It is evident to any industry insider that there are more legal technology products now than there have ever been. From e-discovery, to legal research, to analytics, every niche in legal is being addressed by legal tech companies. As clients demand more value for less, certain firms have leaned on technology to increase efficiency while maintaining high-caliber work product. The explosion of available technology has created unprecedented opportunities for firms. It also poses a threat for the attorneys that choose to disregard this rise of innovation.
So how do you address these pressures without becoming disillusioned by the unending array of options and difficulties of technology adoption? We reached out to some forward-thinking leaders at America’s most prominent, innovative law firms and found that finding the answers for your firm might not be as difficult as we thought.
We asked,
“What is your criterion for judging whether legal tech is good?” and “When you’ve brought it into the firm, how do you ensure that your attorneys will actually use it?”
Leaders at firms like Barnes & Thornburg, Allen Matkins, Hinshaw & Culbertson, Greenberg Traurig, Sidley Austin, Sheppard Mullin, and Shearman & Sterling weighed in with their perspectives and opinions. We received insights from the worlds of knowledge management, pricing, the law library, firm innovation, and information technology.
To learn how to best address these questions for your own firm, we’ve taken many of these insights to create a new report on Evaluating and Adopting Legal Technology in 2019.
While they all had unique insights from their extensive experience working legal technology, we saw 6 key themes emerge across the board. They include ideas and guidance on how you can take advantage of the options out there and assist you in planning a rollout and adoption plan that entirely takes advantage of the newly purchased tech.
We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this report. Reach about this or being featured in our next report to abby@casetext.com.
Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.
How this skill works
Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.
CoCounsel will produce a draft.
Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
How this skill works
Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.
Refine topics by including specific areas of interest and get a thorough deposition outline.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
How this skill works
Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions
This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well
Upload up to 10 contracts at once
Ask up to 10 questions of each contract
Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
How this skill works
Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."
CoCounsel will review your contracts and identify any contractual clauses relevant to the policy or policies you specified.
If there is any conflict between a contractual clause and a policy you described, CoCounsel will recommend a revised clause that complies with the relevant policy. It will also identify the risks presented by a clause that does not conform to the policy you described.
Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.
How this skill works
Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.
CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.
Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.
How this skill works
Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.
CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.
Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.