April 1, 2024 -- Issue #283

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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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Fundraising

-- From Axios’ “Pro Rata newsletter on March 26, 2024: “OneNotary, a digital notary, raised $5m in Series A funding. Jackson Square Ventures led, and was joined by DocuSign Ventures, GoodPaper Ventures, Digital Future, The LegalTech Fund, and Tom Gonsar. www.onenotary.us​

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-- Want to raise VC money? Then, you have to think meet the requirements of “venture math.” Here are the venture math rules (and, yes, there are exceptions to these rules - rare as they may be). https://ehandbook.com/understanding-venture-math-55c5a665cbca​

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-- From the Sifted newsletter today, March 29, 2024: “London-based ayora, an AI revenue management platform for lawyers, raised $1.6m in pre-seed funding. J12 led the round and was joined by investors including Twin Path Ventures.”

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Hiring/New Hires​
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-- The Legal Operators community emailed today [March 25, 2024]: “We’re excited to announce the launch of the first global Legal Operators Job Board, a dedicated space for this community to find new jobs and recruit talented legal operations folks to their teams.” https://www.legaloperators.com/jobs?utm_campaign=Legal%20Operators%20Main%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=84975334&utm_content=84975334&utm_source=hs_email​

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JusticeTech/A2J

-- “. . . [P]rofessors Ruzica Piskac and Scott Shapiro — from Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Yale Law School, respectively — ​are putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work on your behalf. With advanced AI-powered tools, they’ve developed a system — known as a “lawbot” — that can review and parse zoning laws, tax provisions, and other intricate legal codes much faster than human lawyers.”
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What I find unique about this product offering is that, as described in the linked article below, the lawbot here not only employs an LLM, “. . . [it] also applies automated reasoning, a form of AI that uses logic and formal methods to reliably solve complex problems.” A “happy” marriage of neural net systems and and rule-based expert systems (or “good old fashioned AI — GOFAI,” as it’s called in some parts). https://news.yale.edu/2024/03/25/ais-legal-revolution​

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Product Development

-- Here’s a terrific explainer of “. . . the Kelvin Legal Large Language Model (pronounced “Klem”), the first LLM built from the ground up to handle legal tasks and trained on lawfully obtained legal source data.”
​https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/03/26/in-a-gen-ai-first-273-ventures-introduces-kl3m-a-built-from-scratch-legal-llm/​

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Purchasing/Using Legal Tech

-- “CMS has joined the roster of law firms to have agreed a partnership with the generative AI platform Harvey.
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“The firm said that it had agreed to a “global partnership” with the AI company after a pilot programme using the technology beginning in 2023.” https://www.law.com/international-edition/2024/03/27/cms-joins-the-harvey-brigade-announces-phased-rollout-across-member-firms/​

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-- “Reed Smith is expanding its Innovation Lab and Intelligence Center of Excellence. Firm CINO David Cunningham said the venture involves new hires, outside-the-box thinking and fewer inter-departmental communication gaps.”
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Good discussion of the big picture challenges that BigLaw law firm innovation officers face.
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One of several “money quotes:”
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“What I’ve learned is that an innovation officer just does [knowledge management] and generative AI and stays in that lane. That’s a lot to do. But, when I talk to [other firms’ innovation officers] about how they are innovating the marketing processes and onboarding and client-relationships—most of them say that’s not [their] job. [A] few of them have tried to go to Marketing and say [they] want to do more, but they get pushed back with that’s not your area.’ ” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/03/28/inside-reed-smiths-ambitious-modernization-efforts-a-chat-with-cino-david-cunningham/​

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-- LTSF'er, Shashank Bijapur, posts: "🚀🔥Launch Alert: The worlds only store for in-house legal folks is now live at https://lawlawland.shop/ . It's the only place where contracts come with a chuckle. We are giving away free gifts to the first 500 orders - order soon!" https://lawlawland.shop Well, it's not really legal tech that's being sold here, but I'm up for buying some swag!!

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-- A useful distinction drown in this article between Generative AI and “discriminative AI.” Implications of this distinction for lawyer training are discussed-especially when it comes to lawyers learning about prompt “engineering.” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/03/29/generative-ai-and-e-discovery-6-lessons-from-the-past-year/​

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Startup Management

-- A Legaltech News interview with David Gaskey, co-founder of E-discovery platform Altumatim. The lined article below covers such topics as overcoming law firm sales bottlenecks, marketing LLM technology and more. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/03/27/ltn-startup-spotlight-altumatim-founder-on-why-chatgpt-helped-their-marketing-efforts/​
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Teaching/Learning Legal Tech

-- “The Cornell Tech LLM equips you with the legal, business, and tech knowledge you need to succeed, whether your goal is to join a large law firm or in-house legal department, or launch your own startup, like Cornell Tech alum John DeFelice.” https://www.lawnext.com/2024/03/getting-a-tech-llm-is-it-worth-it.html​

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-- “Flatiron Law, in collaboration with the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX) and a team of cutting-edge AI engineers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), has been developing an open source interactive “lawyer training” platform using generative AI that allows young lawyers to dialogue with a virtual adversary in simulated M&A negotiations of a Letter of Intent (LOI). It provides for varying starting positions, levels of buyer/seller leverage, complexity of legal issue at play, and the impact on the deal.
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“Come join us on April 11, 2024 at the CodeX Future Law Conference 2024 at Stanford University for the roll-out of the alpha version of the simulator. Everyone will have a chance to test drive the tool.” Register at the link: https://conferences.law.stanford.edu/futurelaw2024/​