July 8, 2024 -- Issue #297
Hi, Charlie Uniman here, host of Legal Tech StartUp Focus ("LTSF"), the online community for everyone involved with legal tech startups. You're reading the latest digest of articles, opinion pieces, and other thoughts posted during the past week at the community.
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Exit/M&A
🔳 From Axios’ “Pro Rata” newsletter: “Aurora Capital Partners acquired First Legal, a Monterey Park, Calif., provider of outsourced litigation support services." https://www.firstlegal.com
Fundraising
🔳 What’s new in Legaltech News’ latest legal tech rundown, well: fundraises, non-government organization appointments and startup hirings. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/07/05/legal-tech-rundown-structureflow-and-haloo-fundraising-richard-susskinds-new-role-and-more/
Hiring/New Hires
🔳 “Covington & Burling has created a new AI-focused role—director of artificial intelligence and e-discovery solutions—hiring Todd Itami in the position. Itami will lead Covington in its integration of AI and other technology tools at the firm, Covington said this week.” https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2024/07/02/covington-creates-ai-director-role-focused-on-demystifying-tech-for-lawyers/
Honors and Awards
🔳 Pubic service announcement: Nominations for the American Legal Technology Awards close on July 31. So, don’t forget to submit your noms if you haven’t already done so. https://americanlegaltechnology.com/
Member Introductions/Questions
🔳 New LTSF'er, Nathaniel Mayberg, co-founder and chairman at Pre/Dicta, surveys legal tech vendors: "Hi guys! In sales calls with litigators do you find doing 'discovery' questions to uncover pain points and qualify prospects is necessar? Our team seems to skip this and jump into demoing." Reply to Nathaniel's survey here: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/hi-guys-in-sales-calls-with-litigators-do-you-find-doing-discovery-questions-to-uncover-pain-points-and-qualify-prospects-is-necessary-our-team-seems-to-skip-this-and-jump-into-demoing?utm_source=manual
Product Development
🔳 “Legal research startup Paxton AI announced on Monday the release of its new artificial intelligence-powered Citator tool.
“The tool will be made available to all tiers of Paxton AI subscribers, except for the free-of-cost tier. Additionally, the company is offering a complimentary seven-day trial of Citator to new subscribers.” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/07/08/paxton-ai-releases-ai-citator-and-publicizes-its-benchmarks-on-github/
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
🔳 “Law.com Radar, a service that delivers AI-enhanced alerts of new lawsuits filed in more than 2,400 U.S. federal and state courts, is now tagging all new civil filings using the taxonomy developed by the SALI Alliance, a group working to standardize legal data across the industry.
“Radar is assigning these SALI labels using a proprietary machine learning model that it has trained to identify specific case types.” https://www.lawnext.com/2022/08/lawnext-podcast-damien-riehl-on-the-sali-alliance-and-setting-data-standards-for-the-legal-industry.html
🔳 “Retrieval augmented generation has been the talk of the town in legal tech. But, for all of its claims of mitigating or eliminating hallucinations, technologists caution that the process is far from a magic bullet.” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/07/02/rag-is-far-from-magic-and-prone-to-hallucinations/
🔳. Community member Ezra Clark, co-founder of Atlas Technology, posts about "Parsl" saying, "Drowning in M&A Documents? We Can Help You Breathe." Get access to a free trial at: https://parslai.com
🔳 "Bird & Bird has become one of the first international law firms to launch a large-scale proof of concept (POC) trial across multiple offices with Leya, a legal tech startup which uses AI to automate tasks and taps into both public and internal firm data.
"During the six-month programme, the firm will continuously assess the use of Leya across the firm’s international network, focusing on specific legal tasks including analysing local laws, court cases, case law, drafting contracts, and reviewing documents, they explained." https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2024/07/02/bird-bird-to-run-major-poc-with-ai-startup-leya/
Startup Life
🔳 Part of Legaltech News “Women in Legal Tech” series, an interview with Amy Wegener.
“Executive Coach and Consultant Amy Wegener discusses why she wanted to be part of the change she saw technology bringing to the legal profession, the power of coaching for succeeding in the C-suite, and why AI’s moment in legal is long overdue”. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/07/01/women-of-legal-tech-its-lonely-at-the-top-is-particularly-true-for-women-in-law-says-amy-wegener/
Startup Management
🔳 Mat Rotenberg founded and then led legal tech startup, Dashboard Legal, right up until its sale to Bloomberg Law. Here’s an article that explains how Mat made sure to fit Dashboard Legal right into lawyers’ existing workflows.
H/t to Mat for making me aware of the article by way of a LinkedIn post.
https://gritdaily.com/mat-rotenberg-bloomberg-law-upgrading-lawyers/
🔳 In this LinkedIn post, solid advice from legal tech startup, Nexl’s, founder and CEO, Philip Thurner, on product-market-fit and the snare of “false traction.”
Below is one of the many worthwhile insights in Philipp’s post that all early-stage startup leaders should keep top of mind:
“For any first-time founder, don’t get carried away by “false traction.” Raising money isn’t traction.” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/philipp-thurner_crm-lawyers-onefirm-activity-7215029072463114241-t6Ky?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
🔳 How Lori Beer, global CIO at JP Morgan Chase (with a department of 63,000 people and a $17 billion annual budget), thinks about her business remain.
Good read for startups, especially because Beer’s department “. . . works with a number of startups to tap into their innovations; Beer has a whole team dedicated to looking for the next big things.”
Teaching/Learning Legal Tech
🔳 Hugging Face, the AI tooling company that aims to make using GenAI more “user friendly” for beginners and experts, has created the “HF for Legal” community:
“Welcome to HF for Legal, a community dedicated to breaking down the opacity of language models for legal professionals. Our mission is to empower legal practitioners, scholars, and researchers with the knowledge and tools they need to navigate the complex world of AI in the legal domain.”
H/t to Josh Kubicki for calling this to my attention. https://huggingface.co/HFforLegal
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