On the second full day of ILTACON there have been multiple product announcements and we’re here to keep you up to date with all of them, as well as some of the biggest stories of the last couple of days. For those of you attending ILTA, these companies are onsite if you want to meet with them to find out more. We’ll update the article during the day.
Product releases
dealcloser today (23 August) announced that it is launching Zero Effort Deals. The new release features document automation to generate documents from built-in templates. Where there are changes, users can update the entire deal instantly.
Founder and CEO, Amir Reshef said: “I’m beyond thrilled to announce the launch of Zero Effort Deals powered by Document Automation- a feature I’ve wanted to see in dealcloser for some time. With this new version of dealcloser, it completes the suite of tools that legal professionals need to transform the way they work, with everything in one seamless place.”
Afinety, a managed cloud and IT services provider for law firms, officially launched its new ACP 2.0 hosted desktop workspace today. The new solution is optimized for an increasingly hybrid workforce, offering enhanced security, tight integration with modern collaboration tools, and optimized performance across essential legal software applications like iManage, Worldox, ProLaw and more.
ACP 2.0 is powered by leading public cloud platforms including AWS and Citrix Cloud and is specifically optimized for law firms. Since law firms leverage their desktop solutions to generate their work product – including documents and correspondence – seamless integration of the legal desktop is core to end-user productivity.
“We at Afinety are incredibly proud to launch ACP 2.0 which provides a fully integrated, secure, and user-friendly solution for our law firm clients,” said Ed Grubb, vice president of legal services at Afinety.
“Some clients are switching over to ACP 2.0 due to its enhancements, but Afinety’s original ACP 1.0 hosted desktop based on Amazon Web Services and private hosted cloud options are still widely used and will continually be enhanced and supported as well. Afinety stays abreast of the latest technology advances and security protections, and we are continually improving our offerings to benefit our clients.”
Electronic court notice management vendor ECFX has released a number of developments to ECFX Notice, including new special handling functions (including missing case reports and manual processing of notices for unknown cases); new customisation functions; and support for both new case management and document management systems based on clients’ chosen solution.
ECFX, founded by Dan O’Day in 2019, now counts DLA Piper and Dentons among its clients.
Here are the other highlights:
BigHand acquires Digitory Legal
BigHand has acquired 2015-founded cost analytics vendor Digitory Legal, which enables law firms to analyse their billing narratives to shape future pricing and proposals. It also enables firms to understand and improve the diversity, equity and inclusion levels on a matter, and helps corporate legal teams unpick pricing in RFPs and panel processes using its UTBMS+ coding methodology.
Digitory’s founder and chief executive, Catherine Krow, has joined BigHand as managing director of diversity and impact analytics. Her three-strong team, based in San Francisco but working remotely, are all joining BigHand, which has officially partnered with Digitory since April 2021.
Krow is a former litigation attorney who spent 17 years at Orrick, 12 of which were as a partner. She joins BigHand effective as of today (22 August), and BigHand’s managing director of people productivity, Eric Wangler said that Digitory’s technology will, going forward, integrate both with its pricing and task management offerings.
Whereas BigHand Resource Management, which stems from its acquisition of Mason & Cook, surfaces at a high level what fee-earners are working on, Digitory does a deeper dive in terms of DEI.
Krow said: “We recently received an award from CLOC [Corporate Legal Operations Consortium] and that had a lot to do with our work in DEI. Clients really want not just quantitative but qualitative analysis around who is doing what, and they are pushing more onto law firms, who are working hard to get ahead of it.”
LexFusion selects DISCO to join its collective
Legal technology cooperative LexFusion announced today that it has selected DISCO as its eDiscovery partner. LexFusion goes through its own selection process to choose preferred vendors across mature and maturing categories of legal technology.
“DISCO stands apart in empowering legal teams to filter out the noise, focus faster on what matters, and proceed with the confidence that they have a complete picture,” said Joe Borstein, LexFusion’s chief executive officer.
He added: “As legal professionals scale service-delivery capabilities, taking full advantage of the latest advances in technology is foundational. We must embrace new tools as we collectively confront a new wave of litigation, investigations, and information governance challenges in an increasingly complex landscape that is once again making ediscovery a focal point for meeting the legal needs of the enterprise.
“DISCO stands apart in empowering legal teams to filter out the noise, focus faster on what matters, and proceed with the confidence that they have a complete picture.”