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New developments from the 2017 Legaltech conference
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: March 24, 2017
The 2017 Legaltech conference held in New York in February shone a light on several trends in the now-maturing industry of law office technology, according to a number of reports from attendees.
It is apparently the view of the organizers of this annual confab, the publisher ALM, that artificial intelligence is a burgeoning area in legal tech.
The first day keynote speaker, Andrew McAfee, is the author of a recent book about AI. He’s also not familiar with legal tech, so who knows what that means, exactly.
LexisNexis announced that they have ceased to sell their law practice management system designed for small and solo firms, Firm Manager. They will continue to support current customers, but the announcement apparently sent a shock wave through the conference. The company still offers Juris, PC Law, and Time Matters, the latter of which has just received a major upgrade.
Document management systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, both as stand-alones and as add-ons hit the market.
One add-on is Omnity (https://www.omnity.io) a semantic-based document search platform that can find hard-to-determine links between documents. Although Omnity can work in any field, it seems particularly useful in large case file discovery. The developer said that 7000 words make up 90 percent of all documents, and so this product searches in the remaining 10 percent to find correlations between docs. Really at the edge.
Another new add-on doc management product, Metajure Illuminate (http://metajure.com/illuminate), finds documents and emails that are saved outside of the normal document management systems. The search interface is Google-like, and sorted by relevancy or date. Looks like another product that would be very useful in large cases, where the sheer numbers of documents get out of hand easily.
Another new product, not yet on the market, is Expert Witness Exchange, which will be a data-driven referral market for attorneys seeking experts. Interested attorneys can sign up for information at the website, https://www.expertwitnessexchange.com.
And LawToolBox entered into an agreement with DocuSign that will allow client intake information to be streamlined and stored in the cloud.
It also cost like a grand to get into the conference, so maybe this paper will send me next year?