Bespoke classification models need training in order to work. Training models costs the time of lawyers and experts, and that is the most valuable resource a law firm can deploy. To help law firms decide how to best allocate time, we look at the impact of three key levers - (1) picking the best model (or vendor), (2) collecting more training data, and (3) improve the quality of the training data.

As a startup serving lawyers, we have to work very hard to build trust with our prospective customers. We chat with Quintra Rijnders about how she ventured into running a startup from her career in professional services, and her philosophy for identifying the real value our products can provide to prospective customers.

There has been a lot of hype in the media around the capabilities of GPT and its likely impact on a number of sectors, including the legal sector. We decided to record a conversation about what it means to have an intelligent machine with our friend, Dr Stephen Enright-Ward, the CTO of a regtech / fintech company, Bilby.

With the holiday season in full swing and Mariah Carey playing on loop over Spotify, Ben Wightwick of Autologyx took time before Christmas to have a candid conversation with us about what the legal tech companies actually do over the holidays. We hope this blog will share an interesting insider view on how our company operates, and will be the first of many exposés.

Is it a good idea to be creating and pushing a proprietary file format?

Our view is “generally, no”. There are a raft of challenges with this endeavor.

Watch this video chat with Dr. Cain Elliott to understand what Filevine wants to achieve with their new document format.

Front Foot Academy offers pragmatic and principled advice on how to improve legal operations. We think this type of educational courses is an integral part of the innovation ecosystem that helps lawyers perform their jobs better. We chat with David to find out how the old adage - “people, process, product” - combine to solve problems for lawyers.

The legal profession has become better at understand what data science can do and where it can apply to the practice of law, but there is still an air of mystique around how lawyers talk about data science. Some still speak of data science as a black box process that can answer difficult questions with a wave of their hand. We had a conversation with the very humble Aquib Javed Khan about this…

Back in March this year, the brilliant Colin Lachance and I had a conversation about his joint venture, Jurisage, knowledge graphs, and legal data. For those interested in using data to solve legal problems, it would be worth your while to take a look at this video for our in-depth discussion.

We are delighted to announce that we have acquired Motionize, which also offers a Word Add-In that improves access to knowledge and provides drafting guidance to transactional lawyers.

Joshua Schoen, Co-Founder and CEO of Motionize, says, “We believe this combination will ultimately bring forth a category defining drafting product...”

Clearbrief is a technology startup in the US that has built an incredible piece of software to solve problems that litigators encounter in their work. We had a chat with their CEO, Jackie Schafer, about their award winning company, how their software is helping their customers, and how she and her team designed their products.

Isabela Loscher is the passionate Knowledge Management Officer at PPU. In this conversation, Isabela chats with us about addressing real problems for lawyers and the importance of going “back to basics”. We spend much of this conversation discussing how we can identify the right problems to solve.

The majority of Syntheia’s team are engineers and data scientists who had not worked with legal technology prior to joining Syntheia, and so we asked them what they thought when they encountered the idea of “legal technology” for the first time.

We are excited to announce that Syntheia and BWD have joined efforts to explore how the labor-intensive task of generating annual reports can be made easier for companies.

Developers are an exceedingly rare (and often silent) group of professionals working inside the legal system, so we were lucky to have had the opportunity to learn how Ryan McDonough works alongside legal technologists and lawyers in their team…

In the last couple of years, Tim McDonald put together an automation and optimization project where a few changes led to 85% of procurement contracts becoming self-serviced by his business team, so they never need any intervention from his legal team at all. The result was that the speed of procurement improved by three to four times compared to prior to his automation and optimization project!

Tim Perry is a fountain of knowledge on all manners of things, but on legal content in particular. Legal content is a subject that does not receive a lot of attention in the legal technology landscape, and this lack of attention is something which Tim and his team address at Practical Law Australia…

When people think of lawyers, they generally think of lawyers using words on a page or words spoken in court. Unless they have worked with lawyers through the planning and strategizing stages of a case, most people do not think of lawyers as visual creatures. The lucky few who have worked with lawyers extensively may know that, contrary to popular opinion, lawyers rely heavily on visualizations, like flowcharts and structure diagrams…

When it comes to sharing of knowledge and tools, there is a common perception that legal professionals are not very good at sharing of its valuable knowledge and resources. Whereas the common perception (one which I used to hold) is that the tech industry is much better at sharing than the legal profession…

A few days ago, I had a video chat with Tomoyuki Hachigo, co-founder of Sprintlaw (https://sprintlaw.com.au/), about how they built Sprintlaw by focusing on the needs of their target client groups – and created a firm that provides faster, simpler and more affordable legal services…

We had the pleasure to speak with Tom Nevin of Loquitur (https://loquitur.com.au/) a few weeks ago about the dark arts of what trial lawyers have to do, and how by providing training to witnesses, Loquitur helps trial lawyers achieve better results for their clients…