Today's Tech: #ILTACON Wrap-Up

Compared to prior years, there were more non-ediscovery vendors to choose from when it came to setting up meetings.

Digital TechnologyAnother year, another ILTA conference come and gone. Every year my goal is to sit down with leaders from a few innovative legal technology companies to get their perspectives on where legal technology is headed and to learn about their latest product releases. This year was no different, although I found that compared to prior years, there were more non-ediscovery vendors to choose from when it came to setting up meetings. I’m not sure if this is because of: 1) a saturation of ediscovery vendors resulting in increased competition and the folding of smaller companies, or 2) market conditions resulting in a demand for more varied legal software offerings. Either way, it was a welcome change.

One theme that became apparent throughout the show was that vendors were finding ways to integrate with ediscovery products to provide more interesting ways to use the digital data mined and organized by esdiscovery software. Everlaw’s newest feature release, Storybuilder Chronology and Outline, was a great example of this. With this feature, litigation team members can add ediscovery documents to a chronology and then label, annotate, and organize the documents contained in the chronology.

Another company providing a similar integration is Opus 2 Magnum, which announced an integration with Relativity which allows its users to load ediscovery documents stored in Relativity directly into the Opus 2 platform, where the litigation teams can then prepare for deposition and trial by collaborating on the discovery documents and other data, including videos. Opus also rolled out a number of new features, including one that allows users to manage multiple fact timelines.

A Relativity integration was also announced by Everchron, another company that provides a collaborative case management platform for litigators. With this integration, a litigation team using Everchron can import data stored in Relativity and then begin preparing the case for litigation within Everchron’s clean, modern platform by creating chronologies, witness files, and collaborating on documents. Everchron also offers an iPad app so that lawyers can prepare for litigation on the go.

Another interesting integration that was announced at ILTA was AmericanLegalNet’s integration with NetDocs. One of AmericanLegalNet’s stand out offerings is its eDocket Reporting features, which include rules-based calendaring and forms for all jurisdictions along with a seamless Pacer integration. With the new NetDocs integration, their users will now have increased options for document management and storage in addition to the edocketing features.

Next, Intapp announced a new feature that I found to be very forward thinking, especially for a company that provides enterprise-level software: Intapp Time. This feature allows firms to capture what each firm member does on a daily basis, across devices, including desktops, laptops, and mobile. Once the data is captured, a daily summary is provided so that all billable time can be tracked, analyzed, and billed. The summary also makes use of a variation of AI-type of analytics to suggest relevant connections between the data using other firm databases, including suggesting names of contacts and cases based on the documents, etc. with which the user was interacting.

Speaking of AI, I rounded out the conference by meeting with Noory Beechor, the CEO of LawGeex.  LawGeex is one of the most intriguing new legal software products, offering lawyers the ability to utilize AI for contract review. The software is constantly learning as new contracts are uploaded into its database and it applies this knowledge to contracts submitted by users. The AI interface reviews the contract, compares it to multitude of similar documents contained in its database, and then provides an interactive contract report that includes recommended fixes drawn from its analysis of the components of similar contracts. Definitely a cutting edge product and it will be interesting to follow this company and other legal tech AI companies that are bound to pop up in the very near future.

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All in all, this year’s conference was a memorable one. The conversations were enlightening and I left with lots of food for thought about the future of legal technology. And, I got to spend some time with some of my fellow Above the Law bloggers, including Elie Mystal, Joe Patrice, Carolyn Elefant, Bob Ambrogi, Kevin O’Keefe, and more. Hope to see you there next year!

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Niki BlackNicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter at@nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

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