Catch up on the latest legal tech deals from the UK, North and South America and APAC. We also bring you senior industry appointments in North America and Europe.
Wins and deals
UK
Berkshire law firm Gardner Leader is adopting SaaS legal pricing platform Virtual Pricing Director, which will integrate with its P4W practice management system.
VPD, which was conceived of and built over four years by UK cost consultancy Burcher Jennings and legal pricing experts Validatum, integrates with any of the major practice management systems including Elite 3E, Aderant and Fulcrum/SAP.
Derek Rogers, managing partner at Gardner Leader said: “VPD is a very impressive solution to a business-critical challenge with which all of us in the profession have been grappling for years.
“Aside from bringing increased commercial rigour to our operations, VPD will give us the ability to better address the needs and expectations of our clients particularly around price transparency, budgetary certainty, and better cost communication throughout the life of a matter.
“Seamless integration with our practice management system, P4W was a critical requirement and that has been achieved. The team at VPD have been very supportive, and the personal attention throughout has made this project much smoother than we might have expected.”
Ascertus, a leading provider of document and information lifecycle management solutions, has become a reseller partner for no-code, SaaS document generation, assembly, and workflow automation platform Kim.
By partnering with Kim, Ascertus, which is one of iManage’s most successful partners in Europe, will be able to offer its clients access to innovative document automation, intelligent data capture and smart integrations that streamline document creation and management processes, increase efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
Commenting on the partnership, Roy Russell, CEO of Ascertus Limited said, “Kim is a great addition to our portfolio and a natural fit. As businesses look for ways to increase efficiency and streamline their operations across dispersed environments, document automation has become an essential tool. Kim’s software is at the forefront of this technology, and we are excited to offer our clients access to this powerful tool.”
South America
CQS/FV Advogados, the leading Brazil media & entertainment law firm, has selected Nexl’s no-data entry CRM and revenue operations platform.
CQS/FV say that they began their CRM search process seeking to further enhance their operations and drive growth. In Nexl, they found a partner and platform that reliably captured the firm’s entire client relationship history. CQS/FV also found Nexl to be an easy-to-use platform, enabling both attorneys and business teams to collaborate on business development.
CQS/FV will use Nexl’s platform to track client opportunities and referrals, manage projects and tasks, and streamline communication across the firm. By centralising all client and prospect data in one place, CQS/FV aims to improve its ability to identify new business opportunities and deliver better client outcomes.
“Nexl’s platform is designed to help law firms work more efficiently and effectively,” said Lucas Morado, legal manager at CQS/FV. “We’re confident that by leveraging this powerful CRM tool, we can achieve even greater success for our clients and further our firm-wide goals.”
This is the latest in a series of US wins for Nexl, following Olivares, Iberbrand and Von Wobeser y Sierra in Mexico,
North America
Alternative legal services provider Factor and AI-powered contract review platform LegalSifter have announced a strategic alliance. As part of the agreement, Factor will introduce LegalSifter Review tool into its Integrated Contracting Platform, the unified set of capabilities underpinning the company’s scaled managed contracting services.
Factor negotiators will use LegalSifter Review to speed handling of counterparty contractual provisions and mark-up based on client-specific legal guidance, even when working from third-party paper. In addition, Factor will use LegalSifter to streamline playbook creation and maintenance, enabling greater consistency and integration across each client’s environment.
“AI holds great promise to boost the ability of lawyers and others to negotiate better contracts in a more standardised way,” said Jessica Block, executive vice president of market solutions at Factor. “We see opportunities for multiple, high-impact use cases as we evolve Factor’s Integrated Contracting Platform, ranging from smart legal front-door and no-touch/low touch capabilities to concierge-assisted contracting to full-service, lawyer-led contracting negotiations.”
National US law firm Dykema this week announced that it is an early adopter of CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant developed by Casetext and powered by OpenAI’s most advanced language model, GPT-4.
“We strive to be innovative, trusted advisors to our clients, and CoCounsel will help us deliver on that objective,” said Len Wolfe, Dykema’s chair and CEO.
CoCounsel gives Dykema attorneys the ability to speed up substantive tasks such as reviewing millions of documents, conducting legal research, searching entire databases, preparing depositions, analyzing contracts compliance, summarizing complex documents, and extracting contract data.
Before launching CoCounsel, Casetext enabled a dedicated team of experienced litigation and transactional attorneys to collaborate with AI engineers to test every legal skill on the platform thousands of times, spending nearly 4,000 hours training and fine-tuning output based on more than 30,000 legal queries.
“At Dykema, we place heavy emphasis on implementing technology that enables us to deliver exceptional results and service to our clients. CoCounsel can empower our attorneys to do exactly that with speed and precision,” said Ed Empamano, Dykema’s chief information officer.
Myka Hopgood, Dykema’s senior director for strategic legal innovation, played a key role in onboarding and deploying CoCounsel to the firm.
Movers and Shakers
North America
FTI Consulting, Inc. has appointed Chase D’Agostino as a managing director in the contract solutions offering within the firm’s technology segment.
Formerly VP & solution lead for contracts at UnitedLex, D’Agostino, who is based in New York, is a contract solutions expert. He designs and delivers solutions that support clients in extracting data and insights from their contracts to deliver specific outcomes and objectives. Examples include updating contracts in the face of changing requirements due to GDPR, CCPA, Brexit, IBOR transition and other events, as well as completing notice, consent, termination and amendment processes during pre-transaction due diligence, post-transaction integrations and internal reorganisations.
D’Agostino also helps clients assess compliance across contract portfolios against company risk standards and tolerances, create contract repositories that enable business decision making, and implement processes that support realisation of value from contracts.
“Legal department leaders are more focused than ever before on unlocking value from their contracts and using contract data to inform business decisions,” said Sophie Ross, global chief executive officer of FTI Technology. “Our contract solutions experts have a long history of supporting clients with a wide range of contract challenges and applying analytics and artificial intelligence to derive insights from their agreements. Chase is a deeply experienced specialist in this arena, and he will be instrumental in enhancing our Contract Solutions offerings.”
Europe
Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory has appointed Rimco Spanjer as vice president and managing director of LR Benelux, effective August 1, 2023. Spanjer, who joins from Dutch educational publisher Malmberg, succeeds Bas Kniphorst, who has been promoted to executive vice president and managing director for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting (TAA) Europe.
Martin O’Malley, CEO of Wolters Kluwer LR commented: “Our Benelux business unit has been at the forefront of our company’s transition to being the technology company that it is today, supporting legal professionals with the software and tools that they need to work more efficiently and make better decisions. Rimco has thorough knowledge of our company, people, products, and customers. Combined with his recent accomplishments as Malmberg’s CEO, we’re confident that he will be an asset to our division and Wolters Kluwer as a whole.”
Spanjer added: “I started my career at Wolters Kluwer more than 20 years ago, and I’m excited to rejoin the company. I’m fully committed to further developing the strong Benelux business unit that Bas has built with his excellent team within Legal & Regulatory, and to further enhancing our digital offering to customers. We will continue to meet and exceed our customers’ evolving needs in increasingly complex and fast-changing environments.”