Law Firms

Corporate Legal

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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

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.

Business of Law

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

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

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; HBR 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

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.

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

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.

Documents

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

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’s Content Companion, and directories of external data, of which the industry leader is Courtroom Insight. The market for enterprise search is narrow in legal, with Decisiv Search and iManage Insight vying for top place. Foundation’s experience management platform – another Litera product – is a clear market leader, providing the ability to store and connect information about a legal organization’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 and HighQ are solid competitors.

Knowledge Management

Legal operations in corporate legal departments is driving change in-house more than any other innovation. The rise of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) has had a profound impact on how in-house legal departments and their law firms operate. Legal operations professionals are responsible for legal technology, project management, hiring, panel selection and various related matters. Legal operations in law firms is also an increasing area of focus, with firms realizing that in order in remain competitive in the market they must improve the effectiveness of their internal operations. Many of the solutions in this space are human-based but more and more solutions arise that support legal operations.

Legal Operations

Legal point solutions solve narrow but critical problems that frequently occur within specific matter types. Unlike broader solutions, these tools are not meant to address multiple pain-points or to support end-to-end workflows. Instead, they address a single pain-point, such as the need to manage cap tables - which Carta addresses - or to verify claims made in a prospectus document, a need which both Atticus and Scribestar address. In spite of their narrow applicability, point solutions can be valuable investments where the pain-point in question affects a particularly busy or critical practice.

Legal Point Solutions

Online legal research solutions have evolved in sophistication, with many now including analytics capabilities and utilizing artificial intelligence to improve results and relevancy. In addition to the longstanding major players such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, the market for online research tools is now crowded with additional practice area- and market-specific solutions that provide more targeted intelligence. As these resources are necessarily limited by jurisdictional relevancy, each region requires its own solutions. Legaltech Hub currently only covers the following regions: US, UK, Canada, Australia. Over time, this content will be built out to cover additional regions.

Legal Research

As a result of the entrenched nature of eDiscovery, litigation is an area of law in which a large number of technology vendors operate. The field of eDiscovery continues to evolve, with ever more sophisticated tools providing forensics solutions and data analytics capabilities. The acquisition by Reveal of Brainspace and NexLP is a good example of an evolving vendor, though Relativity, Exterro, Integreon, AccessData, Everlaw and many others have also developed data products. End-to-end case management systems have now adapted to provide capabilities that support other aspects of litigation practice, including chronology development, transcript management, exhibit management and trial preparation. Major players such as Opus 2 and Litera Litigate allow for integrations with eDiscovery vendors and the import of tagged hot documents into the case management system. During the pandemic, virtual court work has become necessary, giving rise to the development of platforms such as Armatus and DepoDirect for remote depositions and trials. In addition to these categories, many other point solutions have developed to support various aspects of litigation practice.

Litigation Management

This category covers everything to do with a law firm's or in-house department's biggest asset, its people. This has always been an important topic but given the recently increasing war on talent and the large number of people who leave the law, this category has become more important. In addition to traditional recruiting, retention, professional development and performance management, the other topic that has become very important is diversity, equity and inclusion.

People

Investing in a platform solution, which is flexible enough to address a myriad of use cases and capable of integrating with many other technologies, often allows law firms or legal departments to get more out of the rest of their portfolio. Platforms can integrate across technology systems to create broader capabilities. Many platform solutions in legal incorporate multiple underlying technologies and are able to be configured to meet a variety of user needs. The solutions highlighted in this category are those that do not fall easily in other categories - Autologyx and Bryter are platforms in that they are highly interoperable and malleable, but they each fall squarely under the process improvement and automation topic. HighQ, by contrast, is a platform that does not sit easily in any one category. It is widely used in legal for use cases as varied as project management, collaboration and matter management to building out a client portal and pushing thought leadership to clients. HighQ can be integrated with contract review tools such as Kira, but it also leverages its own AI and analytics technologies and can be developed to create interactive data visualizations.

Platform

Process improvement starts with the process (a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end) - not with technology. Once a process has been evaluated and optimized, however, significant additional efficiency gains can be made by introducing automation. Solutions that allow for process automation have proliferated, and now include expert systems tools such as Neota Logic and Bryter, full digital operations automation systems like Autologyx, Mendix and Tonkean that allow for the end-to-end automation of operational workflows and integration of data sources, chatbots like Joseph, and robotic process automation using Blue Prism or K2 by Nintex.

Process Improvement

With the advent of virtual data rooms and automated due diligence review, transactional practices have come to rely more heavily on technology. Many vendors offer solutions specifically to transactional practices, supporting deal work in many different ways from broad end-to-end transaction management (with Litera Transact, Legatics and The DocYard) to more discrete use cases such as corporate structure diagrams (Jigsaw and Structure Flow).