This Week In Legal Tech: It's All About Legaltech
Legal technology columnist Bob Ambrogi identifies some highlights from this week's big conference.
This week will find me and much of the rest of the legal tech world in New York City for the Legaltech conference, billed as the largest legal technology event of the year. This annual rite is a whirlwind three days of seminars, exhibit hall demos, hallway networking, and a smorgasbord of fancy receptions.
It is potentially even crazier this year with host company ALM’s decision to expand it into something called Legalweek, The Experience. The name conjures images of a destination-park thrill ride, but the concept is to provide a little something for everyone, from Biglaw CIOs to small firms and solos, from law librarians to legal marketers. And, of course, legal techies.
Monica Bay’s column here recently offered advice on how to navigate all this, and she and I recently recorded a podcast with the show’s organizers to get more details about the new format and what attendees should expect.
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As for me, I’ll be spending most of my time at the Legaltech part of the show, but I’ll also be participating as a panelist on two programs for the LegalSmallFirm track: “Challenges Identified by Small Law Firms – How They Threaten Your Success,” on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 2:15 p.m., and “All Things Implementation: Improving Technology Management in the Small Firm,” on Wednesday, Feb. 1, at 10:30 a.m.
Mainly, however, I’ll be on the lookout for interesting legal tech news. Here is some of what I know in advance that will be of interest.
Legaltech is always the venue for announcements of product launches and upgrades. Some announcements came in advance of the show and will be on display there. Lex Machina, for one, will be demonstrating its new analytics apps, Damages Explorer and Parties Comparator, that it announced last week. Its parent, LexisNexis, will be making a number of announcements concerning new integrations, new analytic capabilities and a new cloud-based version of a legal-research product. (I’ll be posting updates at Lawsitesblog.com.)
The e-discovery company Catalyst – for which, full disclosure, I am a paid consultant – rolled out a major new platform earlier this month, Insight Enterprise, designed specifically for corporate counsel to manage e-discovery. It will be available for demonstrations at Catalyst’s booth in the exhibit hall.
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The document management system NetDocuments announced a number of enhancements on Friday, in advance of the conference. These include ndSync secure Dropbox-like file synchronization and share application for improved usability and offline working, native Microsoft Office integration on iOS devices that connects Office apps directly to NetDocuments, and two search enhancements to provide intelligent personalized search as well as advanced entity extraction.
Also last week, the document management system iManage put out two announcements. One was the release of iManage Work 10, a complete redesign of its document and email management application. The other was the launch of two security products, iManage Security Policy Manager, to allow firms to manage their global security profiles, and iManage Threat Manager, to help firms identify malicious attacks or internal threats to their data.
Another pre-show release was from LawBase, the case and matter management system, of its roll-out of an integration with BakerManage, the legal project-management system developed by the law firm Baker Donelson. As I wrote on my Lawsites blog last week, I believe this is the first practice management system to have integrated project management.
I am hoping to get demos of several products that I have heard about but never seen in action. Case.one is a new cloud-based case management platform that provides an interesting twist on pricing – charging by the case rather than by the month. Luminance is a new AI tool for document analysis that claims to understand language the way humans do, but in volumes and at speeds that humans will never achieve.
Others that sound interesting: Omnity, a tool for patent attorneys that finds hidden connections among documents to facilitate patent prosecutions and prior art searches; and StoryCloud, a video deposition service that streams to the cloud in real time, enabling immediate access to the video by the entire litigation team.
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If you’re attending Legaltech and you see a guy wandering aimlessly with a lost look in his eyes, that might be me, so be sure to stop me and say hello. If nothing else, Legaltech is about meeting new people and networking with old friends and colleagues. I hope to see you there.
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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
