At Legal Geek in London, Joanna Goodman caught up with Ben Stoneham, founder and CEO at Autologyx. Autologyx, a cloud platform for process automation and optimization, is a scale up that is expanding into legal services rather than a legal tech start-up. For the past two years Autologyx’s automation as a service platform has supported Konexo, a division of Eversheds Sutherland. In May this year, it raised an additional $1.26 million in funding to increase its presence in the insurance and legal sectors. 

What does the Autologyx platform do?

Autologyx optimises process automation. It was originally developed to deliver outsourced recruitment for the health service, which entails working within a variety of complex compliance frameworks. Processes are non-linear as different clinical roles and situations have different compliance requirements. Rather than designing workflow automation as a series of gateways, Autologyx connects tasks, events, data, and resources and applies an automation engine to figure out the optimal process path in real time. The process map changes in response to different events and outcomes. We then realized that our solution was not specific to compliance and we started to approach businesses in multiple industry verticals.  

Can you say something about your work in legal services?

Konexo (formerly Ignite) – a division of Eversheds Sutherland – is our first legal services customer. They and many of their corporate customers use the Autologyx platform to manage legal matter management, triage allocation, contract review and workforce matters. For example, Autologyx can analyze data to ensure that a matter gets routed to the right legal team – either internally or to external counsel. It then tracks the matter through each stage. But it’s not linear. For example, it can check efficiency/productivity against service level agreements (SLAs) and reroute work if it looks like an SLA is about to be breached. Additionally, the insights that the system captures from every event, action and piece of data it handles can be used for intelligent contract review, applying machine learning to incorporate historic decisions to inform future processes and decision-making.

Although we are a relatively recent entrant to the sector, legal is an excellent fit for Autologyx. Many of our corporate customers, who include Boeing, Centrica, Addeco, Alegis, Luxotica to name but a few, are already using our platform to manage in-house legal processes like compliance, contract management and obligations management.

Another of our routes to market is through partnerships with legal engineering and consultancy businesses, particularly in the US where we are helping one of the largest telcos manage legal matters concerning their cell tower estate; a global retailer manage new franchising opportunities and a global staffing agency manage contracts and compliance. 

Why is legal automation so hot right now?

The legal market is embracing automation because customers are fed up with paying $400 or $500 an hour for a junior associate to do routine work. Unless law firms can respond to customer demand and find a cost-effective way of providing these services, corporate legal departments will either use an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) or bring the work in-house. Automation is that solution. 

Law firms need to respond to the inevitable march towards automation. Led by Amazon and Apple, customers expect digitization and automation to improve the services they buy and deliver them quickly and efficiently. And law firms are being dragged into this new world, where the ability to digitize for efficient operations management is absolutely key. 

But it’s not just about customers. Automation that drives up operational performance helps businesses compete more effectively in a way that they couldn’t do when they used point solutions that didn’t talk to each other. Autologyx works very successfully with other legal tech systems like ThoughtRiver, iManage, or HighQ. Last week, … [at another conference] our stand was next to NetDocuments and we used their API to build an integration then and there! 

Basically, we’re automating the connections that traditionally would have been made by people: moving data around and making decisions efficiently and accurately, while enabling lawyers to continue using the same interfaces to complete and deliver their work. Autologyx is effectively the fabric that joins all the different legal tech together enabling lawyers to provide tailored services quickly and cost-effectively. 

Does Autologyx replace the legal tech integration consultants?

While we can build integrations very quickly, there is still a role for consultants. We provide the enabling technology and train lawyers to use it, but lawyers are not necessarily the best people to manage process design. And if you automate a poor process, it will be faster, but it won’t be better! 

So, there is still a role for consultants like Wavelength and LawMade, for example, because they know what good looks like and they know how to apply analytics and metrics to legal services. Our system can provide any amount of performance data, but you need to know where to apply it in the business. Consultants understand that, and they continue to refine what they consider to be best practice. Although law firms can easily implement process automation, there is still a role for consultants. 

What legal tech trends are you identifying as you seek to expand your foothold in the marketplace?

Legal is at a relatively early stage in the digitization journey, and it’s a vibrant exciting space with thousands of early-stage businesses. There’s still a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI) there are some great machine learning offerings – ThoughtRiver and Luminance, for example – but in order for AI to become a true capability, it needs to be transactional: it needs to be an important part of the value chain and contribute in the same way as a lawyer does. 

Platformization is another trend and Autologyx is one of several offerings. 

What are you working on now?

We are developing technology is around tracking the time lawyers and paralegals spend on each task in a process as we’re handing off tasks to them. Because our platform extends through to the desktop, we’re working on technology that provides ‘last mile’ insight that relates to both the billable hour and machine learning. In fact, if we’re measuring an automated process, we could get it down to the billable second!