Latest news

This Friday our story of the week goes to the virtual bond hearing of the 17-year-old boy accused of hacking Twitter, which was interrupted by Zoombombers playing loud music and a pornographic video. Independent security journalist Brian Krebs, who attended the hearing, summed it up on Twitter by saying: “Judges holding hearings over Zoom need to get a clue.”

NLP-driven document analysis company, Ayfie, has listed its shares for public trading – an unusual step for a small legal tech startup that is not part of a larger company.

ILTA this week announced its Distinguished Peer Awards finalists, with Paul Hastings up for four awards across three categories, including two in the Transformative Projects of the Year category.

UK-based eDisclosure, digital forensics and managed services leader Anexsys has been acquired by U.S private-equity-backed company Xact Data Discovery (XDD) from Hobs Group following a restructure.

Deloitte Legal is supporting the charity LawWorks (the Solicitors Pro Bono Group), in developing and launching a UK-focussed Free Legal Answers online platform that virtually connects individuals in need of legal advice with lawyers who are able to provide it on a pro bono basis.

Iridium Technology has turned out the strongest half-year revenue results in the firm’s history despite a widespread downturn in legal tech spend among law firms post COVID-19, we can reveal.

If law firms and legal professionals are to remain relevant and profitable during the current pandemic and in the future, it’s time to reinvent legal work and overcome our reliance on paper, says Litera evangelist Curt Meltzer.

Editor Caroline Hill speaks to a raft of senior legal technologists to find out how GPT-3 will impact the legal sector.

The first electronically signed deeds have been submitted to HM Land Registry by The Partnership, using SignIT from InfoTrack. 

In a South East UK win for NetDocuments, leading Essex law firm Birkett Long has selected its document management platform as part of an ongoing digital transformation programme.

Litera will today (31 July) announce that Manoj Goyal will join the company as chief technology officer, effective immediately. Goyal brings more than 30 years of enterprise SaaS and cloud services experience to the position, having previously served as chief product officer and chief technology officer at Marketo, group vice president at Oracle, and executive director at Hewlett Packard.

Email management disruptor ZERØ and leading legal management consulting firm Fireman & Company have entered a strategic partnership in order to help deliver productivity, compliance, and profitability solutions to large law firms.

And there’s more news for DocsCorp as it this week announces its PDF editing and bundling application pdfDocs now integrates with DocuSign, with Norway’s Wiersholm among the first firms to take advantage of the integration.

UK top 100 law firm Taylor Vinters has swapped back from Workshare Compare to compareDocs for smart document comparison and review. It joins several other firms that have selected compareDocs in recent months, including Fladgate, Fondia, and Beiten Burkhardt.

The New Zealand government claims to have become the first in the world to outline a set of standards to guide the use of algorithms by public agencies, once again shining a light on what governments around the world are doing to ensure scrutiny of tools that are increasingly being relied on in crucial areas such as criminal assessment and sentencing.

The July/August Orange Rag will be out next week so make sure you get all your wins, deals, stories, moves and more to us by Friday 31 July.