Contracts

Documents

Process Improvement

Business of Law

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Alternative Legal Services Providers (ALSP's), often also referred to as law companies, provide a number of services that traditionally were performed by law firms or in-house counsel. In most cases this involves services that don't constitute legal advice and due to their nature cannot carry typical law firm rates. Early on most of the work that was performed by ALSP's was discovery work. As ALSP's matured, some started to take on certain work law firms wouldn't be involved in such as negotiating NDA's. ALSP's can do work at lower costs because of use of technology, better process and project management and labor arbitrage. Many delivery centers are based in low cost locations. Some law firms operate their own ALSP's as captives to the law firm. Companies in the space include Factor, Unitedlex, Cognia, Epiq, Axiom, Elevate. In January 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court granted Elevate an Alternative Business Structure (ABS) License, making it the first ALSP in the U.S. allowed to provide legal services.

Alternative Legal Services

Outsourced contracting or contracting as a managed service has taken off in the quadrant of high volume, low complexity contracts. Negotiating thousands of NDAs or other high volume contracts is better done in lower cost jurisdictions than in high cost financial centers. Service providers in the space include Elevate, UnitedLex, Cognia, Quislex and many others.

Contract Services

When eDiscovery became ubiquitous and law firms were regularly confronted with large numbers of files that required review using a combination of technology and an army of people, the industry of eDiscovery services started evolving. Instead of a law firm hiring contract attorneys as reviewers, they started engaging third party service providers to do the work. The early ALSPs focused on this type of work and the volume has only increased with increased number of files in discovery. Providers in the category include Epiq, Integreon.

eDiscovery Services

Alternative legal services providers often provide lawyers and other legal professionals on a temporary, contract basis to law firms or corporate legal departments that need additional support on major matters or projects.&nbsp;

Flexible Resourcing

This is a catch-all category for a number of companies that provide non-legal services to law firms and in-house departments. For example companies like Frontline and Keno Kozie provide IT support to law firms. Companies like LAC Group and LegalEase Solutions LLC for library management and legal research. Frontline also provides billing services to law firms.

Managed Services

Repapering is a service that has increased in intensity. As result of regulatory reform (for example the introduction of GDPR or the phase-out of LIBOR) companies see themselves confronted with the need to change thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands) of documents to reflect the regulatory change. The process is complex, and requires streamlining and automation to scale for the volume of contract remediation generally required. Step 1 is typically legal advice by a law firm: what is the impact of the new regulation or the change of regulation.? Step 2 is development of a playbook. Step 3 is contract review, from categorizing contracts in bulk to identifying and extracting relevant clauses. Step 4 is process automation, generating a review workflow that imports the extracted data and leverages the platybook to guide reviewers through a decision tree upon which a decision is made as to whether, for each contract, an amendment note is needed. Step 5 is the generation of draft amendment documents, often leveraging templates and document automation as an output of the review workflow. Step 6 is sending documents to counterpart for signature but often involves negotiation following the playbook with law firms as escalation. Step 6 is execution and step 7 is storage of the executed documentation. Some law firms have established their own workflows (combining contract tools such as Kira or Eigen with workflow tools such as Bryter or Neota Logic), but in order to perform this work at a cost the client is willing to bear they still typically require support from lower cost timekeepers from ALSPs. ALSPs such as the Big 4, Factor, Cognia, and Elevate have also established end-to-end automated workflows, which can be leveraged alongside their flex legal teams.&nbsp;

Repapering

Business of Law solutions support all of the aspects of running a law firm other than the substantive practice of law. This is therefore a broad category, covering processes from client intake and management to timekeeping and billing, matter management, budgeting and pricing of matter work, email management, records management, information governeance and so on. Many of these processes are administrative and repetitive, lending themselves well to automation. The range of solutions in this category means a large number of vendors are represented, with certain behemoths such as Intapp and Aderant straddling many capabilities. In small and mid-sized law firms, practice management systems act as platform solutions that enable all aspects of the business of law. Clio is the leading practice management system for mid-sized law, incorporating many integrated products that extend its native capabilities.

Legal billing solutions assist law firms to improve and streamline the processes around billing, including tracking time and expenses, creating invoices and bills, reviewing bills, dealing with collections, payments and trust accounting. Elite 3E and Clio are two of the key providers in this category.

Billing

Budgeting

The business development and marketing solutions used in legal overlap substantially with those commonly used in other industries. However, there are specific aspects to legal business development that require specialized solutions. Tracking responses to pitches and proposals to easily create new RFP responses is a critical aspect of legal business development. Qorus is one of the solutions in this space. Many firms also use Foundation for pitches and proposals.

Business Development

Client portal solutions provide a two-way interface between a law firm and a client, allowing for some combination of capabilities such as collaboration, joint project management on legal matters, the sharing of select thought leadership, access to matter documents, financials and WIP, and access to data-driven insights related to the engagement. While some firms create custom client portals with tools like SharePoint, solutions that offer many of these attributes, such as LUPL, have become effective one-stop shops, rolling together the types of capabilities that used to be spread across multiple technology tools. Other solutions in the space include HighQ and Moxtra. See also, Extranets.

Client Portal

Outside counsel guidelines, or client terms, can be difficult to navigate and track, especially for larger firms with many clients who all prepare lengthy terms in relation to their panel engagements. Client terms management solutions enable firms to track their obligations and ensure compliance. The leading application in this space is Intapp Terms.

Client Terms Management

Any time a new client engages with a law firm, a conflict check must be conducted to ensure that the firms' lawyers are not conflicted out of working with the client due to their obligations to previous or existing clients, or, if there are some minor conflicts, to make sure that processes are put in place that allow for the new client work to be conducted while maintaining ethical obligations of privilege and confidentiality. The conflicts checking process for large law firms can be onerous, with many people having to respond to questions about conflicts around a new client, and careful records needing to be kept of the firm's processes. Solutions have therefore been developed to help firms automate and track the conflicts checking and response process. Intapp is a leader in conflict-checking software for large law, while Clio offers a leading solution for mid-sized law.

Conflicts

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions allow for the full management and administration of an organization’s customer relations, including the ability to keep and track information about customers (or clients), providing a searchable database that stores customer information and related documents and records interactions with customers. In law firms, the information stored will often include not just the contact details for a client but also the relationship partner, any additional connections between the firm and the client, and notes on events, meetings or calls with the client. More sophisticated systems will provide data analysis capabilities and predictive qualities that support business development. In legal, InterAction (LexisNexis) has been a common system, however many firms are now switching to leading inter-industry solutions such as Salesforce.

Dictation has long been a part of legal practice. In the digital era, dictation and voice recognition solutions are usually AI-powered, enabling the automated capture of verbal communications whether they occur on a phone call, through a virtual meeting platform, or from a webinar or podcast. Some of these solutions provide the ability to automatically scroll and search through transcriptions or recordings.

Dictation and Voice Recognition

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has always been important, but more recently law firms and in-house counsel pay a lot more attention to this. In-house counsel set minimum standards for diversity on the teams that work for them. Law firms have become much active in hiring and promoting diverse candidates. In particular, the introduction of the Mansfield Rule has supported better practices on DEI. Under the Mansfield Rule (result of a 2016 Women in Law hackathon) and supported by Diversity Labs firms that subscribe to it, require that law firms consider at least 30% women, LGBTQ+ and minority lawyers for significant leadership roles. Among the tools in this category, Leopard Solutions provides objective data on DEI. Diversity Labs is the main driver behind the Mansfield Rule.

Diversity and Inclusion

Traditional billing involves paper or PDF based bills that are hard for the client to analyze. When an invoice is sent through eBilling software it is sent in a digital format which enables the client to analyze the invoice in line with its own billing codes. Leading applications include eBilling Hub (Thomson Reuters), Bilr and LegalBill.

eBilling

Email remains the prominent mode of communication between lawyers and their clients, but the magnitude of emails sent and received each day is often overwhelming, making it difficult for lawyers to regularly file relevant emails to client-matter files. Email management solutions provide automated filing capabilities, often using machine learning to predict which matter an email should be filed to based on the subject or recipients. Solutions include ZERO and Hushmail.

Email Management

Facilities Management

Identity and access management technology provides the means for organizations to define roles and manage individal user access to critical information in a variety of cloud and on-premises systems. Generally speaking, IAM systems will define one digital identity per individual or item. After establishing these identities, they are managed and maintained throughout the user or device lifecycle. IAM forms a core part of organizational cybersecurity and is integral to managing risk within an organization. In legal, core players include Amiqus and Sailpoint.

Information governance is a set of rules, policies and procedures that govern the way information and data within an organization is stored and managed. Within a law firm, information governance is typically related to the Office of the General Counsel, a function that prescribes and develops the policies for a firm around legal work product management and manages risk related to compliance and litigation. Information governance software helps organizations to manage their information effectively, informed by all relevant data and in compliance with content data regulations. These solutions also enable organizations to effectively manage privacy, compliance, investigation and litigation risks. Mitratech and Exterro are prominent solutions for legal.

Information Governance

Matter Management

Both law firms and legal departments need to track the work that they undertake, for a variety of reasons including the necessity of being able to locate past work product easily. In law firms, matter management is of particular value because it allows lawyers to easily find representative work that can be referenced in pitches for new work, to use historical matter information in budgeting for future matters, and to track budget and WIP on current matters. Leading solutions for law firms, such as Foundation, provide the capability to track all of these aspects of law firm matters - from matter financials to nuanced matter metadata. Solutions such as Xakia provide matter and work tracking capabilitis for corporate legal departments.

Metadata Scrubbing

The onboarding of a new client or matter by a law firm requires a complex set of administrative processes including the capture of key information about the prospective work. A New Business Intake system is generally the first place that details about a new matter are recorded, including which client it is for, in which industry, in which practice area, what type of matter it is, the name of the originating partner and so on. Intapp Intake and Clio Grow are two of the leading solutions in this area.

New Business Intake

Managing pitches and proposals is a time-consuming task, from both the law firm and the legal department perspective. Responding to pitches and putting together proposals requires the compilation of data about legal matters from multiple systems and departments. Software supporting these workflows typically manage incoming requests for proposals, store prior information about historical matters and responses to previous pitches, pull data from multiple integrated systems, and make it easy for teams to generate proposals. Qorus is one of the leading such platforms commonly used in the legal industry.

Pitches and Proposals

Practice management solutions generally pull together multiple capabilities to support the operational functions of a law firm. This type of technology is one of the best established in legal, with law firms of every size requiring some degree of practice management support. Solutions frequently include capabilities around document and matter management as well as billing, client management and new business intake. Clio is a leading practice management solution for small-to-midsized firms that allows users to integrate specialized apps developed especially for the Clio environment. Intapp provides practice management software for larger firms, and OneDocx offers a solution for solo practitioners and small firms that sits on top of SharePoint Online.

Practice Management

Strategic pricing of legal work is faciliated by data, and the leading solutions in this space collect all of the data that feeds into pricing decisions in one place, leveraging analytics to deliver insights that allow firms to develop data-driven pricing arrangements and improve profitability. Litera's Clocktimizer and Digitory legal are effective solutions in this category.

Pricing

Sourcing pro bono work, administering hours invested, support of the work (which is often outside of the expertise of the lawyers involved), reporting, sometimes collaboration with clients and communicating with legal aid organizations takes considerable time for larger law firms and in-house departments. Probononet is a charitable organization that has supported this for a long time. A recent entrant to the market Paladin has introduced an offering that covers most of the before-mentioned painpoints.

Pro Bono Management

Project management platforms leverage automation to allow legal teams to manage complex projects and juggle multiple projects, as well as facilitating the work of breaking projects into discrete tasks. Typically these solutions allow for the assignment and management of tasks, including assigning priorities, tracking progress, setting weekly, monthly, quarterly goals, and allowing team members to communicate within the platform. While there are various general-purpose project management tools (such as Asana, Smartsheet, Monday, etc.), project management tools specific to the legal industry have developed to support law firm matter teams as well as corporate legal departments. This category encompasses both. In recent years more law firms have recruited legal project managers to help partners deliver legal work on time and on budget. Fibonacci, for example, helps legal departments such as Barclays and many of its panel firms with project management. Dashboard Legal supports law firm project management.

Project Management and LPM

There are obligations arising under law for firms and organizations to retain work product, operational records and related documents for specific time periods. Records management is the function of controlling and governing the retention and disposition of information and documents in an organization throughout the lifecycle of these records, to ensure compliance with regulatory and client requirements. Solutions supporting records management enable organizations to track retention requirements per category of document, helping to classify records and clarifying when records should be stored, archived, retrieved, and disposed of. iManage Records Manager is a popular solution in legal.

Records Management

Risk Management

Subscription management, including the procurement and subsequent management of technology, market research products, is a significant resource drain for many companies and law firms. Solutions in this category support companies and firms in managing the costs, effort, and resources related to subscription procurement and management.

Subscription and Portfolio Management

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Timekeeping is an essential practice for any law firm, allowing attorneys to capture time and assign it to specific client matters. Traditionally, this capability has been constrained to desktop access, with manual time entry required. As the technology evolves, mobile timekeeping is becoming common and AI driven solutions have developed allowing for automated time capture and the generation of automatic narratives as lawyers work. Established players in the market such as Carpe Diem and Intapp have upgraded their existing solutions accordingly, but new players in the market including Ping and ZERO have introduced healthy competition in the space.

Timekeeping

Work allocation software supports allocation of work to associates and associate general counsel. It works based on a number of variables such as previous experience, the need for associates to build up a wide range of experience, diversity, rates and availabilty. Remote work arrangements make it difficult to allocate work as it was previously done because of physical separation. There is also sometimes a preference of a partner to work exclusively with the people they know to be good at a particular task. This can lead to associates being allocated the same type of work for years without gaining experience in other areas. Tools like Capacity, VI Utilize and Vantage by Bighand address these problems.

Work Allocation

Collaboration between lawyers and their clients, and internally within matter teams, has become increasingly important as remote work and hybrid work practices have become commonplace. Collaboration solutions vary from video and web-conference services to basic virtual data rooms to full collaboration platforms allowing teams to work on matters together in one online location.

Collaboration

Collaboration platforms allow teams to work together even if they are in different locations. Many solutions include collaboration as an aspect of their functionality. In this category, we include only those solutions the main purpose of which is to provide collaboration - whether that is collaboration within an organization, with external clients, or both. Microsoft Teams is by far the most common collaboration platform, having gained significant popularity during the pandemic. The other industry leader for collaboration is HighQ.

Collaboration Platform

Extranets allow for the sharing of content between law firms and their clients. An extranet allows a portion of a firm's data, intranet or matter management platform to be accessed by clients, with the firm controlling which subset of the platform is accessible by which clients. HighQ works in this way, providing the ability for firms to share thought leadership and matter information with clients. See also, Client Portals.

Extranet

File sharing tools provide secure methods of transferring large files between users.

Secure File Sharing

A virtual data room is a repository for storing, sharing and distributing documents. They are commonly used to host documents during corporate transactions, for example during due diligence, however they have broader applicability and are sometimes used during large-scale litigation. Popular solutions include NetDocuments, Datasite (formerly Merrill), FirmEx, and Venue by DFIN.

Virtual Data Room

Compliance is a very broad category of applications. For the timebeing, Legaltech Hub is focusing on only a narrow subset of compliance solutions, including those supporting e-filings and privacy applications. In due course, the topics covered in this category will be expanded.

Compliance

This generic compliance solution category includes compliance tools that help law firms and corporate legal departments to stay in compliance with relevant regulatory regimes, such as GDPR or privacy regulations, or support them in advising their clients regarding compliance obligations. Law firm-created regulatory tracking tools fall into this category.

Compliance Solutions

A whole host of applications have popped up in recent years that deal with various aspects of data privacy. Some examples include BigId and PrivacyPerfect. For now this category functions as a catch-all category for all applications that deal with data privacy.

Data Privacy

Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory bodies that require regular reporting from businesses increasingly require such reporting or filing to be conducted electronically. The e-filing requirements of some regulatory bodies are complex, creating inefficiencies for businesses. Vendors can overcome these inefficienies with custom-made solutions to streamline e-filing, making it easy for businesses to comply with regulatory requirements. An example is PowerShark, which has developed solutions for both EQR and MBR e-filings that are FERC compliant.

Regulatory e-Filings

There are numerous consultants addressing law firm management, the business of law, and legal innovation and technology. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to find a consultant who provides the services necessary to address the needs of a particular environment. This category encompasses all consultants who operate to improve the effectiveness of commercial legal organizations, either on the law firm side or for corporate in-house departments. Consultants are not to be mistaken for ALSPs, who may offer some similar approaches but also provide low cost legal services. The consulting services in this category include technology implementation, knowledge management and data strategies, change management and adoption support, as well as broader legal management consulting and hands-on legal engineering. Well-known consultants include Fireman &amp; Company for enterprise search, intranet and document management system implementations; Harbor for data strategy, matter profiling and technology implementations; Traveling Coaches for change management and adoption; Theory &amp; Principle and FoundationLab for prototyping, product design and product development; and Bam Legal for document automation.

Consultants

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice has become widespread, with machine learning built into many platforms and solutions. Consultancies with applied AI practices offer a variety of services, including helping organizations select and implement AI tools for contract review, training algorithms to create machine learning models for data extraction, and custom developing AI solutions to solve organizational problems. Cognia is a leading provider in this space.

Applied AI

Consultants offering services around change management and adoption generally fall into one of two categories. Either they support major technology implementation efforts by developing strategies for communication, training and change management that encourage adoption of the new technology, or they offer ad hoc strategies for improving the adoption of a firm's existing technology stack. Traveling Coaches is perhaps the best known vendor in the former space, though Fireman & Company has recently expanded its services here; Baretz + Brunelle offer services in the latter category.

Change Management and Adoption

With cyber threats increasing daily, law firms and legal organizations often&nbsp; need additional support to ensure their environments remain secure and compliant. Legal technology vendors require certifications and assessments to ensure their products and services meet the rigorous security and privacy standards required by legal customers. Consultants and contractors in this space offer cybersecurity and privacy services and products to help ward against cyber risks, such as vulnerability assessments (including penetration or pen testing), monitoring and threat intelligence, security awareness, managed security services (MSSPs), and incident response plans.&nbsp;

Cybersecurity and Privacy Services

As firms and corporate in-house departments begin to recognize the importance of data and the potential competitive edge to be gained from effectively leveraging their data, so they have also started to realize they need help to streamline, clean and normalize their internal data and to develop cohesive organization-wide data strategies and processes. Several consultants help firms develop and execute data initiative strategies. These are large projects that can take several years. Additional data-related consulting includes evaluating and selecting data analytics tools or APIs and leveraging analytics and integrating internal and external sources of data. HBR has been a leading consulatancy for these types of services, with Fireman & Company having more recently developed similar capabilities.

Data Management and Strategy

Digital transformation efforts are focused on integrating digital technologies and automated processes across all parts of an organization to entirely reshape and improve the way the organization conducts its business. This kind of wholesale transformation is difficult for organizations to undertake without targeted assistance. Consultants in the space offer strategic approaches to digital transformation as well as development and implementation of digital workflows. Although law firms are beginning to think about digital transformation, efforts in the industry have been primarily focused on corporate legal departments. Leading providers include UnitedLex and Elevate.

Digital Transformation

A document management system (DMS) is so foundational to the functioning of a law firm or legal department that implementing or upgrading such a system necessarily becomes an enterprise-wide, multi-stakeholder project. Various workstreams therefore arise in relation to this kind of project, including requirements gathering, information governance and policy work, change management and adoption, workspace design and folder structures, launch planning and training, as well as technical work that often encompasses migration of documents from an older system and strategies for cutting over from one system to another. Additional complexity can arise when a firm is moving their documents to the cloud. Consultants supporting DMS implementations work with law firms and legal departments to ensure the various project workstreams are all progressing within the established timeframe, develop strategies for document management, drive consensus for key decisions, and assist in technical implementation. Fireman & Company is the leading vendor for DMS implementations in the US, although Encoretech is a strong competitor. In the UK and other regions, both Fireman & Company and Morae support DMS implementations.

Document Management Implementation

Enterprise search software is very important in larger law firms and in-house departments. Most in-house departments and law firms need support implementing enterprise search engines. Implementation varies depending on the needs of an organization, including the number of systems to be indexed, mapping of taxonomy terms, definition of required results, configuration of tabs and filters, API integration with various systems, and change management efforts to support adoption. Fireman and & Company and HBR are the main consulting firms addressing enterprise search implementation.

Enterprise Search Implementation

Implementation of a new or upgraded intranet is a complex, enterprise-wide project involving multiple stakeholders, generally including Business Development, Knowledge Management, Finance and IT. Managing the requirements across a firm's business units and implementing an intranet platform with logical architecture that delivers information intuitively to users often requires external support. Consultants in the space can assist with all of these aspects of intranet implementation as well as the integration of data across systems. Fireman & Company and Encoretech are consulting firms providing this service.

Intranet Implementation

IT Consultants work with law firm IT departments or companies to support roadmap planning, help find the right solutions for each business requirements, select cloud service providers, manage service delivery, support critical upgrades and complext integrations, and more.&nbsp;

IT Consulting

Law firms and legal departments need to train personnel on foundational IT resources, keep them continuously updated on changes to these, and ensure that lawyers understand core technology sufficiently to meet client demands. During roll-outs and implementations of new systems, or upgrades to existing ones, training is particularly critical. The companies offering services in this area either provide resourcing to support training, with trainers who can be dedicated to projects for a period of time, or they provide learning platforms and content to support IT training, or both. Examples of the former include Traveling Coaches, and of the latter include Savvy Training and Consulting. IT training providers will often work with law firms and corporate legal departments to design specialized training programs to meet the needs of various persona groups within an organization.

IT Training

At a minimum, knowledge managment (KM) consultants can help law firms and legal departments assess their knowledge-sharing culture, technologies (including DMS, collaboration tools, extranets / client portals, and intranets), personnel, strategies, and tactics. Consultants will focus on ways to improve access to data and information within the organization, and the experience of lawyers, ensuring that firms and legal departments access and leverage the collective knowledge of the enterprise. Since most modern legal KM functions also include innovation, consultants have expanded their scope from traditional KM functions to advising on matters such as client-facing product development, process improvement, legal project management, design thinking, and others. KM consulting providers include Fireman &amp; Company and Tiger Eye Consulting.

KM Strategy and Advisory

Legal design is the application of design principles (including service design and design thinking) to the practice of law and related work product. Legal designers and legal design agencies work with law firms and legal departments to (1) re-imagine the way that legal and legal-adjacent services are offered and design those services in a way that is directly responsive to client needs, (2) review and re-design legal process in a more user-centric manner, and (3) design legal documents in a way that makes them more intuitive and accessible, thereby improving the experience of the recipient. Legal documents to which legal design methods have been applied are usually shorter, cleaner, and clearer than most, potentially including visual elements. Leading legal design agencies and consultants include Ground M, Astrid Kohlmeyer, and Bold Duck Studios.

Legal Design

Legal engineering companies support law firms and legal departments by designing and developing products that meet requirements and solve a particular problem. The tech stack used to do this varies from company to company, with some legal engineering companies - such as Engineer.Legal - partner with specific vendors and build using their solutions. Others, such as Theory + Principle, build proprietary technology and prototypes. Knowledge engineering is a sub-category of legal engineering, whereby consultants help law firms or legal departments map out and maintain the content that will sit in the back end of a product, or help to train AI models.

Legal Engineering and Prototyping

Legal operations consulting is targeted at improving the efficiency and efficacy of a corporate legal department, working strategically to help legal departments improve and streamline operations and make better data-driven decisions for a business, thereby redefining themselves as value or profit centers rather than cost centers. Consulting services may be offered around outside counsel spend, legal billing, panel (outside counsel) management and the RFP process, business analytics and insights, streamlining the way a team works or the way contracts are managed within the business. E&Y Legal Function Consulting provides legal operations consulting, as do Morae Legal, Factor, Argopoint and Elevate.

Legal Operations Consulting

A number of consultants provide ad hoc or interim marketing, sales, and business development services to law firms and legal technology companies. Law firms occasionally need support around marketing and sales, especially in relation to the sale of products or productized services, improving visibility on social media platforms, and during high pressure times such as during a reputational crisis. Vendor organizations often find it challenging to connect with key demographics in meaningful ways or they have sparse marketing resources. Services provides by consultants include marketing support, content marketing services, the development of go-to-market strategies and sales pipelines, social media brand building, and more. LexFusion, for example, leverages the broad network of its founders to connect vendors directly with law firm partners and legal operations executives. Baretz + Brunelle provides crisis managment, content marketing, and product marketing services for law firms and legal technology vendors. Amplify Your Voice provides social media and branding services to law firms and legal technolgy vendors.

Marketing and Business Development Services

Process improvement consultants leverage methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma and Kizen to help law firms and legal departments evaluate current workflows, identify areas of inefficiency, and then eliminate that inefficiency (or "waste") in order to create a better, faster process. Mapping processes in order to optimize them prior to automation is a common use case. Consultants offering this type of service include EY Legal Function Consulting and Bold Duck.

Software Development Services

The remit of legal management consulting firms is broad, supporting an organization's overarching strategic goals and drivers and delivering value through insights and paths towards revenue or profit growth. Law firms will frequently retain legal management consultants to help address a particular aspect of legal business or strategy. Examples include diversity and inclusion strategies, pricing and profitability consulting, reimagining the service business model, transformation projects, and so on. Providers in this space include Morae Global and Harbor.

Strategic Management Consulting

Both law firms and corporate legal departments occasionally need assistance evaluating the legal technology market for a particular type of solution and selecting the right tool for a job. This assistance is especially useful to law firms that do not have internal innovation teams tracking the market. Consultants who provide technology procurement services are able to provide advice about which products and solutions to evaluate when looking for a certain functionality or trying to solve a particular problem, how to evaluate these solutions, what questions to ask, how to develop requirements and prioritize attributes of the various solutions. They are often also able to help law firms build a business case for investment and provide advice about running a pilot and driving adoption of the relevant technology.

Technology Procurement

This category covers all tools and solutions dealing with contracting, from end-to-end contract lifecycle management (CLM) to contract review, and contract management. All interactions of a company are underpinned by contracts making this one of the most important categories of legal tech. Alongside ERP systems for finance, CRM for marketing / business development teams, Procure to Pay for procurement, and HR management for HR, CLM is the fifth system of records touching all parts of a business.

Contract management is the storage, calendaring and reminder system for contracts. A contract managment system stores and summarizes the contract and creates reminders for time-sensitive dates in the contract. Very mature systems are integrated with external systems: for example a loan agreement may be linked to an accounting system to measure whether or not certain threshholds in the loan agreement are breached. This category is often treated as equivalent to end-to-end CLM systems, but solutions in this category don't include all of the elements of an end-to-end system. 

Contract Management

Contract negotiation software is used for pre-execution contract review, helping lawyers with review of third party documents and negotiation. The flow of advanced tools involves the software analyzing a contract and comparing it against models (e.g., playbooks or previously negotiated and approved contracts) to ensure consistency and highlight deviations from the models, and suggesting alternative, consistent contract language. Key players in this market are Lawgeex, Blackboiler, Termscout (recent startup), Scissero.&nbsp;

Contract Negotiation

Contract review software rapidly categorizes executed contracts, and is able to identify and extract clauses and discrete data points from contracts. These applications use machine learning and natural language processing technology to extract pre-defined data points. For example, a user may want summaries of thousands of commercial leases: the software reads the leases and prepares a summary of e.g., the names of tenant and landlord, the property address, the rent, the expiry date, the termination clause etc. If a datapoint is not predefined in the system, users are typically able to train the technology to recognize it, creating their own "models" for extraction. Companies in this category include Kira Systems, Zuva, eBrevia, RAVN Extract, Syntheia, ThoughtRiver, Luminance and others.

Contract Review

Document automation software helps a lawyer draft documents faster and more consistently. There are two types: 1. Q&amp;A based where a user answers a series of questions (e.g., when drafting an employment agreement: name of employee, salary, non-compete yes or no and if yes for how long, place of work etc.) and the system inserts the answers into a template creating a complete document ready for signature. The industry standards for this are Contract Express and Hotdocs. Successful new entrants in the space include Avokka and Clarilis. 2. Clause-based document assembly: by selecting clauses, the user builds a document to their needs. Clausebase and Draftwise are examples.

Document Automation

End-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software helps companies manage their contracting from start to finish: 1) request for a contract, 2) drafting or review, 3) negotiations, 4) approvals 5) execution, 6) storage, 7) data extraction 8) management, 9) reporting, and 10) drafting amendment or renewal. For inclusion in this category LegalTechnologyHub requires a software product to cover at least 6 of these 10 steps. This category has received significant investment since 2018. Companies in this space include ICertis, Coupa, Docusign, Sirion Labs, Agiloft, Evisort, Ironclad, Cobblestone and Legisway.

End-to-end CLM

eSignatures or electronic signatures are a legally binding way to sign electronic documents as opposed to "wet ink" signatures. This category also includes on-line notarization software. Legaltech Hub does not include in this category broader products where one feature of the product is digital execution. Companies in this space include Docusign and Adobe Sign.

eSignatures and Notarization

Smart Contracts

Data management solutions catering to the legal industry have proliferated as both law firms and in-house departments have come to realize (1) the wealth of data they have at their disposal and (2) the opportunities to be gained from properly leveraging that data. The solutions available run the gamut from analytics tools, many of which can be leveraged over both internal and external sources of data, to data visualization tools and tools that structure data and assist in the extraction of data from documents and other content types. Judicial or litigation analytics solutions such as Gavelytics, Lex Machina and Ravel by LexisNexis provide insights that support litigation strategy and early case assessment, while market intelligence tools provide analytics on external industry data. Data visualization solutions such as Brainspace by Reveal add value to eDiscovery, but generic tools like Power BI and Tableau, as well as newcomer Structura, allow for powerful visualizations and reporting across independent and discrete data sets. Increasingly, vendors such as Fastcase and Thomson Reuters have realized that law firms will pay for data APIs and sandboxes allowing them to integrate data to produce actionable insights. This is a growing space, with broad solutions allowing great flexibility, as well as niche areas such as IP analytics.

Data

Data analytics, or business intelligence, products provide organizations with the ability to leverage powerful analytics capabilities over their own internal business data. These solutions empower organizations to make data-driven decisions, through making it easier to understand and predict trends and patterns in business data. Leading solutions include BigSquare and Iridium. A new player in the category is Structura (Loom Analytics).

Data Analytics

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow for the integration of applications and databases for the quick and secure exchange of information. Law firms have started recognizing the value of data to inform strategy, identify new business opportunites and bolster the quality of legal outcomes. Various vendors have consequently started offering APIs that allow firms to more easily access their data and integrate external data with internal data to achieve strategic goals. Thomson Reuters, vLex / Fastcase, and Lexis Nexis are some of the vendors selling data APIs.

Data APIs

Data classification solutions use advanced AI to auto-tag unstructured data with metadata to improve its utility and findability within an organization. Text and other types of data can be classified, usually by applying keywords from a taxonomy, and normalized, by ensuring consistency of data tags used across different systems. Previously, organizations had to rely on employees to classify and tag data, frequently resulting in less consistent, lower quality results. Auto-classification tools still require supervision by humans, but enable these classification and data clean-up efforts to be undertaken rapidly and at scale.&nbsp;

Data Classification and Normalization

Data extraction software extracts datapoints from documents, including contracts. These applications use natural language processing technology and extract pre-defined datapoints. For example, a user may want summaries of thousands of commercial leases: the software reads the leases and summarizes the names of tenant and landlord, the property address, the rent, the expiry date, the termination clause etc. If a datapoint is not predefined in the system, users are typically able to train the technology to recognize it, creating their own "models" for extraction. Companies in this category include Kira Systems, Zuva, eBrevia, RAVN Extract, Eigen, Luminance and many others.

Data Extraction

Data Integrations

Data visualization tools enable the graphic representation of data. The tools in this space allow for the development of dashboards and interactive tools that display data in graphs, charts, maps and other visual formats. Common use cases in law include 50 state surveys, dashboards displaying regulatory developments or tracking litigation cases, and displays of deal data. Leading inter-industry solutions Tableau and Microsoft Power BI are widely used in legal, but specific legal solutions include Map Engine, Structure Flow, Litigaze, and ReportZone, which works with Clio.

Data Visualization

Judicial or litigation analytics involve the application of data analytics to litigation data. The data commonly drawn upon in such resources include the decisions of judges in relation to court cases, motions and appeals, settlement sums, case duration, success rates of counsel, and so on. Judicial analytics tools can provide insights into whether, for example, a motion for summary dismissal might be successful in a certain jurisdiction before a particular judge, whether a case is likely settle and for what amount, and which law firm is most likely to succeed in litigating a specific type of matter. As a result, these solutions are helpful to inform case strategy, advise clients and prepare budgets, and for early case assessment. Lex Machina, Gavelytics, Ravel View in LexisNexis, Westlaw Edge and Docket Alarm are leaders in this area in the US. In Canada, Court Analytics by Loom Analytics is a strong contender.

Judicial Analytics

Market intelligence solutions provide deep data insights into and analyses of specific industries and markets, allowing law firms and legal departments to better understand their clients' business and provide more informed advice. RR Donnelley is a leading provider of market intelligence.

Market Intelligence

Documents are central to a lawyer's work. There are many types of document-related applications that support lawyers, including document automation, drafting tools that ensure consistency of citation, expression, or tables of contents, comparison software to compare versions of documents, and many others. This category includes a number of long established companies like Hotdocs but also companies (like Litera) that are consolidating the market in certain segments. Legaltech Hub has included eSignatures in this category as well as Document Management.

Co-authoring allows several users to access and edit documents simultaneously. Google Docs is the leader. However, many law firms block access to Google Docs due to security concerns. Scribestar was developed specifically for co-authoring of capital markets documents.

Co-Authoring

Comparison software compares two versions of a document and redlines the versions to highlight differences. Litera Workshare Compare and NOVO Compare are examples.

Compare

Software in this category organizes defined terms and enables users to identify errors made in defined terms. Oftentimes this functionality is part of other programs that check for more anomalies in documents, such as Litera Contract Companion. Other providers include LexDye Definition Tracker and Define.

Defined Terms

In recent years, solutions have developed that make it easier for lawyers to read, review and analyze legal documents such as contracts. These solutions typically break down legal documents into their composite parts and are able to reveal aspects of a document to reviewers at will, for example by opening defined terms in a separate panel that can be accessed alongside the core document, or by moving seamlessly between sections of a document. Similar to certain proofreading solutions, these tools will also often point out discrepancies and inconsistencies within a document, allowing lawyers to more easily identify and correct errors.

Document Analysis

Document management software helps users store and organize their organisation's documents. Important features include versioning, file sharing and access control. Typically document management solutions have been on-premise only but increasingly providers are moving their solutions to the cloud. In organizations that implement this software the document management system is the central repository of all client-matter related documents. Companies in this space include iManage, NetDocuments and Opentext. Many organizations also use Microsoft SharePoint.

Document Management

Many discrete tools have been developed that improve the efficacy of document management systems by integrating with those broader solutions to solve specific problems. Examples include tools like SeeUnity that provide an integration layer between iManage DMS and SharePoint, or iManage DMS and Teams, so that changes made to a document in one system are replicated in another. These tools are add-ons and sold separately from document management systems.

Document Management Add-On

Drafting Tools assist users in drafting better documents. Specifically excluded are document automation tools as that is a category of its own. Functionality covered by solutions in this category include identification and resolution of grammatical and substantive errors and inconsistencies, finding connections and important information in documents, citation checkin, creating, automating and managing Styles within Microsoft Word. Litera Clause Companion, Docstyle, Citeright, and Litera Best Authority are among the products in the category.

Drafting Tools

PDF Editors allow users to read and modify the contents of a PDF document. They generally provide functions such as editing text, changing page layout, and splitting or combining files. They also often include OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities. Some of the newer PDF editors such as Macro also allow for more intuitive reading of PDFs by breaking them down into sections and allowing users to jump from one section to the next, even on mobile.

PDF Editor

Smart drafting, also known as intelligent document automation, has transformed the legal landscape by leveraging technology to streamline and enhance the drafting process. Smart drafting platforms employ machine learning algorithms to analyze existing legal documents, identify patterns and clauses, and generate customized drafts.&nbsp;

Smart Drafting

IP rights management can be classified in two ways: by type of IP right (patent vs trademark vs copyright) or by type of functionality (support with registration, repository of IP rights, support with maintenance/licensing/renewing IP rights). Legaltech Hub classifies by IP right only for the time being.

IP Management

For copyright only, these tools support registration, repository of IP rights, and the maintenance, licensing and renewal of IP rights.

Copyright Management

Domain Name Management

IP rights management software is aimed at more than one type of IP right (patent, trademark, domain names, copyright, etc). These tools cover one or more type, supporting registration, repository of IP rights, support with maintenance/licensing/renewing IP rights. Examples include Anaqua and FoundationIP.

IP Rights Management

For patents only, these tools support patent prosecution, prior art searches, repository of patents, support with maintenance/licensing/renewing patents. Examples include AI patents, NL Patents by Legalicity, and Patent Advisor by LexisNexis.

Patent Management

For trademarks only, these tools support registration, repository of IP rights, support with maintenance/licensing/renewing IP rights. Examples include Alt Legal, Trademarknow and CPi Trademark Management System by Computer Packages.

Trademark Management

Knowledge Management solutions provide for the collection, curation, tagging, organization and delivery of knowledge content (including precedent documents, forms, checklists, guides, and other critical legal content) across a legal organization. Classic knowledge management tools include knowledge hubs / precedent libraries and other content repositories, as well as intranet platforms, enterprise search and experience management solutions. Content repositories may include clause banks, such as Litera Create - Content, and directories of external data, such as Courtroom Insight. The market for enterprise search is narrow in legal, with Opentext's Decisiv Search and iManage Knowledge Unlocked vying for market share. Foundation&rsquo;s experience management platform &ndash; another Litera product &ndash; provides the ability to store and connect information about a legal organization&rsquo;s clients, matters and people, therefore enabling a firm to leverage its intellectual capital effectively and better cross-sell work. SharePoint has long been the established platform for intranet systems, with their online offering introducing greater flexibility. Handshake by Aderant, HighQ, Infodash are solid competitors.

Knowledge Management

Unlike knowledge hubs, which primarily store entire documents, clause banks allow for the storage, organization, curation and management of clauses or provisions. This is particularly helpful for specialist practices, such as tax and employment, which work by reviewing existing documents and inserting relevant clauses. In a clause bank, these practices create libraries of clauses with folder structures and taxonomy tags that enable lawyers to rapidly identify the right content to add to a document. Some clause banks, such as Litera Content Companion, provide capabilities such as auto-redaction and the ability to automatically break down a document into its composite clauses. It is also common for sophisticated clause banks, including Content Companion and Syntheia, to offer contemporaneous clause recommendations during drafting. A recent competitor is Lexis Create, though this is currently a UK-focused product.

Clause Bank

Firms often keep directories to track information about local counsel, judges, expert witnesses, and more. The most useful of these directories tie the listed individuals to the matters in which they were involved, enabling others in the firm to identify and reach out to lawyers who have prior experience retaining an expert or local counsel, or appearing before a relevant judge. In relation to expert witnesses, directories can also provide links to relevant articles and expertise. Directories can minimize "PTI" - pardon the interruption - emails that are sent to all timekeepers and interrupt work. External directory solutions, such as Courtroom Insight, have built additional value through integrations with docketing and legal research companies, enabling them to provide rich information on a firm's use of related professionals in legal matters.

Directories

In large law firms, it can be difficult for lawyers and other professionals to know who has what expertise or experience. This lack of connectedness can become problematic when lawyers are looking for assistance with a niche area of practice, wish to internally cross-sell work for a client, or find a lawyer who is admitted to practice in a particular jurisdiction. It’s also difficult for business development professionals and partners who need to put together pitches based on prior experience. Experience management systems solve these problems by providing a single place in which to store, manage, access and share information about professional expertise, educational background and bar admission. The leading solution is Foundation, now part of the Litera stable, with competitors including Ikaun and Pitchly.

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