UK and EMEA
Relativity announced at Relativity Fest London that its cloud platform RelativityOne and its communication surveillance platform Relativity Trace will be available in Ireland and the United Arab Emirates in Q3. By the end of the year RelativityOne will be available in 13 geographies.
At last year’s Relativity Fest London, the company announced RelativityOne would be hosted in Germany and Switzerland and this year Relativity said it will further strengthen its EMEA presence with plans to add a team in Germany. We’re told that the global expansion coincides with RelativityOne’s increased usage in the region. Since Relativity Fest London 2020, data under management in EMEA grew 98% and in March RelativityOne reached peak daily users in the region.
“As Relativity continues to grow globally, we’re committed to driving our EMEA presence forward with the expansion of our RelativityOne footprint and addition of our new Germany team, who will bring unmatched expertise on local market requirements and ultimately best serve our customers’ unique needs,” said Steve Couling, managing director and vice president of sales at Relativity. “With increased importance placed on global availability, we continue to take steps to ensure customers of all types around the world can grow and operate effectively.”
RelativityOne client BDO recently leveraged the datacenter in Germany to cement BDO Germany as the hub of their EMEA operations.
Innovation and IP management technology provider Anaqua this week acquired IP services company Actio IP from Acapo AS.
Anaqua, which recently acquired SeeUnity, says it will invest significantly in the integration of the services with Anaqua’s IP management software and payment services. It is hoped that Actio IP, which also offers IP renewals, will add incremental volume to Anaqua’s existing payments business.
“Both companies share a deep commitment to leveraging technology to optimize the IP workflow process,” said Christine Jennings, President of Anaqua Services, who will lead the new business unit. “We believe this combination will enhance the customer experience by pairing our existing payments business with another high-quality service that can be seamlessly-integrated with our software platforms and other offerings.”
Commercial and business law specialist, Owen White, has appointed Ascertus Limited to implement iManage Work as the firm’s document and email management system in the iManage Cloud. With flexible and remote working expected to become the norm, Ascertus will implement the solution to provide a single repository for emails and documents in structured, matter-specific workspaces, facilitating collaboration and delivering productivity gains to Owen White’s 35 plus lawyers. Ascertus provides document and information lifecycle management solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments across the UK and Europe.
Elaborating on the business requirement for a document and email management system, Jane Masih, managing director at Owen White, says, “Covid has speeded up our move to a best practice approach to document and email management and the cloud. During lock down, it became clear that with everyone working remotely, we needed a more efficient way to manage our email traffic and the attachments contained within them so that teams had visibility of the most current matter-related documents. iManage will save us huge amounts of time in sorting, filing and finding documents and enable effortless information sharing. The flexibility of the system will translate into the firm better meeting client and staff needs.”
Legal services cloud provider CTS has been selected by North West England-based firm AFG LAW to provide their managed cloud solution and fully managed support wrap-around service.
Matthew Davidson, head of finance at AFG LAW, says, “As the contract with our previous managed service provider was coming to an end, we recognised the need for us to build a partnership with a legal sector specialist as we moved forward. It became evident to us that CTS’ comprehensive understanding of our chosen applications, and close relationships with leading legal technology providers, would be truly invaluable to us in achieving our future goals”.
Sales director of CTS, Aaron Naisbitt explains: “CTS focus only on IT services for law firms and chambers, meaning we understand their needs and cater our services around the unique requirements of legal sector firms and their users. As a legal sector specialist, we work closely with third-party legal software providers and undergo rigorous training, enabling us to deliver the best strategic and technical advice to clients”.
More information about both firms can be found at www.cts.co.uk and www.afglaw.co.uk
Beeston Shenton Solicitors has chosen PAY AS YOU GO software from Zylpha to prepare electronic court and client document bundles. With online files now accepted by Courts in England and Wales, the hunt was on to identify the best solution. Beeston Shenton says it chose Zylpha as it was both the most flexible solution and as it was the clear market leader.
Zylpha can be accessed from a dashboard-like screen, which makes it easy to use when creating even the largest bundles. The system’s single-view digital approach streamlines and simplifies the arrangement and pagination of documents, saving time and complexity.
Commenting on the new system Beeston Shenton’s Associate Family Solicitor Eleanor Adams commented, “Zylpha made an excellent business case for a move to electronic bundling on a PAY AS YOU GO basis. The software will have an extremely positive impact, whilst allowing Beeston Shenton to maintain the high standards our clients expect.”
No code software provider Neota Logic and legal ops and law firm management consultancy Karta Legal have announced a new partnership to streamline legal business processes through no-code automation.
Neota’s no-code platform provides professionals with easy-to-use development tools for the intelligent automation of processes, expertise and documentation.
Karta Legal partners with vetted legal technology vendors to help law firms and legal departments innovate, not only by acquiring new technology but also by training their teams and fixing inefficient processes.
Lourdes Fuentes Slater, CEO and founder at Karta Legal, commented, “The synergy between Neota and Karta Legal is clear. Process automation is top of mind for those at the forefront of legal innovation. We believe that all processes, before becoming automated, need to be designed and mapped out to reduce waste and increase efficiencies. By working together, Neota and Karta Legal bring the best of business to the practice of law”.
Baskerville Drummond has released a case study outlining why Capital Law selected Linetime to replace the incumbent ‘end of life’ system. The full case study can be downloaded here with a synopsis following:
As part of an on-going IT renewal program and their current system moving to ‘end of life’, Capital Law employed the services of Baskerville Drummond.
Capital Law ultimately selected Linetime, seeing a good fit in terms of functionality, value and vendor style.
Download the full case study
BigHand has announced the latest developments to its resource management tool for law firms.
The tool allows law firms to identify resources, forecast utilization, manage workloads and add structure to career development for lawyers. BigHand has made significant enhancements to the UI/UX, providing a more intuitive structure to drive efficiency and engagement with all end users, as well as building additional data feeds into the API for greater automation and customisable fields.
The new features include a dedicated partner dashboard, and enhancements to workbook sharing and management across the entire system, which provide greater visibility of legal work allocation across the firm, to drive fair and equitable distribution of work.
And before we move on to North American news, it is worth noting that Nokia’s legal team has completed its first scorecard to assess law firm progress on equity, inclusion and diversity and partnership opportunities.
Nokia’s legal and compliance team will conduct quarterly and annual assessments of its key panel firms globally.
Eversheds Sutherland, Roschier, Bird & Bird, Quinn Emanuel, McKool Smith, and Alston & Bird are the first group of law firms to take part in the new initiative.
The quantitative and qualitative assessments will score organizations based on several criteria including recruitment policies, equality of pay, the availability of mentoring and pro bono initiatives, the percentage of billable work carried out by employees from different backgrounds, engagement with D&I organizations, and the presence of a dedicated E, I&D team.
NORTH AMERICA
Frontline Managed Services (formerly Intellliteach) has expanded into Hawaii with a new contact center in Honolulu to support its 24/7 IT Help Desk service for law firms worldwide. With this new location, the help desk is now staffed by U.S.-based support personnel from the Eastern Time Zone to the Hawaiian Time Zone, providing around-the-clock response.
The Honolulu center, which aims to onboard 20 specialists in full-time positions, also serves as a bridge to Frontline Managed Services’ growing operations in Goa and Hyderabad, India.
“Growth, innovation and client service are part of our company’s DNA as we strive for continuous improvement to how we deliver value for our law firm clients around the world,” said Seelin Naidoo, CEO of Frontline Managed Services. “This expansion allows us to continue providing high-level support during periods where IT request volumes can be unpredictable as we serve the late-night legal workforce in the continental U.S. and prepare for the opening of markets in Asia. In addition to the service upgrade from the talented workforce in Honolulu, we are also excited for the opportunity to join the Honolulu community as we anticipate continued growth at this new contact center.”
Text IQ, a Top 100 AI company helping organizations manage and mitigate risks in their data, has announced the launch of Text IQ for Privacy, a which identifies and categorizes personal and sensitive information hidden in the exploding volume of enterprise data.
Text IQ for Privacy will enable enterprises to proactively manage personal information, particularly hard-to-find sensitive information which otherwise remains hidden in large unstructured data sets.
It automatically identifies and categorizes personal and sensitive information from both structured and unstructured sources, enabling redaction and deduplication before presenting the findings for human review.
“What sets us apart is the ability of Text IQ for Privacy to accurately identify personal and sensitive data equally well from structured and unstructured sources,” said Apoorv Agarwal, Text IQ’s co-founder and CEO. “Most solutions available now can find relevant data from within structured sources. But finding it from within unstructured sources — 80% of today’s enterprise data — is a much higher hill to climb. Another exceptional feature is the speed. We empower companies to move at the velocity they need when responding to data requests and breaches.”
NetDocuments has announced unprecedented growth in Q1 2021 (1Q21), continuing its record setting sales momentum. 1Q21 was a record first quarter for new customer acquisition representing 27% growth over the previous largest Q1, and the biggest non-Q4 quarter on record. This translates to 196% bookings growth year- over-year (YoY) vs. 1Q20, and 337% growth in new bookings from existing customers compared to the same quarter last year.
Overall, NetDocuments added more than two new customers per day in 2020 and continued that trend in Q121, and now includes over 3,150 customers worldwide. Q1 new customers represent a wide variety of industries including legal, biotech, construction, financial, food & beverage, health care, real estate, utilities, and wealth management. In addition to North American sales, NetDocuments EMEA recorded a 168% new customer increase in Q121 compared to 2020, as well as 40% Q121 vs. Q120 growth in APAC.
AXDRAFT, a document automation software company, has released a fully self-service solution suite.
85% of legal agreements are still subject to a lawyer’s review, and only 12% of companies have embraced automation solutions to better manage in-house resources. QuickDocs can fully automate the workflows for processing NDAs, DPAs, sales agreements, or requests for SOC-2 reports.
Yuriy Zaremba, CEO of AXDRAFT said: “When I was a lawyer, I hated getting distracted from my main task, and that’s what happens when you have to review a lot of simple contracts. When we launched AXDRAFT for Slack, we managed to completely automate their DPA workflow. They told us it was a game-changer for their team. I realized how much potential there is in self-service automation. Lawyers need to fall back in love with their jobs, QuickDocs makes this possible.”
And Alt Legal, Inc., an IP docketing software company, and global analytics company Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT) this week announced a partnership to integrate CompuMark international trademark data into the Alt Legal platform. Through this alliance, users of Alt Legal will gain access to CompuMark and its 186 trademark databases, covering all jurisdictions in the world.
“Clients have long viewed Alt Legal as the premier docketing platform for US-centric portfolios and have been asking us to broaden our international reach,” said Nehal Madhani, Alt Legal’s CEO. “With our direct connections to the USPTO and CIPO and now our international integration for all remaining jurisdictions, we are answering that call,” continued Madhani. “We are thrilled to take the reputation we’ve built around making trademark professionals’ lives easier through automation, design, and support and combine it with CompuMark™ and its best-in-class international trademark data for complete international portfolio management.”
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