Last night, law company Elevate announced that they are acquiring Redgrave Data, a powerhouse in several areas, including eDiscovery technology. Artificial Lawyer asked Liam Brown, CEO, some more about the deal.
First, some context. Elevate, an ALSP, handles the volume needs of law firms and corporates. This could be contract review, or litigation-related review. They also provide flexible resourcing.
The company has made several purchases and major hires over the years, with the acquisition of LexPredict in 2018, the legal AI doc review system created by Dan Katz, as probably one of the most important in terms of tech development.
They also provide clients with their own home-made software products, such as Elevate ELM, which ‘unifies legal requests, matters, contracts, counsel and spend management into one intelligent and connected platform’. In short, they are taking an ‘everything store’ approach to operating as an ALSP.
After a pause in inorganic growth, in May this year they also bought the CJK Group, which among other things helps with eDiscovery work in non-English languages.
In short, Elevate seems to be on a growth push again and now they have bought US-based Redgrave Data. It has around 20-plus staff, and its founders Mollie Nichols, Scott Culbertson, Dave Lewis, Mark Noel, and Lindsey Worth will all join the Elevate management team. So, that’s an immediate boost to the law company.
But, in terms of what it brings to the table, their skills in legal data analysis and AI, often around eDiscovery, increases Elevate’s capabilities in this fast-evolving field and will be a clear benefit to what the ALSP already offers.
So, now to the interview with Los Angeles-based Liam Brown.
Why do this deal?
Elevate is investing in our consulting and software businesses. The Redgrave Data team is a world-class team of experts in handling enterprise data in law. Elevate has a global customer base of household-name corporations and law firms that need that legal and tech expertise, e.g. for ediscovery, investigations, or compliance matters.
How does the deal fit into your longer-term strategy?
Elevate started investing in AI when we acquired LexPredict in 2018. Since then, we have built increasingly powerful AI into our ELM legal ops software platform.
We use that AI-powered software to deliver our human-in-loop services. For example, we have reviewed over 14 million contracts using our contract analysis software. We have also added more world-class AI technologists to our development team.
How important is genAI as an aspect to this deal?
GenAI is one of the AI tools that Elevate uses, but it’s not the only one in our AI toolkit. GenAI’s conversational capabilities, ability to retain knowledge from conversation history, and answer questions from this knowledge history or any other relevant context the user provides, makes it great for content creation use cases such as deposition summaries.
But other Analytical AI tools are a better fit for some of our complex, scale, computationally intensive work. The Redgrave Data AI team are experts at selecting and implementing the right tool for each specific use case.
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So, there you go. While the field of independent ALSPs has had a bumpy ride over the last couple of years, it looks like Elevate for one is very much focused on growth and making the most out of AI, whether genAI or ML/NLP approaches.