Technology

And The Legal Technology Word Of The Year Is …

A year ago, no one in the legal profession was talking about this. It was a word few lawyers knew. Now, it's taking the legal profession by storm.

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After Dictionary.com announced “complicit” as its word of the year for 2017, a friend asked what I considered to be the legal technology word of the year. An answer immediately came to mind, but before I blurted it out, I wanted to look at what other words or phrases might be contenders. Read on to find out which words I considered and which one I ultimately chose.

One obvious candidate would be artificial intelligence. This was a year in which everyone seemed to be getting into the AI game. There were big players, such as LexisNexis with its launch in June of AI-powered Lexis Answers, Bloomberg Law with its September launch of its AI-powered tool Points of Law, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solution’s launch in March of an AI tools to review legal invoices, and legal services provider Axiom’s launch in August of AxiomAI to improve the efficiency of its contract work.

On the business front, notable AI news included the closing of a $7 million funding round in March by AI contract review platform LawGeex, the acquisition by iManage of UK AI company RAVN Systems in May, and the announcement in October by AI legal research platform ROSS Intelligence of an $8.7 million funding round. Hoping to help law firms experiment with the use of AI, Fastcase in June launched an AI sandbox.

Another worth considering for word of the year is analytics. Among the best-known platforms in this category is Lex Machina, which offers litigation analytics in an expanding number of practice areas. Ever since its acquisition by LexisNexis two years ago, Lex Machina has grown from its original focus on intellectual property to add analytics for product securities, antitrust, commercial litigation, employment, bankruptcy, and products liability.

Of course, Lex Machina is by no means alone in providing analytics. Among others that launched this year were Ravel Law’s Firm Analytics, Bloomberg Law’s Litigation Analytics for labor and employment cases, and Gavelytics for judicial analytics.

A buzzword not to be ignored this year is bot. Early in the year, I wrote here about how everyone, it seemed, was suddenly talking about bots. That was partly due to the widespread media coverage given to DoNotPay, the chatbot that promised to help people fight parking tickets, after its founder reported winning 160,000 out of 250,000 cases.

Since then, the buzz around bots has grown only louder.  In October, the UK company Elexirr (which rebranded in July from LawBot) threw down the gauntlet, challenging lawyers to a competition to determine whether its bot could better predict case outcomes than can they. When the results were later announced, the bot, not surprisingly, emerged victorious. Meanwhile, in November, DoNotPay announced $1.1 million in seed funding to develop the capacity for the bot to handle more complex types of legal problems.

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My list of contenders would have to include legal keyboard. The year was only a few days old when I wrote a post announcing the launch of the LegalBoard, a keyboard designed specifically for lawyers. As I later wrote in my column here, never in all my years of writing about legal technology have I seen the legal world respond to a new product as it did to this. It wasn’t long before another keyboard for lawyers came along, the Citepad, and just recently, the LegalBoard introduced a mini version for travel, the LegalPad.

Also on my short list would be Alexa. In May, Thomson Reuters Elite, part of Thomson Reuters Legal, introduced Workspace Assistant, a tool that allows lawyers to track and manage time using the Amazon Echo or other Alexa-enabled device. Although Workspace Assistant works only with Workspace, an enterprise-level product for large law firms, soon another product came along for time tracking via Alexa, Tali. And in September, Tali announced its integration with practice management platform Clio.

What’s a technology list if it doesn’t include disruption? Yes, it is a tired and overworked word, but companies still regularly invoke it. This year, we saw Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Justin Kan promising to disrupt the law firm business model with his Atrium LLP, Integreon vowing to disrupt the legal industry with its acquisition of Allegory, and two separate companies — GLG Law and The Expert Witness Exchange — saying they would disrupt the expert witness business.

A phrase hardly uttered until this year is brief analysis. One of the hot products of the year has been CARA, the Casetext tool that analyzes briefs and memoranda and automatically finds relevant cases not mentioned in the document. The American Association of Law Libraries awarded its product of the year honor to CARA and its developer, Pablo Arredondo, chief legal research officer at Casetext. Then along came another brief-analysis tool, this time from Judicata, with the ability to analyze and grade a brief’s strengths, weaknesses, and thoroughness.

Also continuing to grow in significance is the phrase technology competence. In September, the number of states that have adopted this ethical duty hit 28. Meanwhile, the American Bar Association issued a major ethics ruling interpreting the duty and lawyers continue to wrestle with how they become technologically competent.

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Worthy contenders all. But after due consideration, I rejected them all in favor of what I consider to be the top legal technology word of 2017. And it is (drumroll): blockchain.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post, In Legal, Blockchain Is The New Black, in which I discussed the emerging and growing importance of blockchain technology in the legal industry. I described there a convergence of events that cumulatively underscored blockchain’s potential to disrupt many aspects of both the business and practice of law.

As one writer so aptly summarized, “[B]lockchain might be the most important addition to the legal infrastructure since William the Conqueror gave rise to common law.”

A year ago, no one in the legal profession was talking about blockchain. It was a word few lawyers knew. Now law firms have practice groups that focus on it, consortia have been formed to study its applications in law, and there has been at least one major conference devoted to it. For all of these reasons, I pick blockchain as the legal technology word of the year.

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert 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).

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