kennethmjoyner

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Everlaw Becomes Legal Tech’s Latest Unicorn, with $202M Raise at $2B Valuation

E-discovery company Everlaw today became one of the few legal technology companies to join the elite ranks of unicorn status — companies valued at over $1 billion — with the announcement of a $202 million Series D funding at a valuation of over $2 billion.

The news follows a year in which the company experienced 80% year-over-year growth. The company says that total cases on its platform have more than doubled since its $62 million Series C round in March 2020, and that its platform is now used by 91 of the Am Law 200 and the attorneys general of all 50 U.S. states.

This was also a year in which Everlaw launched several new products, including Everlaw Legal Holds and Storybuilder by Everlaw (which the company demonstrated for my How It Works video series). Earlier this year, it became one of the first e-discovery platforms to achieve FedRAMP moderate certification.

Listen: LawNext Episode 33: AJ Shankar, Founder and CEO of Everlaw. 

“The legal industry has undergone a decade’s worth of technological change in just 18 months,” Everlaw CEO and founder AJ Shankar said in a statement. “Legal professionals need tools that can keep up with the pace of change without sacrificing security.

“We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we’re not resting on our laurels. This investment is part of a thoughtful and well-paced strategy for global growth, enabling us to support our customers, people and programs, including go-to-market efforts, channel partnerships and product innovation.”

The round announced today was led by TPG Growth with additional participation from H.I.G. Growth Partners and existing investors CapitalG, Menlo Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and K9 Ventures. Mike Zappert, a TPG partner, will join Everlaw’s board of directors.

Earlier this year, legal technology company Clio reached unicorn status when it announced a Series E investment of $110 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion, a milestone its CEO Jack Newton called “a coming of age for legal tech.”

In December 2020, says that Ironclad, the San Francisco-based digital contracting platform for legal departments, raised at least $100 million in a Series D funding round at a post-investment valuation of more than $950 million.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/11/everlaw-becomes-legal-techs-latest-unicorn-with-202m-raise-at-2b-valuation.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Paladin Partners with Major Law Firms to Expand Its Pro Bono Platform to the U.K.; Adds New Portals in U.S.

Paladin, a legal technology company whose platform enables law firms and legal services organizations to streamline and manage their pro bono programs and opportunities, is expanding from the United States to the United Kingdom.

The expansion comes by way of a partnership with six major law firms who are already Paladin customers in the U.S.: Akin Gump, Clifford Chance, McDermott Will & Emery, Vedder Price, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Winston & Strawn.

Through this expansion, partner NGOs, charities, and clearinghouses in London and Newcastle will be able to use a free version of Paladin’s platform to post pro bono and community outreach opportunities as they arise, to be referred out through a central dashboard.

Lawyers and business professionals who wish to volunteer their services will be able to filter opportunities across organizations by practice area, communities served, type of engagement, and whether the work is in person or remote, Paladin says.

The platform will also provide a personalized weekly email digest for volunteers to help them more readily find opportunities that meet their interests.

Kristen Sonday

“Leveraging technology to increase access to justice globally has always been Paladin’s vision,” Kristen Sonday, Paladin’s cofounder and CEO, said in a statement announcing the expansion. “We’re thrilled to take the next step towards building global pro bono infrastructure with our U.K. launch. By partnering with these six innovative firms and their NGO, charity, and clearinghouse partners, we’ll streamline legal aid workflows and more efficiently place volunteers on pro bono cases around the world.”

Paladin said that Clifford Chance, which nearly doubled its annual pro bono hours in the first year of partnering with Paladin in the U.S., will be a key partner in the launch. “We believe it is important not only to do good, but to be smart about how we do it, and Paladin is the perfect partner for any law firm chasing the same goals,” Tom Dunn, Clifford Chance pro bono director, said. “With just a few clicks, Paladin better matches those with skills they want to offer to those in need, leaving everyone better off.”

Sonday said that the company’s partner firms in the U.S. have been asking to expand the platform globally, which she said is a testament to the value they see in streamlining their volunteer programs through Paladin, as well as to the need for innovation in the pro bono ecosystem.

Paladin Launches New Pro Bono Portals in U.S.

In other Paladin news, the company has recently helped two states, Colorado and Indiana, launch pro bono portals, bringing to seven the number of state portals it has supported.

In  Colorado, Succession to Service, a pilot program of the Colorado Attorney Mentoring Program (CAMP), partnered with Paladin to launch a statewide online Pro Bono Opportunity Portal in August. Through the portal, Succession to Service will connect volunteer lawyers to their communities through local legal services organizations in order to help Colorado residents obtain legal help.

In Indiana, it worked with the Indiana Bar Foundation and the Coalition for Court Access to launch the Indiana Legal Help Pro Bono Opportunity Guide, which helps lawyers, law students and other legal professionals find opportunities to provide pro bono services.

These join other portals that Paladin has helped launch: Pro Bono Texas, in partnership with The State Bar of Texas, Oklahoma’s Pro Bono Opportunity Portal, in partnership with the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation; the Unemployment Insurance Relief portal launched by the New York State Bar Association, in which Clio was also a partner; and Wisconsin’s Pro Bono Opportunity Portal, together with the State Bar of Wisconsin.

Paladin also helped create the Disaster Relief Pro Bono Portal in partnership with the American Bar Association.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/11/paladin-partners-with-major-law-firms-to-expand-its-pro-bono-platform-to-the-u-k-adds-new-portals-in-u-s.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Justice Deno Himonas, Who Spearheaded Utah’s Innovation Sandbox, Retires from Supreme Court

Constandinos (Deno) Himonas, the Utah Supreme Court justice who spearheaded the state’s first-of-its-kind regulatory sandbox to license new forms of legal services and providers, is retiring from the court.

Himonas will step down on March 1, 2022, after which he will he will join the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, helping to anchor its office in Salt Lake City.

“I am particularly proud of the Utah Supreme Court’s efforts to develop and launch the world’s first legal regulatory sandbox,” Himonas wrote in an Oct. 29 letter to Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox. “Indeed, our sandbox already serves as the model for other states and countries considering regulatory reform.”

Read: Full text of Justice Himonas’ retirement letter to Gov. Cox. 

In his letter, Himonas said that the time has come for him to begin writing a new chapter in his professional life.

“These are exciting times in Utah’s legal market,” he wrote. “With our burgeoning tech sector and legal regulatory reforms, Utah has become a hotbed of legal activity, bringing many major law firms, talented individuals and high-paying jobs to our state.”

While he will no longer be a judge, he wrote, he will “continue to be an active member of Utah’s phenomenal legal community.”

Listen: I interviewed Himonas and John R. Lund, past-president of the Utah State Bar, for my LawNext podcast.

In August 2020, the Utah Supreme Court approved what I described at the time as “the most sweeping changes in a generation to the regulation of law practice and the delivery of legal services.”

The package of changes included creation of a regulatory sandbox — a regulatory body under the oversight of the Supreme Court, called the Office of Legal Services Innovation, whose charge is to license and oversee new forms of legal providers and services.

In a statement issued at the time, the court said that these changes would enable individuals and entities to explore creative ways to safely allow lawyers and non-lawyers to practice law and to reduce constraints on how lawyers market and promote their services.

“We cannot volunteer ourselves across the access-to-justice gap,” Himonas said in that statement. “We have spent billions of dollars trying this approach. It hasn’t worked.”

Hammering away at the problem with the same tools is Einstein’s definition of insanity, he said.

“What is needed is a market-based approach that simultaneously respects and protects consumer needs,” he said. “That is the power and beauty of the Supreme Court’s rule changes and the legal regulatory sandbox.”

Himonas has been a judge since 2004, serving until 2015 on Utah’s Third Judicial District Court and then named to the Supreme Court in 2015. Prior to becoming a judge, he was in private practice, focused on complex civil litigation.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/11/justice-deno-himonas-who-spearheaded-utahs-innovation-sandbox-retires-from-supreme-court.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Winners Named for 2021 American Legal Technology Awards

Winners have been named for the second annual American Legal Technology Awards, a competition launched last year to honor exceptional achievements in legal technology.

This year, the competition added the announcement of a runner up and honorable mention in each category. A series of videos showcasing the winners in each category will be posted to the ALTA site between now and Nov. 10. The date for each category’s video is shown in the table below.

Award Category Winner Runner Up Honorable Mention Access to Justice (Monday, Nov. 1) Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico Michele Pistone, professor of law, Villanova University Ben Carter, senior litigation and advocacy counsel, Kentucky Equal Justice Center Court (Tuesday, Nov. 2) Justice Deno Himonas, Utah Supreme Court Judge Clemens Landau, presiding judge, Salt Lake City Justice Court David Slayton, vice president of court consulting services, National Center for State Courts Enterprise (Wednesday, Nov. 3) InCloudCounsel (rebranding as Ontra) Priori Legal Neota Logic Individual (Thursday, Nov. 4) Glenn Rawdon, program counsel for technology, Legal Services Corporation Jennifer Mendez, director of knowledge management innovation, Fisher Phillips David Wang, chief innovation officer, Wilson Sonsini Law Department (Friday, Nov. 5) UpWork Startup Legal Garage VillageMD Law Firm (Monday, Nov. 8) Fisher Phillips Lauren Sturdivant, founder, Rising Tide Law Sam McAllister, director of litigation technology, Lightfoot, Franklin & White Startup (Tuesday, Nov. 9) Clearbrief Athennian SettleForFree.com Technology (Wednesday, Nov. 10) Unicourt Embedded expungement project,  Lawyaw Filevine

The competition received 184 nominations in the eight categories, which were winnowed down to 24 finalists.

“The caliber of finalists this year was superb and the awards competition was tight,” Tom Martin, cofounder of the awards and CEO of of LawDroid, said in an email. “All finalists were standouts in their categories and it goes without saying that all should be very proud of their achievement.”

Winners were selected by a panel of judges, who you can see listed on the ALTA site.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/11/winners-named-for-2021-american-legal-technology-awards.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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For Halloween: The True Story of My Relation to A Salem Witch – and to a Witch Accuser

In the history of the United States, there are many dark chapters. One remembered at this time of year is the witch hysteria that overtook Salem, Mass., in 1692 and 1693, leading to the convictions and hangings of 19 accused witches – 14 women and five men.

As it turns out, one of the women who was killed was my 8th great grandmother. Even stranger, one of the principal accusers who helped set off the hysteria was the son of my 9th great-grandfather and brother of my 8th great-grandfather. Although the victim and the accuser trace back through different lineages, they converged with the marriage of my great-grandparents, my mother’s grandparents.

I discovered all this only recently. For me, the witch trials were always a subject of mild interest, especially since I live on the North Shore of Massachusetts not far from where they took place. But in recent years, I have been researching my genealogy. A clue on Ancestry.com led me to uncover my connections to the witch trials.

The name Mary (Ayer) Parker had already appeared in my family tree, as I’d traced back connections from one generation to another. But she was just a name, and I hadn’t given much thought to her date and place of death: 1692 in Salem.

“What a Sad Thing It Is to See Eight Firebrands of Hell Hanging There.” Illustration from the New England Magazine, Volume 5, circa 1892

But an Ancestry clue from another of Mary’s descendants mentioned her in the context of the witch trials. A bit more sleuthing led me to realize that she was indeed one of the women executed by hanging in Salem that year for witchcraft, and that her name is among those memorialized in the Salem Witch Trials Memorial (pictured above).

Records are sparse about Mary Parker. At the time she was killed, she was a widow, age 55, living in the town of Andover, Mass., which then bordered Salem, with her son John. Her husband Nathan had been one of the original founders of Andover and a wealthy landowner when he died.

Much of what is known about her accusation comes from a court document detailing her examination. It describes that two young girls in Andover, Martha Sprague and Sarah Phelps, accused her of witchcraft, and that upon the mention of her name, several other suspected witches were cured of their “affliction.”

“How long have ye been in the snare of the devil,”, the examiner questioned her.

“I know nothing of it,” she answered. “There is another woman of the same name in Andover.”

Indeed, historians have since found that not only was there one other Mary Parker in Andover at the time, there were three others.

Regardless, her defense was for naught. She was convicted on Sept. 16, 1692, and executed by hanging on Sept. 22, 1692.

My Connection to an Accuser

Discovering that was fascinating. I had no idea of any such connection to the witch trials. And then I discovered a second connection, through a separate family lineage that converged with the marriage of my great grandparents.

Three of the principal accusers responsible for setting off the witch hysteria in 1692 were Sgt. Thomas Putnam, his wife Ann (Carr) Putnam, and their daughter Ann Putnam Jr. Ann Jr. was a witness in several of the trials.

Lt. Thomas Putnam’s house still stands in Danvers, Mass.

Sgt. Thomas Putnam (1652-1699) was the son of Lt. Thomas Putnam, who was my 9th great-grandfather. Lt. Putnam was born in 1614 in Buckinghamshire, England, and died in 1686 in Salem. Putnam had 11 children with his wife Ann Prudence Holyoke, and then two more children by his second wife, Mary Ingersoll. The house in which he lived still stands as a historical landmark in the town of Danvers, Mass., which, at the time of the witch trials, was part of Salem.

Another son of Lt. Putnam — and younger brother of Sgt. Putnam — was Deacon Edward H. Putnam (1654-1747). Edward Putnam was my 8th great-grandfather.

The Putnams had extensive land holdings in parts of Salem, but by the 1690s, Sgt. Putnam’s holdings were diminishing, even as many of his neighbors were prospering. Several articles I’ve read, such as this one from the Salem Witch Museum, speculate that the Putnams’ envy of and feuding with others in the community drove them to start accusing neighbors and strangers of witchcraft, accusations that resulted in the execution of innocent people, including Mary Parker.

In addition to Sgt. Putnam’s role as an accuser, a handwriting expert concluded that it was Putnam who hand wrote over 100 of the Salem witch trial documents, including the depositions of the afflicted girls. Analysis suggested that he copied out of a single deposition over and over again and submitted them all as evidence.

In fact, Sgt. Thomas and Ann Putnam were dramatized in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.

So I am related to both a victim and an instigator of the Salem witch hysteria. Mary Ayer Parker, who was executed by hanging in 1692, was my 8th great-grandmother. Sgt. Thomas Putnam, the accuser who instigated the hysteria, was the brother and son, respectively, of my 8th and 9th great-grandfathers.

One final weird coincidence: Mary Parker was executed on Sept. 22. My mother — through whom I trace both lineages — was born on Sept. 23.

Further Reading:

The Witchcraft Trial of Mary Parker, History of Massachusetts blog.

The Untold Story of Mary Ayer Parker: Gossip and Confusion in 1692, Jacqueline Kelly, presentation at the Berkshire Conference, 2005 (scroll down page and click link to expand article).

More about Mary Parker.

Mary Ayer Parker, History of American Women.

More about Thomas, Ann Sr. and Ann Jr. Putnam (Salem Witch Museum).

Thomas Putnam (Wikipedia).

Thomas Putnam: Ringleader of the Salem Witch Hunt? History of Massachusetts blog.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/for-halloween-the-true-story-of-my-relation-to-a-salem-witch-and-to-a-witch-accuser.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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The Cheetah’s Out of the Bag: Wolters Kluwer Rebrands Its Legal Research Service and Adds Free Public Version

Well, I was going to write about this on Monday, as I’d been briefed under an embargo that was to lift then, but Jean O’Grady let the cat — or should I say cheetah — out of the bag in a post at her blog, Dewey B Strategic.

The news is that Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory is rebranding its flagship Cheetah legal research platform on Monday as VitalLaw, a name that Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets, told me better reflects the mission of the platform and better resonate with with customers. 

As if that were not news enough, WK is also Monday launching a free, public-facing version of VitalLaw that will provide access to some of WK’s current-awareness content that had previously been behind a paywall.

New Primary Source Content

For Cheetah subscribers, the changes will be largely cosmetic for now. They will be able to log in with the same credentials, follow the same workflows and links, and the platform will look much as it did before, but for the rebranding. There will be no changes to customers’ subscriptions.

However, there is one notable addition to the subscription site — a comprehensive collection of primary source content covering all federal and state statutes and regulations.

Until now, the platform included primary source law only to the extent it related to the practice areas WK covers. The new VitalLaw version adds a Laws & Regulations dashboard that users can search or browse.

All of this primary content is organized and presented in a uniform style such that users can also follow a breadcrumb trail to see where they are, and each entry uses the same format to show  provision’s history and how to cite it.

In addition, if changes have been made to a statute or regulation that take effect on a future date, the date is displayed above the current version, and a user can click to see the future version.

This future version is not currently redlined to show the changes, but WK plans to add that in the near future.

In a demonstration earlier this week, Crutchfield and Nicole Stone, director of new product content strategy, said they have an iterative roadmap of plans to further enhance and build out this dashboard. Because it remains somewhat of a work in progress, WK is offering it free to all subscribers on any plan until July 1, 2022.

Free Access to Legal News

The public-facing side of VitalLaw shows current legal news of interest to attorneys and legal professionals. The top story on this page is free for anyone to view, and that free access extends to any primary source materials or hyperlinked materials cited in the story.

In addition, any user gets another three free views per month of “locked” stories, which are displayed with a green padlock icon.

Further, users get free access to any news content that is older than 30 days, with no limits on access to that content.

On each practice-area page of this free site, the top story there is also free for anyone to read. At launch, the site will cover these practice areas: antitrust and competition, banking and consumer finance, COVID-19 resources, healthcare, intellectual property, labor and employment, products liability and insurance, and securities.

To sum that up, visitors to the free site get complimentary access to:

The top story on the home page.

The top story on each practice area page.

Another three stories per month.

Any story older than 30 days.

This free site, Crutchfield said, is a way for WK to engage with the broader legal market. He expects it to continue to evolve over the coming months.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/the-cheetahs-out-of-the-bag-wolters-kluwer-rebrands-its-legal-research-service-and-adds-free-public-version.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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ECFX Adds Courts in Five States to Its Service that Automatically Distributes Court Filings

ECFX Notice, a company that automates the processing of electronic court filing notices, has added support for courts in five additional states: state courts in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Wisconsin, and a specialty court in Illinois.

The company’s technology automatically downloads the documents in a court notice, distributes the notices and documents to the case team, and stores the documents in the appropriate matter or client workspace in a firm’s document management system.

The company said its coverage includes all federal courts and some 27 different state courts in locations across the country. Rather than cover only courts with large volumes of notices, the company said, it prioritizes courts based on the needs of its customers.

“The ECFX Notice platform was designed to quickly and easily add new court notice providers according to the needs of our clients,” said Dan O’Day, ECFX cofounder and CEO. “We add courts based on client demand and work closely with them to ensure 100% coverage for their incoming notices.”

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/ecfx-adds-courts-in-five-states-to-its-service-that-automatically-distributes-court-filings.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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LexBlog Creates ‘Open Legal Blog Archive,’ to Preserve Blogs for Search, Citation, Syndication and Posterity

In an initiative intended to provide better access to and visibility for the insights and commentary published on legal blogs, LexBlog, a company that provides professional blogs and turnkey digital publishing solutions for law firms and legal organizations, has launched the Open Legal Blog Archive.

The archive aims to be a centralized database of all credible legal blog posts worldwide, and accompanying metadata, accessible via the web, RSS feeds, and an API.

Speaking with me on the podcast This Week in Legal Blogging, Kevin O’Keefe, founder and CEO of LexBlog, explained that the amount of insight and commentary that is being published on legal blogs exceeds that of law reviews and law journals, but that, until now, there has been no organized way to search, index, archive, and cite this content.

The archive is intended to be used by legal professionals to research commentary and analysis published on blogs, while also providing greater visibility for those blogs and the legal professionals who publish them.

Kevin O’Keefe

The contents of the archive are free to search and will always remain so, O’Keefe said. It currently contains more than 1,800 legal blogs written by more than 31,000 blog authors.

The content of the archive will also be available for syndication by bar associations, continuing education organizations, law schools, and others, using LexBlog’s Syndication Journals, a product that creates custom, turnkey publications based on aggregated content from multiple sources.

That syndication piece is critical for making this content widely available to the legal profession, O’Keefe believes. He points to Illinois, where the state bar hosts Illinois Lawyer Now, publishing blog posts from a wide array of Illinois lawyers in a single place, and to the legal research service vLex, which he says now has more than a half million pieces of insight and commentary from legal blogs included within its research platform.

While the archive will benefit those who read and research blogs, it will also benefit blog publishers by raising their profiles, O’Keefe says. Having their content in the more-structured environment of an archive will make it more accessible to a broader audience.

In addition, syndication of that content through special-focus sites, such as a state bar site or a site focused on a specific legal topic, can underscore an author’s expertise and credibility, he say.

The archive is available at LexBlog.com, or through LexBlog’s syndication partners, who currently consist of:

Illinois State Bar Association with Illinois Lawyer Now.

State Bar of Texas with Texas Bar Today.

California Continuing Education of the Bar (CEB) with Golden State Lawyer.

vLex, with law covering over 100 countries, has incorporated the archive feed for research and AI.

State Bar of Wisconsin with WisLawNOW.

State Bar of Arizona with Arizona Attorney Daily.

FastCase, serving more than 900,000 legal professionals, has incorporated the archive feed for research and AI.

Legal professionals interested in adding their blogs to the archive can go the submission page and answer a few questions. To be included, blogs must offer legal news, insight or analysis, and they may not include advertising. Other requirements are detailed on the submission page.

[Disclosure: I am a former employee of LexBlog and I continue to perform certain paid services for the company.]

  from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/lexblog-creates-open-legal-blog-archive-to-preserve-blogs-for-search-citation-syndication-and-posterity.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Plot Thickens In Thomson Reuters’ Lawsuit Against ROSS, As It Subpoenas Docs from Fastcase, Morae

The plot thickens in the ongoing copyright lawsuit by Thomson Reuters against ROSS Intelligence, as lawyers for TR have now subpoenaed documents from two companies not previously mentioned in the case, Fastcase, the legal research and publishing company, and Morae Global Corporation, a company that provides legal and compliance solutions to legal departments and law firms.

The subpoenas offer no explanation of how the companies may be related to the lawsuit, but request documents relating to any relationships between the companies and ROSS or LegalEase, the company that TR alleges ROSS engaged to help it steal content from Westlaw — an allegation the now-shuttered ROSS denies.

Lawyers for TR have not replied to my emails asking about the subpoenas. A Fastcase representative said the company had not received the subpoena and declined to comment.

The subpoena to Fastcase requests documents and communications relating to any “actual or potential” work it performed for ROSS and any other documents and communications concerning ROSS, “including providing the text of judicial opinions, statutes, and/or regulations to ROSS, the ROSS platform, training data, plaintiffs, Westlaw, Westlaw content, West headnotes, and/or WKNS (the West Key Number System)”

It also asks for any documents relating to communications between ROSS and Fastcase about TR’s prior lawsuit against LegalEase, which it settled shortly before filing the suit against ROSS, and for any communications between ROSS and Fastcase regarding the announcement by ROSS when it shut down that it would transfer customers to Fastcase.

The subpoena to Morae is similar in its requests, except that it focuses on any communications between Morae and LegalEase concerning ROSS. It suggests that LegalEase and Morae had entered into contracts related to ROSS, and asks Morae to produce documents concerning “the reason LegalEase entered into one or more contracts with you concerning ROSS.”

Here is the full text of each subpoena:

Subpoena to Fastcase.

Subpoena to Morae Global Corporation.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/plot-thickens-in-thomson-reuters-lawsuit-against-ross-as-it-subpoenas-docs-from-fastcase-morae.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Trellis, State Court Data Analytics Platform, Raises $14.1M to Expand into Other States and Verticals

Trellis Research, an AI-powered state court research and analytics platform, has raised $14.1 million in a Series A round that it will use to expand its coverage into additional states and its customer base into additional industries. 

Launched in 2018 as a judicial analytics platform for California state courts, Trellis has now broadened into a searchable database of state trial court data, covering courts in 12 states.

It offers two products: Smart Search, through which users are able to find court dockets, rulings and filed documents, and Judge Analytics, where users can find information about judges’ caseloads and ruling tendencies, including grant rates for specific types of motions and anticipated timing to reach certain milestones.

Trellis was founded by Nicole Clark, a lawyer who initially began collecting data on judges for her own use while a litigation associate in Los Angeles. “Every time someone would go before a new judge, an email would go around the firm asking for information on the judge,” Clark told me in a 2019 interview. 

This latest funding round brings the company’s total funding to $20 million. It was led by venture capital firm Headline, with participation from Calibrate Ventures, Craft Ventures, and Revel Partners.

Several individuals from the legal industry also participated, including Colin Stretch, former general counsel of Facebook; Julius Genachowski, former FCC chairman; David Hantman, former head of public policy at Airbnb; Eddie Lazarus, EVP at Sonos; and Matt Mazza, general counsel at Appfolio.

The latest funding will be used to fuel product expansion and hiring efforts as the company seeks to extend its reach across all 50 states. Trellis will also use the financing to expand its customer base beyond the legal vertical into adjacent industries that need court data — including real estate and property management, financial services and insurance.  

“The opacity of the state court system is unacceptable,” Clark said in a statement announcing the round. “By creating a way to aggregate data, and providing legal teams with a streamlined way to access critical case-making insights, we are modernizing the world’s largest court system.”

Trellis says that it currently aggregates data from 362 trial courts across 12 states (which does not include all courts for each state). For every county it covers, it includes 15 years of historical trial case data, verdict analysis, visualizations, and searchable filed documents. Trellis’ database contains over 90 million documents.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/trellis-state-court-data-analytics-platform-raises-14-1m-to-expand-into-other-states-and-verticals.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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On LawNext: Marking 20 Years, Nextpoint’s CEO Rakesh Madhava Discusses First-Ever Financing, First-Ever Acquisition, and This Week’s User Conference

This marks the 20th year in business for Nextpoint, and it is shaping up to be a momentous one for the Chicago-based e-discovery and case preparation company. Having been bootstrapped since its founding, Nextpoint recently closed its first round of outside financing. Having never made an acquisition, it recently acquired deposition software company WarRoom. And this week, Nextpoint is holding a virtual user conference, On Point 2021, where it will lay out its roadmap for the future of the product. 

On this episode of LawNext, Nextpoint’s founder and CEO Rakesh Madhava joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss these recent developments and to share the story of how he founded and built the company. As you will hear, Madhava’s path to becoming a founder was not a typical one, and the path the company has taken since he founded it as one of the first cloud-based e-discovery platforms also was not typical. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. 

Agiloft, a trusted provider of agile software for contract and commerce lifecycle management.

Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.

Woodpecker, legal document automation for solo and small firms.  

A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/on-lawnext-marking-20-years-nextpoints-ceo-rakesh-madhava-discusses-first-ever-financing-first-ever-acquisition-and-this-weeks-user-conference.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Integreon Names Former UnitedLex Exec to Lead Contracts, Compliance and Commercial Services

Integreon, the global managed services and alternative legal services provider, has appointed legal industry veteran Gabriel Buigas as executive vice president and head of its Contracts, Compliance, and Commercial (CCC) Services business unit.

Buigas, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has worked in the legal industry as an attorney and business executive for 25 years. Most recently, he was an executive vice president at UnitedLex, where he ran the Digital Contracting and Commercial Solutions business unit.

Gabriel Buigas

Prior to joining UnitedLex in 2015, he spent 19 years as an in-house attorney at HP, where he worked in a variety of positions of increasing responsibility, most recently in the role of senior vice president and deputy general counsel for HP’s largest business unit, the Printing and Personal Systems Group, while also overseeing legal strategy and operations for the overall legal department.

At Integreon, Buigas steps into the position previously held by Jeffrey Catanzaro, who moved to PWC in July as a principal in its Legal Business Solutions group.

In a statement, Bob Rowe, CEO of Integreon, described Buigas as the right person to lead the Contracts, Compliance and Commercial Services business unit.

“Gabriel’s uniquely broad experience encompasses outsourced legal services, in-house corporate legal positions, professional services and law firms,” Rowe said. “His diverse knowledge ideally qualifies him to understand and bring additional innovation to our CCC client base and the organization as a whole.”

Buigas said of his new role, “Joining Integreon’s leadership team provides a great opportunity to leverage all my experience developing and delivering compelling CCC solutions to the marketplace. We will continue to grow the Integreon business with a relentless focus on delivering material value to our clients in all our offerings.”

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/integreon-names-former-unitedlex-exec-to-lead-contracts-compliance-and-commercial-services.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmjoyner]

As Its Conference Kicks Off, Clio Announces Its ‘Most Important Product Release Ever’ (and More)

The Clio Cloud Conference is always the occasion for the law practice management company to announce new and enhanced products, and today’s kick-off of this year’s event was no different, with CEO Jack Newton unveiling what he described to me as the most important product release since Clio’s debut 13 years ago.

That product is Clio Payments, a native e-payments technology built into the Clio Manage law practice management platform, allowing lawyers to offer clients secure and compliant credit card, debit card and e-check payments.

More on Clio Payments below, but, in addition, Clio today also announced:

Clio for Clients. This client portal facilitates secure communications and notifications to clients, and now works both on mobile devices through the Clio app and on computers through a web-based portal. Lawyers can use it to provide case updates, notify clients when documents are ready for review, and send and receive messages privately. In addition, the mobile version has a built-in scanner so that clients can scan and upload documents.

Text notifications. Clio said that its new text notifications feature enables firms to send an SMS confirmation to participants when they schedule a meeting in Clio. Recipients receive the meeting details and can confirm attendance directly via text.

Automated court forms. Last month, Clio acquired Lawyaw, a document automation and assembly platform. That followed Clio’s acquisition in July of CalendarRules, an automated court calendaring product. Building on the two acquisitions, Clio said that Lawyaw, which already offered automated court forms for California federal and state courts, has added forms for another five states: Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York and Texas.

Clio Drive. Clio Drive is a desktop application that allows a user to synchronize documents between the Clio cloud and the desktop. That means a user can create, edit and store documents on a computer while keeping them fully synchronized with the Clio Manage platform.

Clio Ventures. Not a new product, but Clio today also announced the launch of Clio Ventures, an equity investment portfolio for early state companies that are creating innovative solutions aimed at helping transform the legal experience for all. The fund will initially focus on companies building products on the Clio platform, but Newton said it will eventually extend to “companies that align to our vision of creating the connective tissue the industry needs in a legal operating system.”

Integrated Payments

While Clio users already could accept electronic payments through third-party companies such as LawPay, the new Clio Payments is a native solution fully integrated into the Clio platform, which makes the process of accepting and tracking payments far more seamless.

During a preview last week, I asked Newton why he considered this to be Clio’s most important product release since the platform’s launch.

“First and foremost, it is the lifeblood of a law firm,” he said. “If you talk about what makes a law firm survive, it is around an effortless payment experience for clients.”

In a separate statement, Newton elaborated: “Streamlining this single touchpoint has the potential to fundamentally change where legal professionals spend their time — and who can access legal services. We see this as a critical juncture in realizing our mission to transform the legal experience for all.”

Clio Payments is available as of today within the Clio Manage platform. Payments made through Clio Payments are recorded automatically in Clio and synchronized into the user’s accounting platform (such as QuickBooks or Xero).

As with any payment processor, users pay transaction fees. However, unlike some processors, whose fees can be confusing, Clio is charging a single flat fee of 2.8 % for all credit card types and a flat rate of $2 for check transactions.

With Clio Payments, when a lawyer sends an invoice, it will include a payment link. The link will take the client to a payment page, where the client can apply a payment of any amount. The client can store credit card information to simplify future payments.

Firms can also use Clio Payments to set up payment plans for clients, scheduling payments to occur in installments over a period of time.

When clients make a payment, the payment shows up within seconds in Clio and is also synchronized to the user’s accounting platform.

In announcing these products, Newton reiterated a theme he has talked often about in recent years, that of Clio’s commitment to building the first comprehensive operating system for law.

“As we define Clio’s next chapter, we see an opportunity to design the first legal operating system, something that is much larger than one software or integration alone,” he said. “We are designing a system that will see the foundational cloud-based and client-centered technologies come together to create the fabric that serves the entire industry.”

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/as-its-conference-kicks-off-clio-announces-its-most-important-product-release-ever-and-more.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmjoyner]

Why Lawyers Should Offer CLE on Porn Hub and Not Legal Providers

When it comes to promoting his math tutoring services, Taiwanese math teacher Changsu knows all the right angles.  Figuring that the probability of reaching more students would increase proportionately to the size of his audience, Changsu posted 200 calculus lessons on Pornhub, reasoning that:  Since very few people teach math on adult video platforms, and… from Law and Politics https://myshingle.com/2021/10/articles/marketing/why-lawyers-should-offer-cle-on-porn-hub-and-not-legal-providers/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmjoyner]

Law Street Media, the Fastcase News Service, Launches M&A News Feed, Using Data from Matterhorn

Law Street Media, the legal news service owned by Fastcase, is adding coverage of mergers, acquisitions and financings, using data and documents provided by Matterhorn Transactions, a company that provides comprehensive databases, analyses, and reports of publicly filed transactional information.

This adds transactional news to Law Street Media’s existing litigation-focused coverage of technology, agriculture and health law.

As with Law Street Media’s litigation coverage, which provides free links to underlying litigation documents drawn from Docket Alarm (also owned by Fastcase), the new M&A coverage will include free links to underlying deal documents, derived from Matterhorn.

In addition to news coverage of deals, Matterhorn’s CEO Logan Beirne, who is also a lecturer at Yale Law School, will contribute weekly insights to Law Street Media, highlighting notable deals and terms.

“For years, we’ve worked with Docket Alarm as an unparalleled and timely source of litigation news, with free links to source dockets,” said Law Street Media Editor-in-Chief David Nayer. “In the same way, Matterhorn will serve as a must-have news source within Law Street Media for transactional lawyers, with free access to the underlying deal documents.”

The M&A articles will be available on Law Street’s website as well as by newsletter. To receive notification of Beirne’s articles or for free subscription to any of Law Street Media’s newsletters, you can sign up here.

Fastcase launched Law Street Media in January 2020 with the goal of enabling readers to track legal news by industries, companies, law firms, and litigation.

Disclosure: Law Street’s website lists me as a member of its advisory board. However, I have not providing any advising, other than to comment on some early plans for the site, and I receive no compensation from the site. 

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/law-street-media-the-fastcase-news-service-launches-ma-news-feed-using-data-from-matterhorn.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmjoyner]

New ‘Judicial Brief Analysis’ from LexisNexis Allows Lawyers to Compare Up to Six Briefs at Once

Despite its name, Judicial Brief Analysis, an enhancement introduced today to the Lexis+ legal research platform from LexisNexis, is targeted at lawyers, enabling them to analyze up to six briefs at a time and receive a report comparing all case law, arguments, citations and quotes.

The product’s name is meant to suggest that it mirrors the process of judges and court clerks when they must analyze multiple briefs submitted by opposing counsel in a matter.

Judicial Brief Analysis builds on the Brief Analysis feature that LexisNexis introduced last year when it launched Lexis+, its premium legal research service. That was LexisNexis’s answer to a line of products pioneered by legal research company Casetext with its CARA brief analysis tool and followed by companies such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law.

The product launched today is similar to one that Thomson Reuters introduced last year, Quick Check Judicial, which similarly built on TR’s previously introduced brief-checking tool, Quick Check, to allow a user to upload multiple briefs in a matter and compare them against each other.

Like that product, Judicial Brief Analysis allows a user to see all the cases cited by both parties in common, all the cases cited by only one party or the other, and relevant cases and authorities cited by neither party, as well as Shepard’s warnings and quotation checking (checking to see if a quotation from a case is accurate).

The tools extracts concepts from a brief and offers recommendations of relevant cases and treatises.

LexisNexis says Judicial Brief Analysis can compare up to six briefs total — which it somewhat confusingly says means three for each side. I am not sure how often a single party files three briefs in conjunction with a specific motion or matter. And what happens when there are more than two parties, such as when there is a third-party defendant?

The tool shows citations in the documents and Shepard’s warnings.

During a demonstration of the product last week, I put that question to Elizabeth Christman, product manager for case law at LexisNexis. She said that it does not actually matter which side the briefs are for, as long as they are for the same matter with the same case heading.

But the problem, it appears, is that the product can compare only two parties, which it designates as plaintiff and defendant. So if there are more than two parties in a matter, it appears the user would be able to compare just two sides at a time. (The same is true, I believe, of the Thomson Reuters Quick Check Judicial product.)

Dashboard View

Similar to other brief-analysis tools, a user starts by uploading the briefs to be compared. They can be in Word or PDF format.

Once the briefs have been uploaded, the product extracts and analyzes citations and concepts in the documents and shows the results in the dashboard, which provides a visual overview of the results, both for each side separately and for the results that both sides share in common (as shown in the featured image above).

Here, the tool analyzes the accuracy of quotations appearing in both sides’ briefs.

The dashboard shows the number of additional cases it recommends as potentially relevant, how many similar briefs it has found, the number of jurisdictions from which relevant documents have been found, the accuracy of case quotations in the briefs, Shepard’s Citations, and extracted concepts.

From the dashboard, a user can move through tabs to see specific recommendations for recommended cases, similar briefs, analysis of cases cited in the documents, and accuracy of quotations.

Within each tab, the user can select to view the analysis for just one side or the other, or the user can select the Shared view, which shows the analysis and recommendations for cases and quotations the two sides’ briefs have in common.

The tool also extracts and identifies concepts in briefs and maps those concepts to recommend other resources that may be relevant, including treatises and practice guides. Christman said that it can find similar concepts even when they are expressed using dissimilar words. For example, she said it would know that seatbelt and safety restraint are similar concepts, even though they are different words.

The tool does not currently allow a user to click through from the analysis of a document to the full text of the document. Christman said that is on their “to-do” list for a future release.

A Safety Check for Your Briefs

The two primary uses of a tool such as this are to check your own brief before filing it or to check your opponent’s brief after you receive it.

Among the advantages of comparing both sides’ briefs at once is that you can see the potential weaknesses and holes in your own brief — and thereby address them — while also, at the same time, seeing the weaknesses in your opponent’s brief and the cases your opponent disregarded or overlooked.

LexisNexis did not provide details on the cost of Judicial Brief Analysis.

  from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/new-judicial-brief-analysis-from-lexisnexis-allows-lawyers-to-compare-up-to-six-briefs-at-once.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmjoyner]

ZERO’s New Product Automatically Captures Billable Time On A Lawyer’s Desktop Computer

Some lawyers will tell you that there is no greater nuisance in their daily work than recording their billable time. For those lawyers, salvation has arrived, and its name is Apollo.

Apollo is a new AI-driven software product being released today by ZERO, a company whose flagship product automatically captures billable time spent on emails and documents on mobile phones and tablets.

Apollo brings that functionality to the desktop, automatically capturing time spent on billable work on a desktop device and integrating the time entries into the lawyer’s existing billing platform.

In addition to eliminating the tedium of timekeeping, Apollo provides three benefits to lawyers and and law firm staff, ZERO says:

It ensures the quality and relevancy of time entries.

It reduces the hours spent on manual timekeeping.

It increases revenue for law firms.

Alex Babin, ZERO CEO, said that by reducing the time lawyers spend capturing time, Apollo can give them more time for other things, including a better work-life balance.

He pointed to an industry survey ZERO published in August finding that lawyers waste 30% of their time on non-billable administrative tasks such as tracking and reporting time.

“With Apollo, the time they spend working on their desktops is automatically captured and entered into their billing software, meaning they don’t have to spend hours at the end of every day, week or month manually entering that time, when they could be watching their child play soccer or focusing on winning a case,” Babin said.

Unfortunately for smaller-firm lawyers, Apollo is a product designed for larger firms, so it integrates only with timekeeping systems designed for larger firms.

Zero is introducing it today in a joint announcement with Aderant, whose iTimekeep is one of the timekeeping products Apollo integrates with.

As Apollo automatically captures time, it sends it directly into iTimekeep, where the lawyer can later review and edit the time entries. It also works with timekeeping products from Intapp and Thompson Reuters.

During a demonstration earlier this week, Babin showed me how Apollo works. As he moved from reading and answering email in Outlook, to researching cases on the Justia website, to editing a document in iManage, to making a call, Apollo captured it all.

It not only records the time, but, using natural language processing, it predicts the client and matter to which the time should be billed. The more the lawyer uses Apollo, the more precise its predictions become.

It does not yet enter billing codes, but Babin said it can learn the language of a firm’s billing guidelines. If the guidelines, for example, specify the phrase “compose email” rather than, say, “write email,” it will mimic that in the entries it creates.

Babin says that users who combine Apollo with ZERO’s mobile app will now have 360-degree, fully automated time capture.

ZERO has another product, ZERO for Desktop, that automates email filing into a firm’s document management system.

“Our goal is to automate as much as possible of the business of law,” Babin said, “so the lawyers can practice the law instead of doing the admin stuff.”

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/10/zeros-new-product-automatically-captures-billable-time-on-a-lawyers-desktop-computer.html via http://www.rssmix.com/