Ideas that shape the future

In our blog and in our podcast, we share what we are learning alongside our customers to help shape a smarter, better future for everyone’s legal practice.

Further Comments is a podcast hosted by Damien Riehl and Horace Wu that brings together industry leaders and forward-thinkers to discuss how technology is reshaping legal work. Listen for expert insights, candid conversations, and a front-row seat to the future of law.

Read our latest Syntheia blog posts here.

Horace Wu Horace Wu

Legal Gen AI Megatrend 2024: Tailored Use Cases

In the second of our three part series on Gen AI megatrends, we speak with Abhijat Saraswat. We speak about how to build software that solve real problems for the end users, and how we go about the exercises of listening and building. Ab offers us a master class in product development, drawing on his years of experience working in the highly competitive legaltech vertical.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Legal Gen AI Megatrend 2024: Build vs Buy

At Legalweek, we spoke with legal tech and taxonomy pioneer Damien Riehl about building and selling legal tech, particularly using Gen AI. Damien offers deep insights that may help in the strategic build vs buy decisions.

This conversation is the first of a three video series that we hope to shed light on key megatrends for the future of legal tech.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Jaffle makers, Legaltech Events, and Buffets

In our first vlog of 2024, we wanted to explore a few ideas that occurred to us while in Nashville. We had travelled to Nashville for a strategy meeting for ILTA, and during the travels, we noticed a few things that might have interesting parallels to legaltech. We talk a little about what we expect from generative AI tools in 2024, and also about how we will be approaching R&D at Syntheia.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Goodbye 2023, you have been swell

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

The holiday email that never reached your inbox

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!

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Releasing our Generation 3 Upgrades — A Progress Update

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Tips for your legal prompt engineering experiment

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Paul Farrell joins as Syntheia’s Director of Customer Success

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Tips on winning and closing legaltech deals

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Pivot to potato farming in response to generative AI

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)

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Give Your AI Tools a Makeover (from SKILLS 2023)

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Winning your first customer, and the art of presenting value

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

ChatGPT is better than you know and dumber than you hope

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

What does a legal tech startup do over holidays?

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

A legal-specific standard document format?

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Learning and applying “street fighting legal ops”

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

How data science might influence and change the practice of law

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…

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Using legal data that is hidden in words, lines, nooks and crannies

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.

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

Syntheia acquires Motionize

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...”

Read More
Horace Wu Horace Wu

How Clearbrief designs and uses NLP to help litigators

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.

Read More