Robert Ambrogi Blog
Last week brought a flurry of legal technology news, thanks to the first in-person Legalweek conference in two years. Yesterday, in the first of two posts, I began a round up the week’s notable announcements. Here is the rest of my round-up.
Reveal Releases Major Enhancement of its Platform
Reveal, a global provider of e-discovery technology, announced the release of Reveal 11, which it said is a major enhancement to its AI-powered on-premise and SaaS platform, which can be used to support litigation, investigations, compliance, antitrust, data privacy and other matters.
“Reveal 11 is the full realization of the company’s strategic vision to go ‘All in on AI,’” the company said. “By integrating and expanding on the standard-setting AI technologies NexLP and Brainspace, Reveal 11 allows users to more quickly and efficiently uncover insights surrounding litigation, investigations, compliance and much more, while the ‘single pane of glass’ experience enables more desirable outcomes by orders of magnitude.”
The new platform uses adaptive AI, behavioral analysis, and AI models to focus on the context around data, not just what the words say, Reveal said. It can be used in a range of cases, from large-scale, multi-national matters, all the way down to routine cases.
“This is a pinnacle moment for Reveal,” said Wendell Jisa, Reveal’s founder and CEO. “Reveal 11 is the result of the company’s multi-year vision for the company to fuse the best legal AI technology onto a single platform that instantly becomes a force multiplier for legal teams large and small.”
Cobra Legal Solutions Partners with Reveal
Speaking of Reveal, Cobra Legal Solutions, a legal operations outsourcing provider (LOOP), announced that it has established a partnership with Reveal by which Cobra’s clients will be able to leverage Reveal’s entire end-to-end, cloud-based platform.
“We’ve seen increased need from our clients for battle tested AI tools to help with the growing tide of investigations, data breach reviews, and due diligence,” said Cobra CRO, Doug Kaminski. “Reveal’s platform will help them get the answers they need, quickly and accurately, to produce better outcomes.”
Cobra said that the combination of its Value Sourcing methodology and experienced team of attorney project managers with Reveal’s out-of-the-box, pre-trained AI models will make it easier for clients to harness the power of AI throughout any legal task.
Relativity Celebrates AI Visionaries as It Helps Develop AI Bias Detector
In February, e-discovery company Relativity announced the first of what it plans to be an annual list of AI Visionaries – early adopters in legal, compliance and risk who are playing a seminal role in advancing the use of AI in their organizations – and at Legalweek it staged a dinner to honor those recognized.
The list is too extensive to include here, so view it at the link above. But worth noting is that, during the dinner, Relativity CEO Mike Gamson engaged in a fireside chat with one of those visionaries, Virginia Essandoh, chief diversity officer at Ballard Spahr, about the importance of ethical AI. The chat was moderated by 60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl.
During the chat, Relativity revealed that it is working with Ballard Spahr on building an Unconscious Bias Detector, a tool that uses AI to surface instances of biases related to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. in performance reviews.
Relativity said it is committed to setting a precedent for the ethical use of AI, especially at a time when there is growing concern around issues such as coded bias.
“The legal industry is on the precipice of major digital transformation, and nothing will be more transformational to our industry than AI, which is why we’re turning our expertise and investment toward delivering AI capabilities that will help our customers discover the truth faster,” Gamson said.
More from Relativity: New Data Transfer and Security Product Capabilities
In more news from Relativity, the company announced new RelativityOne product capabilities that include RelativityOne integration with Microsoft 365 Advanced eDiscovery and the launch of a security detection tool.
Integration with Microsoft 365. Relativity said it is launching an integration with Microsoft 365 Advanced eDiscovery to enable legal hold, collection and data transfer workflows between Advanced eDiscovery and RelativityOne, creating a seamless cloud-to-cloud e-discovery experience. Relativity will be one of the first providers to enable integrated data transfer with Advanced eDiscovery.
In addition to significantly simplifying the data transfer process, the integration will automatically convert Microsoft Teams data originated in Advanced eDiscovery to the Relativity Short Message Format, enabling customers to review, analyze and produce this data in its native format, Relativity said.
Enhanced cloud security. In February, a new threat monitoring, detection and response service called Security Alerts was made available for all tenants in RelativityOne Commercial. This new service gives customers the ability to identify and resolve potential threats in a centralized location in real time.
Visibility into these alerts is surfaced in the Security Center in RelativityOne, which offers customers real-time insight into the safety of their environment, with easy-to-use controls to help them manage users and protect their instance.
LawToolBox Now Available through Microsoft Commercial Marketplace
The legal calendaring and deadline management software LawToolBox is now available through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, which means that law firms, businesses and government agencies that are Microsoft customers can easily purchase the product by adding it to their existing Microsoft purchase agreements and receiving a consolidated invoice from Microsoft.
[Read more about LawToolBox on LawNext Legal Tech Directory.]
Carol-Lynn Grow, chief operating officer and cofounder of LawToolBox, said the product transforms Microsoft 365 into a full legal suite for law firms and other legal professionals.
LawToolBox has rulesets for thousands of courts in all 50 states and in countries around the world, offering a rules-based deadline calculator, automated legal calendaring, and matter management within Microsoft 365.
Reynen Court Raises $4.3M to Fuel Continued Growth
The legal technology platform Reynen Court announced the closing of $4.3 million of additional financing from three new investors and existing shareholders.
The new investors include venture capital funds Bryce Catalyst and Forefront Venture Partners. Existing investors participating in the new round include global, early-stage VC Ventech and international law firms Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins.
Reynen Court, sometimes called the app store for legal technology, provides a platform where firms and law departments can research, test, securely adopt and manage cloud-based software applications on the infrastructure of their choice.
More than 150 third-party application vendors are participating on the Reynen Court platform or working towards participation pursuant to signed agreements.
“The legal industry is facing an onslaught of new software applications and most of these have been designed and built to leverage cloud-computing,” said Cary Burch, president and CEO of Bryce Catalyst and former SVP and chief innovation officer at Thomson Reuters. “Due to security and data protection policies, however, it is extremely costly and time consuming for large legal organizations to vet and secure permission to use new SaaS solutions.
“By making it easy for law firms and law departments to adopt and run third-party software applications in private cloud infrastructure under their own control, we believe Reynen Court is strongly positioned to play a central role in the transformation of the legal industry that is well underway.”
Legal Services Provider Veralocity Launches to ‘Bring Speed to Truth’
Last month brought the launch of Veralocity, a programmatic professional services company serving corporate legal departments and law firms, and a sister company to Veristar, a provider of end-to-end discovery services and specialized legal staffing.
At Legalweek, I met with Dan Panitz, president and CEO of Veralocity, and Ethan Crooks, vice president, strategic growth, at Veristar, to learn more about the new company.
Veralocity’s focus, Panitz said, is on helping companies more quickly get the substantive intelligence they need to make more strategic decisions in litigation, and thereby reduce risk and reduce spend.
Partnering with Veristar to provide customized discovery services – including forensic data collection, processing and hosting, managed review and managed services – Veralocity’s programmatic approach develops bespoke discovery programs designed for rapid evidence acquisition and evaluation, enabling increased speed to case strategy, Panitz said.
“It’s not one size fits all,” Panitz said. “You can’t solve with a tech-first approach without amplifying bad process. Let’s figure out what we’re dealing with and then design a bespoke program that’s best for the client.”
“We’re trying to shine a very focused bright light early in the process. If you come at it just from an e-discovery standpoint, you’re missing the bigger picture of what your clients’ pain points are – you need to look at it holistically.”