April 15, 2024 - Issue #285
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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Conferences and Other Events
🔳 The European Legal Technology Association is putting on a virtual program on May 13, 2024 covering the subject of cybersecurity for web apps, with the program being targeted to legal tech vendors (and their technical profiles).
For a list of speakers and more detail about what sounds like a program of great relevance to legal tech companies, visit this link (where you can register for the program too): https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvdOCurz0qG9YnGTmZ6TVBjayMkVfZjsLy#/registration
Exit/M&A
🔳 "Bloomberg Industry Group today (9 April) announced that it has acquired Dashboard Legal, a New York-founded legal project management and collaboration startup.
"The acquisition expands Bloomberg Law’s presence within the legal workflow market, which it entered last year with the introduction of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, its AI-powered solution for storing, searching, drafting, and negotiating contracts."
Hearty congrats to Mat Rotenberg and the rest of the Dashboard Legal team! https://legaltechnology.com/2024/04/09/bloomberg-law-acquires-us-collaboration-and-project-management-startup-dashboard-legal/
Fundraising
🔳 "Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan will receive $40 million in litigation funding from Longford Capital to finance lawsuits for private equity firms and their portfolio companies.
"The deal, announced Thursday, will offer funding for private equity clients who want to pursue litigation without harming profit and loss statements, according to the law firm. Quinn Emanuel said liquidity challenges posed by high interest rates make outside funding particularly attractive for private equity companies."
I wouldn't call this traditional a "startup fundraise," but I'll tag it with the "Fundraising" tag on the LTSF home page. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/quinn-emanuel-inks-40-million-deal-to-fund-private-equity-suits?source=newsletter&item=body-link®ion=text-section
🔳 “. . . Patlytics, which offers an artificial intelligence patent workflow platform, announced that it raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient Ventures, an investment firm backed by Google.” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/11/patent-workflow-platform-patlytics-raises-4-5-million-with-help-from-law-firms-partners/
Hiring/New Hires
🔳 “Last year Joe Cohen hit the headlines for his work at global law firm Dentons in building FleetAI, one of the first major legal sector projects founded upon OpenAI’s LLMs. To the surprise of many, he then left to help another firm with a major tech and innovation launch – which as revealed today, includes building and selling its own software products to clients.
“Where he went was UK-based Charles Russell Speechlys (CRS), a law firm known for its private client work as well as finance and real estate, to become Director of Advanced Client Solutions (ACS).”
More here: https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2024/04/09/joe-cohen-charles-russells-plan-to-sell-its-own-software/
JusticeTech/A2J
🔳 "The legal aid community is actively exploring the use cases for generative AI, and these could differ from what Big Law has been experimenting with over the last year or so."
$$ Quote: "During his two decades litigating housing cases in New York City, Sateesh Nori estimated that he has likely represented about a thousand families. But the number of families he had to turn away, or what he called the “triage” that legal aid lawyers have to do daily, could easily be tenfold that amount. The appeal to leverage some form of AI to help service more clients quickly became obvious." https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/10/could-gen-ai-be-a-pivotal-moment-for-the-legal-aid-market/
Product Development
🔳 “Gavel Launches PDF Automation Tool to 'Double' Its Reach
“Gavel CEO and founder Dorna Moini said the new tool will also allow users to generate PDFs from source documents without Adobe subscriptions.” https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/09/maybe-gavel-launches-pdf-automation-tool-to-double-its-reach/
🔳 “Legal technology provider Litera released Foundation Dragon, a generative artificial intelligence-powered deal term database, on Wednesday.”
Very comprehensive reporting on Litera’s product release (especially on the subject of Litera’s competition in this KM space and how Litera wants to distinguish its offering). So, much more worth reading here: https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/10/litera-releases-gen-ai-powered-foundation-dragon-km-solution-for-deal-data/
🔳 From Axios’s website: “Docusign, the e-signature giant, announced Thursday it is moving into a new software category — contracts — and will soon offer an AI-powered ‘intelligent agreement management platform.’” https://www.axios.com/2024/04/11/docusign-ai-contract-management
Purchasing/Using Legal Tech
🔳 Winners and losers from legal’s adoption of GenAI - who might they be? A host of thinkers weigh in on this question. https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2024/04/08/the-ai-revolution-is-here-who-will-be-the-winners-and-losers-in-legal-services/
🔳 “Lawyers at tech-savvy law firms say they are more satisfied in their jobs and more efficient at their work than those at less technology-forward firms, according to the 2024 Technology Perceptions Report by Intapp.”
Why did this survey result not surprise me? 😉 https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/09/lawyers-say-technology-improves-employee-satisfaction-so-why-are-firms-slow-to-modernize/
🔳 “Lawyers using generative artificial intelligence completed everyday legal tasks as much as 80 per cent faster in a months-long trial by global firm Ashurst.
“But, in a blind study during the trial, case summaries produced entirely by humans were judged of a higher quality than AI-assisted case summaries in all but one case, suggesting that using these tools in the wrong way could lead to worse outcomes than not using them at all.” https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/what-this-law-firm-learnt-from-experimenting-with-ai-20240408-p5fi2k#:~:text=Lawyers%20using%20generative%20artificial%20intelligence,trial%20by%20global%20firm%20Ashurst
🔳 Come and get it: latest Legaltech News’ roundup (hires, acquisitions, product developments and more): https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/12/legal-tech-rundown-harvey-acquisition-relativity-hire-thomson-reuters-api-portal-and-more/
Startup Management
🔳 VC firm, First Round Capital, has put together a program for sales-led B2B companies (a category that includes most legal tech startups) on making the product-market-fit search more of a science and less of an art. https://pmf.firstround.com/levels?ref=review.firstround.com
🔳 Failure is, of course, an orphan; however, wherever the parentage may lie for these legal tech failures, it's instructive to keep them in mind (as the LawSites blog does in the article linked below). https://www.lawnext.com/2024/04/the-five-most-momentous-legal-tech-fails.html
🔳 Read this interview with the co-founder of legal project management software provider, Hivelight, and learn about, among many other things: (i) how crucial customer onboarding has been to Hivelight’s success, (ii) what its like to combine an engineer’s background with the background of a lawyer when founding a legal tech startup, and (iii) what financial bootstrapping has meant to Hivelight’s business journey. https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2024/04/11/ltn-startup-spotlight-hivelight-founder-discusses-bootstrapping-the-future-of-integrations-and-more/
🔳 In “Lenny’s Podcast,” Lenny Rachitsky interviews Todd Jackson, a partner at VC firm First Round Capital on product-market fit. Before joining First Round, "Todd Jackson. . . played a crucial role as VP of Product and Design at Dropbox and . . . led product management for Twitter’s Content and Discovery teams after selling his startup, Cover, to Twitter in 2014."
Recently, we previously posted to the LTSF community about First Round's PMF advice here: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/54334845?utm_source=manual
Podcast accessible here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lenny/p/a-framework-for-finding-product-market?r=1cv2&utm_medium=ios
🔳 "Enter Sequoia’s product-market fit framework, which comes at a time when venture funding has taken a nose-dive due to high interest rates and other economic pressures. Founders today need to do more with less, and get to product-market fit as efficiently as possible. Sequoia’s framework defines three product-market fit archetypes and outlines different ways of thinking about each one." https://www.fastcompany.com/91089116/heres-how-sequoia-teaches-founders-to-find-product-market-fit
Teaching/Learning Legal Tech
🔳 “Aderant, a leading global provider of legal business management solutions, has announced its new collaboration with Vanderbilt Law School, which aims to drive greater awareness about
artificial intelligence to benefit both law students and law firms.”
I really love these legal tech company/law school collabs. Beneficial to both sides and socially good overall. Kudos to Aderant and Vandy law school.
Much more in the press release that can be accessed at this link: https://network-295075.mn.co/posts/54467897?utm_source=manual
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