Top Industry Updates in legal Tech: Missed Highlights from AL

The legal technology landscape is constantly evolving, and as such, there were several significant news stories that AL didn’t cover last week. The reason? Well, it was a busy time in New York! Engaging with people, exploring the vibrant streets, and seeking inspiration via chance encounters on the mesmerizing island of Manhattan proved a delightful distraction.

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LexisNexis Unveils Innovative Voice AI Assistant

In a groundbreaking move, LexisNexis has introduced its voice AI assistant, which operates as part of their Protégé platform. This tool enables users to engage in a more natural interaction by using spoken language, effectively eliminating the need for manual prompts while conducting various legal tasks.

According to the company, this ‘multi-modal experience’ offers users enhanced workflow flexibility, and much more insight will become available regarding voice functionality soon.

Sean Fitzpatrick, the CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, shared: “We aim to increasingly simplify collaboration for our customers with LexisNexis AI solutions to generate exceptional legal work. By launching the legal industry’s first personalized AI voice assistant, we leverage our profound technological expertise to make human-AI interaction more intuitive, productive, and ultimately beneficial, leading each customer toward better outcomes.”

LexisNexis has also upgraded its agentic capabilities:

• Users can now pose legal inquiries, initiate drafting tasks, and ask for case law summaries using only voice commands.

Additionally, Lexis’s advanced AI features incorporate:

• The Planner Agent, which adeptly breaks down complex legal questions into manageable steps to yield more thorough responses,
• An Interactive Agent that allows users to adapt the agent’s plan, ensuring tailored results, as well as
• A Self-Reflection Agent that is capable of self-evaluating and refining its outputs, resulting in superior document drafting quality.

Although it’s not named HAL, should you ask it nicely, perhaps it will allow you to address it that way?

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Opus 2 Introduces AI Workbench for Enhanced legal Strategy

Opus 2 has unveiled its new AI Workbench, a tool specifically designed to empower lawyers and litigation teams to swiftly develop case strategies. Using generative AI functions, this platform allows for the analysis, summarization, and querying of sets of legal documents effectively.

legal professionals have the added advantage of engaging in a chat with the AI, swiftly uncovering deeper insights and organizing pertinent facts and details to refine their strategy more expediently.

Liza Pestillos-Ocat, Senior Vice President of Global Client Success, remarked: “By collaborating closely with our clients, our goal was to develop an intuitive, AI-driven workspace that allows legal professionals to locate evidence, build persuasive arguments, and extract insights from various case documents with unrivaled speed and accuracy. AI Workbench does precisely that by seamlessly integrating the capabilities of our award-winning case management software with the productivity advantages offered by generative AI.”

Upon accessing AI Workbench, users gain:

• A comprehensive view of all individuals, events, organizations, and legal topics associated with a set of case documents. They can review AI-produced summaries and connect relevant facts directly to their chronology, witness lists, and existing case management workflows within Opus 2. Moreover, 
• Users have the ability to converse with the query tool in AI Workbench in everyday language, allowing for the extraction of deeper insights that unveil important details, patterns, and conclusions from the case materials.

For further details on Opus 2, click here.

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iManage Enhances User Experience with New AI Features

Launched in 2024, the ‘Ask iManage’ initiative introduces an AI-powered assistant designed to simplify users’ interactions with innovative technology. The latest updates include a guided actions interface, enabling users to benefit from generative AI without needing extensive expertise in creating prompts. Some of the guided actions currently available include:

• Overview: Quickly review the main content points.
• Extract: Capture specific text and data points from documents.
• Summarize: Generate succinct summaries addressing particular topics within content.
• Analyze: Evaluate whether the content meets specified requirements.

Additionally, Ask iManage supports multi-document processing; it allows guided actions to be performed on multiple documents at once. This feature is invaluable for activities such as due diligence, compliance reviews, and remediation projects, as highlighted by the firm.

A newly implemented question library permits users to browse a carefully curated set of prompts, which can be saved, customized, and reused for individual or team purposes, further optimizing efficiency in legal processes.

Discover more about iManage here.

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Simmons & Simmons and the Evolution of Percy AI

Simmons & Simmons has developed Percy, their Generative AI platform, and through collaboration with Microsoft, they have announced ambitious plans for its next iteration, Percy 3.0. The intention is to transform Percy into a fully-featured Generative AI platform that includes a collaborative space for lawyers where they can request agents to execute complex tasks, according to Drew Winlaw, Global LLM Lead at the firm.

Winlaw noted the firm’s initial focus on enhancing AI literacy within their workforce, which has evolved to include developing innovative services aimed at creating new income streams in anticipation of client adoption of AI tools.

Additionally, the firm is in collaboration with Microsoft to develop a legal inference engine set to enhance capabilities for specialized divisions. Percy’s unique LLM-driven engine is designed to produce outputs surpassing traditional LLM methodology and is under continuous improvement to adapt to evolving legal demands.

By the way, the name Percy holds significance: it refers to one of the twin brothers who founded the firm and also mirrors the legendary Percival—or Parsifal—a knight who sought the Holy Grail, a fitting metaphor considering their aspirations to achieve peak performance with AI.

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Legora Expands Footprint into the United States

Sweden-based Legora has officially entered the American market by opening an office in New York and forming a strategic alliance with the US law firm Goodwin.

CEO Max Junestrand expressed excitement about Legora’s expansion, noting: “The US represents the key market for pioneering legal technology innovations. We are genuinely thrilled to establish our presence in North America and collaborate with the forward-thinking lawyers at Goodwin. In this rapidly changing landscape, firms like Goodwin will set benchmarks for innovation to deliver exceptional client service.”

Meanwhile, Mary O’Carroll (formerly of CLOC fame), now Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin, added, “Our joint efforts with Legora enable us to play an active role in shaping AI-driven solutions that create significant impacts, helping our lawyers to work smarter and ensuring even better outcomes for our clients.”

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Haystack ID Launches Generative AI Powered Case Insight

Haystack ID has announced the rollout of Core Intelligence AI ‘Case Insight’, a cutting-edge generative AI-powered intelligence engine aimed at revolutionizing how legal and investigative teams analyze case data. This recent addition to HaystackID’s expanding Core Intelligence AI portfolio promises to deliver faster and more accurate insights, empowering professionals to evaluate case strengths, identify critical issues, and act on pivotal evidence in a matter of days versus weeks.

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Conclusion

As shown, significant advancements in legal technology are rapidly transforming the legal landscape. Tools like AI legalese decoder can profoundly assist legal professionals in navigating these changes. By simplifying the interpretation of complex legal language, these tools enhance understanding and communication, allowing lawyers to better serve their clients and utilize new technologies effectively.

That’s it for now, folks! AL will resume regular news and views publishing soon.

[ Main image: Lexis Voice – note the reference to Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey 🙂 ]

“HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Dave: What’s the problem?”

“HAL: I think you know what the problem is.”