possible? Because of the bifurcation of legal work, i.e. while there has been an increase in high value advisory work, corporates are finding more cost-effective ways to handle BAU work, from using ALSPs and managed legal services teams, to the use of process groups that belong to law firms, to expanding their own contracting teams, as well as making better use of technology.

20. There are so far two legal tech marketing consortiums, one is LexFusion, which is the other? Jameson Legal Tech – which is actually part of a recruitment company.

Hope you enjoyed that. If you got them right then kudos to you!

Legal Innovators Conference

P.S. if you’d like to come along to the Legal Innovators conference in London, which is on October 21 and 22, then you can find out more information here.