Robert Ambrogi Blog
Today kicks off the first full day of ILTACON22, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Already, the day has brought a slew of news announcements from legal technology companies.
Here is a roundup of news announced this morning.
DISCO Joins the LexFusion Go-to-Market Collective As Its E-Discovery Provider
The e-discovery company DISCO (NYSE:LAW), one of only a handful of publicly traded legal tech companies, has joined LexFusion, a go-to-market collective of legal technology companies, as its e-discovery provider, the two companies announced this morning.
Joe Borstein, LexFusion’s chief executive officer, said that after surveying the market of innovative e-discovery technologies, LexFusion concluded that DISCO offered “the most fully-realized value proposition and the most compelling vision for what comes next.”
“DISCO stands apart in empowering legal teams to filter out the noise, focus faster on what matters, and proceed with the confidence that they have a complete picture,” Borstein said. “DISCO’s cutting-edge technology is wrapped in an unparalleled user experience and paired with a world-class services arm.
LexFusion is a unique collective that evaluates products in the legal technology market and partners with what it considers to be best of breed in order to help market and sell a vetted portfolio of products.
Docket Alarm Releases Unique Tool for Searching and Analyzing Motions in Federal Court
At ILTACON today, Docket Alarm by Fastcase released Motions in Federal Courts, a unique tool for searching and analyzing motions from almost 5 million cases and for generating analytics around those motions for individual law firms, judges and nature-of-suit codes.
Docket Alarm is positioning the new tool as one for business intelligence, but based on a demo I had seen last month at the American Association of Law Libraries conference, it is a potentially powerful tool for anyone involved in federal court litigation.
Docket Alarm says:
“The new Motions in Federal Courts search empowers lawyers to micro-target specific types of motions and to create customized analytics. This enables Docket Alarm users to dive into both their own firm’s litigation history — as well as opposing law firms — providing the market’s most precise and powerful tool for internal and external business intelligence.”
Two aspects of the new feature make it particularly notable.
For one, it combines the technology of Judicata, whose technology stack and team Fastcase acquired in 2020, with the data of Docket Alarm, which Fastcase acquired in 2018, to categorize the millions of motions from some 5 million cases by type, stage, nature of suit, law firm, state, judge, and much more.
Well before Fastcase acquired Judicata, it had developed unique technology to “map the legal genome.” This is a significant expansion of that technology into the federal courts.
“Judicata used that technology to create quantum leaps in legal research, but the technology also has amazing applications in the vast Docket Alarm database as well,” said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase. “The Federal Motions Practice search engine is one of the early fruits of that collaboration.”
The other notable aspect of this new feature is that all the tagging is done with the open-source SALI LMSS 2.0 standards recently developed by the SALI Alliance.
We discussed these standards in a recent episode of my LawNext podcast with Damien Riehl, one of the principle developers of the standards and also VP for litigation workflow and analytics content at Fastcase.
The facts that the tags are universal means that law firms and corporate legal departments can export documents with APIs that link right into their own SALI-compliant document management systems, databases, KM systems, or other legal tech products.
Docket Alarm says the new Motions in Federal Courts tool covers the federal courts of all 50 states and tags more than 3 million briefs, 2.5 million motions, and 6.6 million court orders.
Lawyers can create precise motion searches to discover the strategy of opposing counsel, to analyze the effectiveness of their own strategy, or to find precise templates for new motions, targeted to specific judges and courts, Docket Alarm says.
“This goes beyond search and analytics,” said Michael Sander, Docket Alarm founder and VP of Fastcase Analytics. “The ability to drill down to see how any firm – including your own – handles motions in specific courts is actionable business intelligence. This isn’t for niche practice areas or a small number of courts. This new tool covers all practice areas in all federal courts. Once you can see the motions, it’s hard to imagine litigating blind without them.”
ILTACON attendees can see a preview and learn more about the new features by visiting Fastcase-Docket Alarm at Booth #615 in the exhibit hall.
Relativity Announces New Subscription Plan for RelativityOne
Relativity, a global e-discovery and compliance technology company, announced at ILTACON today a new subscription plan for its RelativityOne cloud platform that bundles user fees into a single data fee.
The subscription plan eliminates separate user fees, which Relativity said will make it easier for customers to meet evolving client needs and simplify their internal operations.
Mike Gamson, Relativity’s CEO, said that RelativityOne has been the company’s fastest-growing product since it launched in 2017, with more than half the company’s customers now on the platform.
“Based on strong adoption and valuable customer feedback, it’s clear that the time has come to unlock new opportunities for engagement and access in RelativityOne,” Gamson said. “We’re really excited about this change and the role it will play in supporting customer innovation and facilitating a greater breadth of use cases.”
Relativity said that many of the organizations that have adopted RelativityOne are tackling more use cases and practice areas across their organizations – such as cyber breach response, data subject access requests, third-party subpoenas and internal investigations.
Because many of these use cases involve significantly more people reviewing and investigating the data than in a typical litigation matter, the separate user fee was a barrier to RelativityOne’s adoption.
Relativity said it is currently working with existing customers to familiarize them with the new subscription plan, and it will be available to new RelativityOne customers on Oct. 1.
Reveal Unveils Streams, An ‘Entirely New’ Data Visualization Engine for Data Across Everything from Slack to Social Media
Reveal, a global company that provides an AI-powered e-discovery platform, today introduced Streams, which it says is an “entirely new way to uncover insights from today’s complex web of digital communications data sources using the power of Reveal AI.”
Reveal said that Streams is a macro-visualization engine that maps massive amounts of data from traditional and alternative data sources to uncover patterns, saving reviewers time and resources and “exponentially” amplifying insights.
“When Streams is used in concert with the full suite of Reveal AI-powered tools like the Cluster Wheel, Communication Map and AI Model Library, the results are unmatched in the industry,” the company said.
What makes Streams unique, the company said, is its ability to weave communication threads into a single, AI-powered visualization that understands patterns, concepts and anomalies across multiple communications sources, including collaboration tools, messaging platforms, social media and beyond.
Among the sources it supports are Slack; Microsoft Teams; Zoom; WhatsApp; social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok; email; text messaging; instant messaging; and documents of all types.
“New communication platforms and formats have exploded in variety and adoption, creating a wealth of potentially relevant ESI sources that current discovery platforms struggle to parse,” said Wendell Jisa, founder & CEO of Reveal. “Streams solves this issue by bringing the varied threads together in a single, powerful interactive visual analytic that instantly becomes a force multiplier for case teams.”