Inhouse

Digital contract management platform Contractbook has raised €3.5m from a syndicate led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI Fund, together with Nordic VC-fund byFounders and a group of key angel investors. The investment is significant not just because of Google’s participation in a legal tech funding round – we understand this is a first – but because Gradient invests in and connects startups with Google’s resources, innovation and technical leadership in AI. This is the first time a Google backed VC has invested in Denmark.

Former Zapproved eDiscovery distinguished fellow Brad Harris has joined Hanzo as vice president of product, tasked with expanding the company’s product vision and developing data management solutions for its impressive array of corporate legal and compliance departments.

Legal engineering company SYKE has appointed Lewis Bretts to the role of chief strategy officer (CSO). Formerly a practising commercial barrister, Bretts has been consulting for SYKE since January 2019.

As we first revealed in the October Orange Rag, OnePlace’s founder Tim Smith has largely exited the client lifecycle management business following its acquisition by Intapp, as Intapp formally rebrands its entire business around the OnePlace name.

Email management provider ZERØ has hired time entry guru David Robinson from Intapp as its new vice president of product. This is an interesting hire not least because Robinson will be responsible for spearheading new time capture initiatives and expanding the existing ZERØ product.

Alternative legal services provider Integreon in October announced a new partnership with Seal Software, in what will start as a LIBOR repapering offering but is expected to expand far beyond that.  We spoke to Integreon’s CEO Bob Rowe and Integreon’s senior VP of contracts, compliance and commercial services, Jeff Catanzaro about their plans.

Transatlantic law firm Womble Bond Dickinson has rolled out a new knowledge management application using the iManage RAVN search engine to unlock greater insights into its people, financial centric data, and associated relationships.

In a figure that will prompt further questions over how…

I was recently on a panel to discuss the death of the billable hour and thought I’d share (with his permission!) a behind-the-scenes conversation with Hans Albers, general counsel and head of legal operations at Juniper Networks, who is also president of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

Automated legal timekeeping provider Ping has raised a $13.2 million Series A investment round led by Upfront Ventures. 

Last week I was honoured to open David Cowen’s London Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID) among fellow speakers such as BT’s head of legal vendor management Neil Willson; Accenture’s deputy general counsel Christina Demetriades; John Lewis Partnership’s director of legal  Hannah Hullah; and American Express’s director and counsel for legal services Emer Kelly, to name a few. Here are the highlights.

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.

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.

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.

The FT has – somewhat bravely, we’d suggest – selected a top 10 of legal business technologists and some of our favourite people are in there, although there are also people that we would have included who are missing. Congratulations to Alistair Maiden, chief executive and founder of Syke, on being selected as the winner!

In a double bill of legal tech news from Oxford University, a team from the University has been awarded £213,000 to study the LawTech “ecosystem” – including the career path of legal innovation heads  – as separately, it also launches an interdisciplinary Law and Computer Science course from this year, we can reveal.

Investment into UK legal technology startups reached £61m in 2018, more than doubling the £22m invested in the previous 12 months, according to the Legaltech Startup Report 2019, a report by Thomson Reuters and Legal Geek, which also claims that startups have already received more than that sum in 2019.

Catherine Bamford is joining Deloitte Legal as a director to lead on legal engineering for the business, effective from early November.

German headquartered decision automation software provider BRYTER has formally expanded…