Startup Corner

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.

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…

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.

German headquartered decision automation software provider BRYTER has formally expanded…

The September Orange Rag is out now with all the…

The Technology, Access to Justice and the Rule of Law report is out today (16 September) following The Law Society’s research into whether technology is the key to improving access to law, justice and rights. Here are the key findings.

At #ILTACON19 the Legal IT Insider team were run off our feet with product demos and industry updates. Here industry analyst and consultant Neil Cameron takes an invaluable in-depth look at automatic email management solution Zero.

Slater & Gordon says it is the first legal services client of digital workplace provider Unily: an intranet as a service based on the Microsoft Azure platform.

Thanks to a bank holiday in the UK (and the fact it’s hard to type in a canoe) there will be a slight pause in Legal IT Insider’s own summation of ILTA 2019 but this round up from Ron Friedmann accords with many of our thoughts and experiences.

BPP Law School’s head of development Adam Curphey has joined Reed Smith as its innovation engagement manager.

As we slide into the weekend, here’s a quote to provide food for thought about using technology to win business in eDiscovery!

In a major new release for Juro, its contract collaboration platform can now read uploaded PDF contracts in order to extract and store key data within the platform.

Global disputes law firm HFW has announced a development partnership with litigation analytics start-up Solomonic to “combine Solomonic’s data with our experience and expertise as litigators.”

ContractPodAi has secured a $55 million Series B investment round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from the company’s Series A backer, Eagle Proprietary Investments. The $55m investment represents Europe’s largest legaltech Series B fundraise (and, apparently, the largest Series B round for any CLM provider globally.) We speak to co-founder and CEO Sarvarth Misra about the investment.

Litigation data and analytics startup Solomonic was recently rolled out by Herbert Smith Freehills across its UK disputes team and they are working closely with Stewarts Law. Don’t know much about Solomonic yet? You do now.

Digital transformation – nothing short of “harnessing the power of digital technology to rethink every aspect of the organisation” (according to McKinsey) – is the hottest of hot topics, says Autto’s co-founder Max Cole. Recently, the government launched a grant competition – Transforming Accountancy, Insurance and Legal Services (TAILS) – aimed at digital transformation in the professional services arena, and Autto was one of the winners. But adopting technology without fully and clearly understanding what it is going to solve is a hiding to nothing, he says.

Harvard Business School has made a rare new case study out of online legal marketplace Lexoo for its MBA program, in which students pore over the real life business decisions made by Lexoo co-founders Daniel Van Binsbergen and Chris O’Sullivan as the basis of discussion in its Managing Service Operations (MSO) course.

As CIOs from the world’s biggest law firms heatedly debated…

Silicon Valley-based technology specialist Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has launched legaltech start-up SixFifty. The company’s first product will tackle new consumer data privacy regulation, the California Consumer Protection Act, which comes into force in 2020. The product will go live this Spring. Amy Carroll spoke to Wilson Sonsini’s managing partner Doug Clark and SixFifty president Kimball Parker.

After what is described as “a solid and detailed process”, Benelux-based international law firm NautaDutilh has swapped out its in-house AS/400 PMS with Aderant Expert.