Latest news

Ashurst has announced the first cohort of businesses for FinTech Legal Labs, a three-day accelerator programme designed to provide FinTech businesses with legal support and access to investors and leading financial institutions, plus ongoing activities.

Late but worth the wait, see here all the stories from the latest Orange Rag, which is packed as usual with news and commentary.

Cyber security provider Darktrace and legal online marketplace Lexoo have been ranked at number 12 and 25 respectively in Deloitte’s UK Fast 50, which is a list of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in the UK based on revenue growth over the last four years.

Ashurst has today (8 November) formally launched a new flexible resourcing platform – Ashurst Advance Reach – working in collaboration with law companies Cognia Law and Elevate.

North-East London law firm Thirsk Winton has upgraded and migrated its privately hosted iManage Work email and document management solution to the iManage Cloud with the help of Ascertus Limited, migrating nearly one million documents.

Anthony Barrett has joined Enable Business Solutions to head up their sales in the UK. Formely at LexisNexis,  Barrett is a well-known figure in the UK legal market and over the past 12 years has also held roles at nQueue Billback, Phoenix Business Solutions, Hubbard One and TimeKM.

No one is still using pen and paper to write contracts—so why are so many firms still using pen and paper to execute them? asks Haley Altman, general manager of transaction management at Litera.

In a big name US hire for law firm intelligence platform Foundation Software Group, Allens Matkins’ former chief information officer Adam Stock has joined as vice president of product strategy, we can reveal.

There was much excitement in the legal and business press on Monday 4 November because the Ministry of Justice has awarded £2m to a company that (not meaning to be rude) I’ve never heard of to support the development and use of technology in the UK legal sector.

Global law firm Reed Smith today (4 November) announced that it has become the first international law firm to convert to an Alternative Business Structure (ABS), after receiving approval from the UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority. 

In a big UK win for FileTrail, 300-lawyer agile working firm Keystone Law has selected GPS Policy Manager to automate records retention in compliance with GDPR.

UK  railway owner and manager Network Rail has selected Office 365-based legal matter management solution Custodian for Legal from Repstor in collaboration with Konexo Global, Eversheds Sutherland’s newly rebranded alternative legal and compliance services division.

In a move that will turn many if not most law firm IT directors and head of risk’s hair white, Microsoft is to open up end-user self-service purchases of its Power Platform products (Power BI, PowerApps and Flow), bypassing Office 365 admins.

The Legal IT Innovators Group has launched a research project to help its members gain insight into if and how key solutions provided by a number of third-party suppliers integrate with Microsoft O365, as Litig members continue to develop their cloud strategies.

I’ve changed my mind about whether lawyers should learn to code or not, and one of the main reasons is speaking to the attorney founder of Docassemble, Jonathan Pyle, who has developed a free, open source expert system for guided interviews and document assembly that can plug in external sources such as client credit reports in bankruptcy proceedings. Oh yes, and Radiant Law has just open sourced a library that integrates Docassemble to DocuSign, so that you can generate a document, including bulk generation, and send it straight out to the signatories without any additional steps.

If you’re not yet familiar with Crafty Counsel, it’s worth taking a look at their website, through which in-house counsel can now access online subscription-based structured learning and development via a series of videos recorded by specialists in the area. Legal L&D that isn’t like watching paint dry, yay.