Legal Technology And Innovation: Ediscovery, Machine Learning, And Transactional Practice, Oh My!
When it comes to legal technology, there's a whole lot of innovation going on.
Yesterday I discussed technology and innovation in the legal profession, offering some big-picture insights from the Thomson Reuters Innovation Summit that took place here in New York on Wednesday. In today’s follow-up post, I’ll offer a more granular view of innovation in legal tech, focusing on specific products discussed by TR at the Summit.
Perhaps the most exciting product announcement emerging from the summit was the new Thomson Reuters ediscovery platform, eDiscovery Point. Document review is the bane of so many litigation associates’ existences (as well as an essential way for contract attorneys to make a living, and an important revenue source for law firms). If a new product can make the process easier and less unpleasant for the lawyers, as well as cheaper and faster for the clients who are footing the bill, what’s not to like?
The adorably elfin Eric Laughlin, Managing Director of Legal Managed Services (formerly known as Pangea3), explained why Thomson Reuters decided to launch an ediscovery product. The short answer: customer dissatisfaction with current solutions on the market. According to a survey of TR clients, 9 out of 10 believe that existing ediscovery platforms can be improved. Problems include clunky tools, poor customer service, and a process that’s too long and too expensive.
Curbing Client And Talent Loss With Productivity Tech
Hence eDiscovery Point — a new, web-based ediscovery platform built from the ground up, designed to handle ediscovery from processing through production. Laughlin touted it as built for ease of use, speed, and accuracy, all at a reasonable price.
In the current ediscovery market, pricing is often a confusing (and costly) mess, with a proliferation of different line items for things like user licenses, hosting, predictive coding, processing, and production (see, e.g., this funny mock invoice by Logikcull). With eDiscovery Point, TR will offer one simplified price based only on data “in review,” not irrelevant data that’s uploaded but never reviewed. So if you have 100 GB of data and push just 20 GB into review, you’ll be charged only for the 20 GB.
Additional services, such as technical managed services and document review services, will be available at an additional price through TR’s Legal Managed Services division. But the core functions of ediscovery are all included in the per-gigabyte price. (That price, in response to a question from the always insightful Bob Ambrogi: roughly $40 a gigabyte.)
Laughlin and the two other panelists — James Jarvis, Vice President for Product Management and Partner Management at Thomson Reuters Legal, and Amy Goin, Senior Director of Marketing for Legal Managed Services — gave examples of current problems encountered in ediscovery that eDiscovery Point is designed to avoid:
Sponsored
AI Presents Both Opportunities And Risks For Lawyers. Are You Prepared?
Law Firm Business Development Is More Than Relationship Building
Curbing Client And Talent Loss With Productivity Tech
Happy Lawyers, Better Results The Key To Thriving In Tough Times
- Search results will come back in seconds (or fractions thereof), not minutes.
- Many different users can perform many different functions on eDiscovery Point all at the same time (e.g., you don’t need to kick reviewers off the system in order to run a complex search).
- The platform is easy to use; reviewers won’t need a hefty manual just to do basic operations. (Laughlin said eDiscovery Point was designed to be intuitive, “just like an iPad that my six-year-old and pick up and use.”)
- Search functionality is both easy and powerful. For example, you can run searches “Westlaw style,” using terms and connectors, or you can search by metadata fields such as file type — e.g., pull up all 2007 Excel spreadsheets where the CFO was the custodian.
- Redaction is easy; you simply highlight material to be redacted using your cursor. (As one client told Thomson Reuters, “I did not go to law school to draw boxes on documents.”)
- You can create and track assignments relating to the discovery process within eDiscovery Point, so you can keep track of what needs to get done, who’s doing it, and when it gets completed.
During the process of developing eDiscovery Point, Thomson Reuters worked closely with four partner law firms — Paul Hastings, Chaffetz Lindsey, Kolesar & Leatham, and Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr — to figure out how they currently handle ediscovery, what drives them batty about the exiting platforms, and what they wish they could do (or do better) with a new platform. Thomson Reuters employees even shadowed lawyers and legal professionals at these firms to see them at work in the ediscovery trenches. Employees at these firms gave Thomson Reuters continuous feedback during the development process, identifying pain points that TR fixed before launching eDiscovery Point.
“Ediscovery is not complicated,” Jarvis said. “Load the data. Find the documents. Review the documents. Share the documents you have to share with the other side.” But the status quo, he said, involves a lot of “hurry up and wait” — at considerable cost to the client.
One of the ways that eDiscovery Point reduces waiting time, at a technical level, is to break up data into smaller packets for quick processing. Another innovation is to rely upon abundant (and redundant) data centers, so the system doesn’t get overloaded by too many users or too much data, and doesn’t have to endure any downtime for maintenance (thanks to the redundancy).
As someone still suffering from discovery-induced PTSD, despite not having done doc review in more than a decade, I thought eDiscovery Point sounded amazing. The cute slogans on Eric Laughlin’s PowerPoint — “you’ll feel like Vikings with a speed boat,” or “you’ll feel like Lewis and Clark with a monster truck” — sounded totally on point.
Sponsored
Ranking The Law Firms Lawyers Love
Happy Lawyers, Better Results The Key To Thriving In Tough Times
During the Q-and-A session, legal tech guru Bob Ambrogi — who, full disclosure, is a paid consultant to another ediscovery vendor, Catalyst — pushed back a bit on the transformative nature of eDiscovery Point. As he puts it in his write-up of the Summit, “While it is true that some older ediscovery platforms continue to maintain a significant market share, and that those older systems can be hobbled by speed and usability issues, there are also many newer vendors whose products address some or all of these issues in various ways.”
So how does Thomson Reuters think it can compete with existing market leaders — like, say, Relativity by kCura? (Note: TR diplomatically did not mention kCura, Catalyst, Logikcull, or other players in this space by name, although specific brands did get mentioned by Summit attendees during the Q-and-A.)
Eric Laughlin
According to Laughlin, it’s partly about brand and partly about investment. In terms of brand, Thomson Reuters is not some small start-up company; law firms and in-house legal departments know and trust TR. In terms of investment, the company has poured extensive resources into eDiscovery Point, and it pledges to support the product with TR’s renowned customer support in the years ahead. (If you’ve ever called up a Westlaw research ninja in the middle of the night and had them patiently walk you through a complex search, you know what I’m talking about.)
Moving on from ediscovery, the next session at the Summit focused on advanced technology and cognitive computing — aka Watson, IBM’s famous Jeopardy-playing (and winning) computer system — and how such technology can transform the practice of law. This panel was moderated by Charlotte Rushton, Managing Director of U.S. Large Law Firms and Head of Innovation at Thomson Reuters Legal, and featured Eric Laughlin; Alexa Swainson, vice president for Strategy and Global Alliances at IBM Watson; and Bob Schukai, Head of Advanced Product Innovation at Thomson Reuters. (Schukai, sporting long hair and wearing a white t-shirt and dark jeans, looked every part the techie.)
This session was much more theoretical than the first one. Charlotte Rushton posed a question that my colleague Elie Mystal might have asked: are we building “robo-lawyers,” machines that might someday replace flesh-and-blood attorneys?
That’s not the goal of Thomson Reuters, according to Laughlin. Instead, TR is partnering with IBM Watson to develop products that will amplify the intelligence of clients and help them better advise their clients. The jobs of lawyers become more interesting and fulfilling when they don’t have to engage in mundane tasks and can instead focus on client-facing activities that call upon the exercise of human judgment.
As IBM’s Swainson put it, “Watson isn’t about replacing the expert, but augmenting and extending the expert.” She cited uses of IBM Watson in the field of medicine, where technology isn’t replacing doctors but instead allowing doctors to extend their expertise into patient interactions. Schukai cited investment management, where technology is revolutionizing the way people run their portfolios.
In terms of what specific products will emerge from the TR-IBM collaboration, the panel didn’t offe much in terms of specifics. The first product, which Thomson Reuters expects to go into beta in the second half of 2016 and launch in the first half of 2017, will “help users untangle the sometimes-confusing web of global legal and regulatory requirements and will be targeted at customers in corporate legal, corporate compliance and law firms,” as Bob Ambrogi put it.
Eric Laughlin described the following use case: a company just acquired a bunch of businesses in Europe, which has very different privacy laws than the United States. Exactly what customer data can that company bring back to the United States, and how can it do so while complying with privacy laws and regulations in all relevant jurisdictions? Thomson Reuters hopes that its forthcoming product will help lawyers tackle situations like this one by streamlining a lot of the regulation gathering and research, allowing the lawyer to start giving advice at an earlier point in time.
Based on this description of the product, another legal tech guru in attendance, Casey Flaherty — former in-house counsel at Kia Motors, current principal at Procertas — challenged the earlier reassurances that no lawyers would be harmed by the making of this product. If law firm associates currently spend much of their time gathering regs and doing research, wouldn’t software that can do this send some of these associates to the unemployment line?
Flaherty’s comments were echoed by remarks from Jean O’Grady, Director of Research Services and Libraries at DLA Piper and author of the excellent site Dewey B Strategic. New technologies and products are expensive, she pointed out; will Thomson Reuters try to market its services by touting the cost savings to law firms in terms of possible reductions of associate headcount?
Laughlin candidly acknowledged that yes, there might be some “redeployment” of associates and other lawyers. If computers can do certain tasks more quickly, effectively, and cheaply than lawyers, then lawyers will have to find new ways to add value. Of course, we don’t know yet how that will happen or what such redeployment might look like. If law firms decide they can serve their clients with fewer associates, that’s up to the firms; it’s not the place of TR to tell them about staffing levels. (This discussion reminded me of the plight of the legal secretary; we’ve chronicled in these pages the continuing reduction in the ranks of Biglaw secretaries, now that technology allows law firms to get by with higher lawyer-to-secretary ratios.)
But don’t get too paranoid, lawyers; we’re a long way off from “the singularity.” Alexa Swainson of IBM Watson — a company that has every incentive to tout the capabilities of Watson — reminded Summit attendees that Watson is taught, not programmed, and that teaching must be done by humans with appropriate subject-matter expertise.
As Swainson put it — reminding us that technology, despite all its fabulosity, can’t (yet) do everything on its own — “The people element is critical.”
P.S. Another session at the Innovation Summit that I wasn’t able to attend discussed Practical Law Connect, a new research tool designed for transactional lawyers. You can read more about Practical Law Connect at Legal Current or from Bob Ambrogi (who goes much more “under the hood” of the products than I have here, with screenshots showing the user interfaces of both eDiscovery Point and Practical Law Connect).
Thomson Reuters Unveils New Platforms for E-Discovery and Legal Research [Law Sites]
Thomson Reuters Launches eDiscovery Point [Legal Current]
Thomson Reuters Introduces Practical Law Connect [Legal Current]
