This week we bring you news and updates from a raft of legal tech companies including BigHand, Wilson Legal Solutions, NextLaw Labs and many more.
Wins and deals
Dentons’ innovative legal tech development platform Nextlaw Labs has signed a partnership with Seedcamp, the first round fund for ambitious founders, to co-sponsor a global callout to early stage legal tech startups.
Selected startups will receive training, mentorship and investment from both Nextlaw Labs and Seedcamp.
Nextlaw Labs is a global collaborative innovation platform focused on developing, deploying, and investing in new technologies and processes to transform the practice of law around the world, while Seedcamp has invested in more than 210 companies across multiple sectors from around the world, including startups such as Transferwise, Property Partner, and legal tech company, Apperio. To date its portfolio has raised more than $380 million in further funding and 14 companies have been acquired by companies, including AirBnB, BBVA and GoPro.
“This is an amazing opportunity to expand our initiative to identify and connect with the hottest legal tech companies of the future at a very early stage with Europe’s leading early-stage fund,” said Dan Jansen, CEO of Nextlaw Labs.
Druva, a leader in converged data protection, and DISCO, a leading provider of software as a service eDiscovery solutions, have unveiled a new joint solution that they say cuts the overall time taken to conduct discovery in half.
The companies have expanded their respective data protection and discovery platforms to move the end-to-end eDiscovery process entirely to the public cloud.
“By moving the full eDiscovery process to the cloud, organizations gain a significant advantage to reducing collection and processing times, ultimately reducing the heavy cost burden and data risk so commonly faced today, said Neil Etheridge, vice president at DISCO.
Berwins Solicitors has selected BigHand Now to help create transparency of administrative tasks across the firm. This is part of an on-going commitment to deliver a high quality legal service for clients in Harrogate and Leeds.
BigHand Now is a task management solution that enables users to delegate tasks using the BigHand workflow and monitor them through to completion, providing complete transparency over the entire process.
It will be rolled out to the residential property team and the operational support team in June and then on a team-by-team basis covering all the departments across the firm.
InOutsource, a consulting and technology implementation services company, and FileTrail, a leading provider of records management and information management solutions, announce that Husch Blackwell has deployed FileTrail for physical records management.
Husch Blackwell is an industry-focused, full-service law firm with more than 575 attorneys in 16 offices in the United States and London.
“In evaluating records management solutions, it was important to find a product that would meet our needs to lower overhead costs, be easy to roll out, and provide an efficient process for users,” said Bret D. Chapman, chief information officer for Husch Blackwell. “FileTrail has gone beyond our expectations in these areas. Moreover, its innovative features set it apart from other records management software solutions on the market.”
Lex Mundi, the world’s leading network of independent law firms, and Hotshot, a startup bringing modern learning to the legal industry, have announced a joint collaboration to complement and strengthen professional development and training initiatives at Lex Mundi member firms.
Through the collaboration Hotshot will provide all Lex Mundi member firms and their lawyers access to short, practical videos and related training materials. The first topic available through the collaboration covers the basics of M&A practice. Other topics will include venture financing and accounting and finance for lawyers.
People moves
Consilio, a global leader in eDiscovery, document review and legal consulting services, has appointed John Ashley as managing director in forensics and expert services and Mike Haysley as managing director in law department management.
Prior to Consilio, Ashley was the executive vice president of consulting and forensics at Epiq Systems and Encore Discovery Solutions.
Haysley, meanwhile, was a director at Duff & Phelps, where he provided consulting services in the Legal Management Consulting group.
“Following Consilio’s string of acquisitions in 2015 and subsequent integration of Huron Legal, Proven Legal Technologies and Backstop, we have been seeking to further bolster our leadership team in key strategic areas,” said Andy Macdonald, chief executive officer at Consilio. “Their expertise in forensics and law department management consulting services will greatly benefit our global client base.”
QuisLex, a premier legal process outsourcing provider, has appointed Josh Rosenfeld as vice president, legal services to lead QuisLex’s new San Francisco office.
Prior to joining QuisLex, Rosenfeld spent 15 years at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, most recently as the chief practice officer for the finance and energy & infrastructure business units, comprising more than 300 lawyers globally. Previously, he practiced law as a litigation associate with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York Washington, D.C., and later with Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in Palo Alto.
“Josh brings substantial experience advising senior leaders on a range of operational, financial, and strategic issues. His expertise and skills will contribute significantly to providing innovative solutions to our expanding client base”, said Ram Vasudevan, CEO.
Wilson Legal Solutions, a leading global provider of consulting services and analytics software to law firms and professional services organizations, has appointed Alexander Klamkin as director of the company’s newly-formed systems and information security practice.
Klamkin, who was previously vice president of technology at Messina Quantitative Research, is an IT executive with more than 15 years of experience as a consultant focused primarily on the legal IT industry.
At Wilson Legal Solutions, he is building and leading the company’s systems and information security practice, which is focused on helping firms plan and support systems infrastructure, deploy highly available systems, implement disaster recovery, enforce security management to both systems and data, audit information systems, and provide performance improvement recommendations.
Encompass Corporation, a technology solutions provider to financial services, legal professional and insolvency and corporate recovery firms, has made a number of significant appointments to its team, bringing the total number of staff to 32 in the UK.
In early 2015 Encompass, which was founded in Australia in 2011 and launched in the UK in 2015, employed just two software developers at its Glasgow headquarters. Since then, the business has grown considerably with recent hires including the appointment of Scott Goodsir Smyth to bolster the firm’s customer success team. Goodsir Smyth is responsible for establishing and growing a new team in Glasgow, where he has already recruited a customer success specialist from the financial services sector. He was previously account manager at IRW Systems.
Wayne Johnson, founder and CEO at Encompass, said: “Since the company’s inception, we are delighted to report that the business has grown from strength to strength, and this is reflected in the calibre of the staff we are recruiting.
Product launches
Morae Legal, an end-to-end legal consulting and solutions provider, has launched INCOMPASS, its transformational information and discovery management service.
By applying machine-learning and other analytic tools to the source system of origin ‒ behind the company’s firewall or in its own cloud-based environment ‒ INCOMPASS extends analytic capabilities typically applied in the discovery process upstream, solving challenges faced in both information governance and discovery and improving the quality of information.
INCOMPASS integrates discovery with information management ‒ what is frequently referred to as the “left side” of the EDRM ‒ and transforms the linear steps of typical discovery processes into an integrated and dynamic workflow.
Xact Data Discovery, a leading international provider of eDiscovery, data management and managed review services for law firms and corporations, has launched a new monthly webinar series as part of the company’s overall commitment to educating customers and prospects. The first webinar in the program, being held June 22, will focus on mobile device forensics.
Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. has announced the launch of cost recovery solutions and document scanning and routing technology via vendor partner nQueue for the legal market and other professional services firms.
Law firms typically recover costs from their clients for copies, prints and scans. nQueue’s software can be embedded into a Konica Minolta bizhub (or attached via a tablet) to make it easier for firms to track, control and recover these costs. The software integrates with leading time-and-billing systems and also makes document scanning and routing easier.
“This solution is designed to streamline data input and improve accuracy of data capture while minimizing the number of steps by end-users,” said Kevin Kern, senior vice president, business intelligence services and product planning, Konica Minolta Business Solutions, USA, Inc.
DocsCorp has announced a new release of its document comparison tool compareDocs, which enables users to compare two versions of a document for changes. The 4.2 U2 release now supports the recently-released NetDocuments ndOffice; iManage Work 9.3 (64-bit); and Microsoft Office 2010, 2013, and 2016 (64-bit).
Leonard Johnson, VP of product at NetDocuments, said, “We’re thrilled to see technology partners like DocsCorp continue to improve and evolve the integrations with NetDocuments’ cloud-based services. ndOffice is a key component to NetDocuments’ focus on end-user productivity and user experience, which is only improved with third party integrations like compareDocs.”
Industry news
A new legal industry award has been created to recognise the fastest growing law firms in the United States. The inaugural Law Firm 500 award program is an entirely new award that will celebrate high-velocity law firms – that is the 500 fastest growing firms by revenue. The award program is open for application to U.S. law firms of all sizes and winners are determined solely on the percentage of growth over a three-year period.
“This this award was clearly inspired by the Inc. magazine annual recognition of the fastest growing private companies in the country,” said RJon Robins, a legal industry veteran and proponent of the Law Firm 500. “It’s important because experience suggests there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of fast growing law firms that largely go unrecognized under existing law firm award programs.”
Applicants must have generated at least $50,000 in revenue in 2012; have generated at least $500,000 in revenue in 2015; and be an independent for profit law firm based in the U.S.
UBIC, a leading provider of global eDiscovery support and big-data analysis services, announced today that the company will feature its Business Intelligence Solution for big data in eDiscovery at the Legaltech West Coast conference on June 13-14, 2016 in San Francisco.
UBIC’s TRUST Business Intelligence Portal solution is a client portal powered by market-leading business intelligence (BI) technology. The TRUST portal summarizes volumes of data from the Relativity eDiscovery platform, the Relativity User Activity and Status function, and financial data repositories. It delivers clear visual analytics reflecting metrics on project status, user/service breakdown and legal spend to help users make more informed decisions, save time and money, and have better outcomes.
“Big data is a double-edged sword for most companies, in that it offers business opportunities but risk as well,” said Shamir Colloff, CTO at UBIC. “The UBIC approach leverages business intelligence to manage vast stores of structured and unstructured data. This allows organizations to gain insight into business trends, make responsible data-driven decisions, and reduce cost and risk in eDiscovery projects.”
HotDocs, a leading provider of document automation technology, has today announced that Paul Orovan of Satmetrix will provide the keynote address at the upcoming HotDocs User Group (HUG) meeting.
Orovan is the Senior Director of Enterprise Success at Net Promoter company Satmetrix and has worked within the customer experience and loyalty field for 15 years. His talk will focus on managing the customer experience in the professional services sector and will cover how documentation can drive good or bad experience, using NPS to manage client accounts and the future of customer experience management.