As we wave goodbye to 2023, let's take a moment to reflect on the year's evolving legal tech landscape. It was a year marked by adaptation, innovation, and a forward-thinking progress in legal technology. In our latest post, we share some observations on the trends that shaped the legal world – from the buzz around generative AI to the subtle shifts in work culture. Join us on a casual stroll through the year's highlights.

As an AI developed by OpenAI, we wish you a safe and happy holidays.

We hope you can turn off a little, relax, recharge, and come back to 2024 refreshed. Next year will be filled with more surprises and advances, and we look forward to sharing more laughs and triumphs with you!

We are excited to unveil a major software upgrade with the launch of Generation 3, featuring a completely redesigned front end and a refactored back end for more powerful search and insights. The roll out will begin from December 2023. Generation 3 will deliver a more intuitive experience and workflow enhancements tailored to transactional lawyers.

In this blog post, we chat with Steve Goldstein about his experience of prompting generative large language models and what has worked well for his use cases. This is not your standard listicle of top 10 prompting tips. There are already thousands of those listicles. There are even books about prompt engineering now. This is a blog sharing tips from hard-earned experience.

Syntheia is pleased to announce the appointment of Paul Farrell as our new Director of Customer Success. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Paul brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the Syntheia team.

As we continue to focus on delivering value and support to our customers, the addition of a seasoned professional like Paul is a significant step to ensuring unparalleled customer service.

There is a general consensus that, when compared to other industries and professions, selling to lawyers can certainly feel like a grueling marathon. This is why our approach to “selling” to lawyers and law firms is to not try to sell anything at all. Read this blog post to learn how Jon Bartman at Jameson Legal approach “selling” without selling.

As a company that has always prided itself on innovation and staying ahead of the curve, Syntheia recognizes the need to adapt to changing market conditions. While our existing products were groundbreaking in their time, the rapid development of generative AI technology has rendered database and search technologies obsolete. (happy April Fool’s)

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.