Do you really know who’s looking at your most confidential data? Documents travel the globe to employees, contractors, business partners and collaborators.
That’s a lot of opportunity for leaks. WFH creates new cybersecurity hazards.
It’s impossible to lock down all those computers manually and ensure they stay that way. Answer these five questions to find out if your security posture is all it can be.
Join SecureReview for a timely and vital discussion on challenges related to cybersecurity risks. The one hour panel, “WFH Cybersecurity Risk Management from Legal, Business and IT perspectives,” will take place virtually on February 2, 2021 at 11:45 AM as part of Legalweek 2021. Registration for Legalweek is free.
Experts from leading law firms, managed review, hosting and cyber security companies join the CLE session to address cybersecurity risk management in the “Work From Anywhere” world in the COVID-19 era. Click for full press release.
Hanzo provides “Follow-the-link” context between Slack messages and Google Workspace with the new release. Hanzo’s purpose-built discovery solution for Slack extends collection ease to new data frontiers via the follow-the-link feature.
Hanzo Hold has become favored as the “best practice” legal and compliance application to manage Enterprise data within Slack, now allows customers to extend their matter management to G Suite (Google Workspace) data. Starting with “Follow-the-Link,” customers can identify critical Google data nested within Slack threads, messages, and groups, retrieve that data, and combine both Enterprise data sets into a single, surgical export for import into today’s industry-standard review platforms.
Following this initial launch, Hanzo will be adding support for Google Drive, Gmail, and other Google Workspace data sources — with the roadmap accelerating quickly from there. In 2021, Hanzo Hold will be the authoritative source for internal investigations, security checks, legal holds, and compliance archiving across all dynamic, complex content types.
Follow-the-link functionality for G Suite within Slack is just one example of how Hanzo applies its mission by leveraging its deep experience in dynamic data today to help customers manage tomorrow’s data challenges.
“Our customers have come to rely on Hanzo Hold’s comprehensive Slack preservation, early case assessment, and review capabilities,” said Brad Harris, VP of Product at Hanzo. “Now, with the addition of G Suite and our roadmap for Google Workspace, we anticipate efficiencies well beyond initial expectations. We listen intently to the market and rely on our close partnership with our customers to ensure the software is built the way it is supposed to be built – with the customer in mind.”
“Enterprise SaaS applications are in high demand mode, and the risk, legal and compliance challenges that present themselves as this application ecosystem expands are non-trivial,” said Keith Laska, CEO of Hanzo. “Hanzo made a long-term commitment to our Enterprise customers. We’ve pledged to listen, design, and build best-practice application layers for the identification, early case assessment, and exporting of critical data to industry-standard systems hosted by law firms and legal service providers such as Relativity, DISCO, and Reveal Data. This release extends to Slack and the immense ecosystem of Google Workplace instances, where the vast majority of mission-critical data sits.
Contact, Sarena Regazzoni, Hanzo’s director of communications to learn more. 503-407-4208 or sarena@hanzo.co
COVID-19 has fast-tracked strategic workplace initiatives to address a dispersed workforce and digital transformation. I work with Law Offices who are reimagining their workplace strategy with an emphasis on safety and social distancing, flexibility, cost reduction, and employee experience as they balance between back-to-work and work-from-home – the Hybrid Workplace.
Smarten Spaces functionality at a glance:
Luminance, the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, has announced that Delta Capita, a top financial services business, technology consultant and managed services provider, has adopted Luminance’s AI technology to assist them with LIBOR, IBOR and EURIBOR transition projects. Click here for the full Press Release.
It is safe to say that 2020 was a challenging and unprecedented year across all industries, not least the legal sector. Yet our altered ways of working have spawned new innovations and different ways of thinking about “business as usual.” For the legal sector, AI has become a key part of many lawyers’ arsenal, allowing them to rapidly respond to new challenges such as remote working, increased market and economic volatility and complex client demands. As we approach 2021, it is clear that this momentum in the legal sector to embrace all things tech shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
‘Technophobia’ is no longer a viable excuse for lawyers
The pandemic has accelerated the pace of technology adoption generally, and has also opened lawyers’ eyes to the possibilities that advanced technology such as AI can herald. Technology has moved from being a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’, allowing businesses and lawyers to keep pace with marketplace changes whilst also driving profitability and growth.
Let’s take the example of M&A due diligence- whilst years ago, the number of contracts to review for a transaction was a lengthy yet reasonable task, an explosion in enterprise data has rendered this process practically unfeasible. Indeed, hiring armies of junior lawyers to manually trawl through endless volumes of contracts in order to find a crucial ‘Change of Control’ clause is increasingly becoming recognised as a waste of resources and an inefficient use of legal talent.
And this is where AI comes in: Luminance is able to rapidly read and form an understanding of legal data, instantly surfacing crucial clauses, datapoints and anomalies at the click of a button. Not only does this instil lawyers with the greatest confidence that nothing has been missed in their review, but by enabling them to cut through the admin-heavy, mundane work, advisors are once again able to focus on adding value where it matters: the analysis. As Gavin Williams, Partner at Holland & Knight said to me at a recent Luminance webinar, “Luminance allows young lawyers to push skills faster, resulting in better quality and better work product which is closer to being ‘client ready’ than ever before.”
Another example is the sudden switch to remote working in 2020. With many offices now remote working for the foreseeable future and some organisations reimagining how offices will function after that, it seems that increased remote working or flexi-working is here to stay. Luminance’s easy cloud-deployment and advanced collaboration tools such as the ability to allocate tasks and track work progression are invaluable for the seamless coordination of legal teams. We have had customers such as VdA, Norburg & Scherp and The 36 Group use the tool to coordinate teams in connection with large review projects.
Clearly, the real, practical value of AI can no longer be overlooked and as we enter 2021, it is clear that AI is integral to the infrastructure of all organisations.
Clients expect more- tech is part of the answer
Client demands and expectations have always been high on the agenda for law firms yet increased economic volatility and steepening competition will once again push these demands into the spotlight in 2021. Indeed, recent research by Luminance found that decreased client budgets are the biggest concern for senior lawyers. Clients are increasingly savvy as to the technology that is available to lawyers as well as the benefits in terms of efficiency, insight and cost.
This year, for example, the Dubai office of Dentons were tasked with a time-sensitive review of 200 documents. This number quickly swelled to over 180,000 documents, all of which had to be reviewed in just two weeks. After consulting with their client, Dentons opted to deploy Luminance and were able to review the entire dataset within the timeline set by the client and with huge cost-savings. Results like this show that by embracing technology, lawyers are able to not just meet but exceed the expectations of their clients and this is something that we predict will continue far into 2021.
The year that in-house teams embrace technology
The last few years have seen a growth in the role and scope of in-house legal professionals. Indeed, in-house lawyers are not just subject matter specialists that are only to be consulted on specific legal matters but are instead now expected to play a significant and proactive role in wider legal matters, including ensuring compliance, examining potential business risk and being key members of the corporate decision-making team.
Consistent with this trend, this year there has been a 65% increase in the uptake of our technology by in-house teams in order to streamline work such as the review of outside counsel guidelines, employment contracts and regulatory compliance reviews in the face of data protection regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. We expect to see a continued acceleration in this trend in 2021, with these lawyers becoming more tech-savvy, efficient and sophisticated in the projects they manage in-house in order to better control costs during uncertain economic times. Recently, we welcomed Featurespace, a market-leader in enterprise financial crime prevention software, as a customer in order to help the company’s in-house legal team to gain more control over their in-house processes.
2021: The year that AI got real in the legal industry?
This year has marked a turning point for the legal industry’s adoption of AI technology. At Luminance, we have seen an astonishing 40% increase in the uptake of our technology since the beginning of the year, with Luminance’s customer base now reaching nearly 300 firms and organisations. In 2021, AI will be a fundamental component of every law firm and business and to that end, the future of the industry.
More than 80% of lawyers now view technology adoption as essential for the future of their firm and three quarters view the future adoption of AI specifically as key. Yet in increasingly uncertain economic times, the return on investment or ‘ROI’ of any outlay an organisation makes is going to be highly scrutinised. Crucially, lawyers need technologies that they can trust to get the results they need, not only to maintain business stability but also to take their work to the next level.
Take on more projects with Luminance
The legal and business marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive: law firms and in-house legal departments are tightening their belts to maintain profitability while clients are demanding increased expertise, efficiency and transparency from their lawyers.
Luminance brings machine learning to the legal profession, uniquely combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of data, instantly surfacing crucial information such as clauses and datapoints. By reducing the amount of time and legal professionals needed to find the key data within documents, lawyers can choose to spend more time on higher-value analysis work, or can instead redirect resource to undertake additional projects.
For example, Luminance customer, Burness Paull, is using the Luminance ‘Discovery’ platform to conduct DSARs (Data Subject Access Requests) arising from data protection regulations like the GDPR. Without Luminance, the resource needed to fully comply with each DSAR means that the service is often not economically viable for lawyers to offer their clients or, in the case of in-house teams, without the support of external counsel. Yet with the assistance of Luminance’s technology, firms can dramatically reduce the time spend on each review. For instance, the first time that Burness Paull used Luminance to conduct a DSAR of 6,000 documents they saw 50% time savings, thus ensuring profitability when offering this service to their clients.
Meeting the spectrum of client demands
Not only can Luminance help lawyers to attract new business, but it can help provide an enhanced service to existing clients, too. By using flexible machine learning technology, Luminance can be used across a wide range of projects, enabling them to proactively respond to new challenges and in turn, expand their client service offering. For example, ‘Big Four’ accounting firm, Ernst & Young (EY) Law Belgium are using Luminance’s flexible technology to help their clients with Brexit compliance and now LIBOR transition projects. As Stéphanie De Smet, a Corporate Lawyer at EY Law Belgium, put it, “With many of our clients concerned about the impact and cost of a LIBOR review, Luminance’s powerful machine learning is fundamental to our legal practice.”
Flexible pricing for lawyer and client
Luminance has a range of commercial models from pay-as-you-go model to subscriptions options for larger data usage. This ensures that the platform can benefit firms and organisations of every size, from boutique law firms right through to the Big Four. Further, Luminance requires little-to-no set-up time before use, with most customers up and running within a matter of hours. Indeed, with Luminance’s intuitive and easy-to-use system, no bespoke user training is required and legal teams can see real results from day one.
When it comes to recouping their initial outlay on technology spend, some law firms choose to pass on the cost of their investment directly to their clients as a technology fee. Other firms choose to pass on some of the cost savings to their clients, offering competitive pricing in order to win additional business: one ‘Global Top 100’ law firm recently used Luminance to conduct a review of employment contracts and were able to save their client $800,000, representing an impressive 90% cost saving. And other firms might choose to maintain the same fees, keeping lawyers working the same hours on the project but with more time spent on analysis rather than sifting through the data. The range of ways firms might maximise the value of their technological investment is covered in our white paper.
Try Luminance for free today
Legal professionals are at a pivotal point- with advanced technology available and more accessible than ever, lawyers have tools at their fingertips that will allow them to do more with less resources, keep up with the accelerating pace of their business and use time more effectively. Luminance offers a two-week free pilot today so users can the the transformative potential of Luminance’s technology at work in their organisation.
For more information, please read the Luminance Business Case White Paper or contact info@luminance.com.
iManage, the company dedicated to transforming how professionals work, today announced that Walder Wyss Ltd. – one of the most successful and fastest growing Swiss commercial law firms – is using iManage Knowledge Unlocked, powered by RAVN, to transform their approach to knowledge management.
iManage Knowledge Unlocked puts knowledge in the hands of the users with 7 ways to search across iManage Work and other systems. It helps users discover new content and insights, identify similar matters or motions, highlight relevant content, and provide updated intelligence on legal principles while respecting security and confidentiality that is so important to the industry. When integrated with powerful business intelligence tools like Microsoft Power BI, it provides Knowledge teams with powerful analytics that enable content to be kept relevant, fresh and additional resources added that meet the needs of the users.
Walder Wyss can instantly see data around which members of the firm are actively using the knowledge management system, what type of searches users are carrying out, what type of results are being returned, and where there might be gaps in content or other areas that require attention to optimize knowledge flow. This enables the firm’s knowledge management team to make statistical connections between users and data.
Identifying “power users” assists in the effort to expand usage across the organization, to uncover and replicate best-practices, and to create best practice document templates. Data regarding what documents and knowledge are not being accessed also provides deep and valuable insights for improvements of how documents can be refined to better meet the expectations and needs of the firm’s lawyers.
Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence about what knowledge assets its professionals find most valuable, the knowledge management team at Walder Wyss is now able to use data to determine how people are using the system. This supports an ongoing process of quality improvement to guide the investment in the knowledge content, enabling the team to make better decisions and deliver higher quality service, driving competitive advantage for the firm.
“Lawyers are busy people – most of them don’t have time to tell us how they’ve been using the knowledge management system,” said Urs Bracher, Legal Engineer and Head of KM at Walder Wyss. “Having Knowledge Unlocked means that we don’t have to guess or rely on just a few lawyers telling us what type of knowledge management assets they find most useful, or where they need more help. We can look at the data and have insights into users’ needs that allow us to better address their requirements.”
The Appeal of a Platform Approach
“We were already using iManage Work as our document management system, so it made a lot of sense to use Knowledge Unlocked for our knowledge management system,” said Lorenz Reinle, Assistant Know-how and Legal Tech at Walder Wyss. “It was a natural extension of our usage of the iManage platform, and iManage is recognized as a leader in the international market, which helped simplify the decision.”
Since going live on Knowledge Unlocked earlier this year, Walder Wyss has rolled it out to all six of its offices in Switzerland. Eventually, there will be nearly 300 users who will use the iManage solution to search and access more than 7,000 knowledge assets within the knowledge management system, and several million documents within iManage Work.
“Knowledge is only as good as your users’ ability to tap into it,” Nick Thomson, General Manager, RAVN, iManage. “Walder Wyss’ usage of Knowledge Unlocked enables them to truly leverage their work product and enhance the effectiveness of their curated knowledge assets, allowing them to continually improve knowledge management processes and outcomes for their users.”
ZyLAB Insights Added to eDiscovery Platform
New Artificial Intelligence-based functionality automatically performs entity extraction of case data
TYSONS, Virginia, January 25, 2021: ZyLAB, manufacturer of ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery, today launched ZyLAB Insights, a major new enhancement to its solution offering allowing for the automatic extraction of entity information from unstructured datasets.
“ZyLAB Insights represents a major milestone in our ongoing commitment to bring the latest in data science to our customers,” said Dennis van der Veeke, Chief Executive Officer of ZyLAB. “The ability for legal professionals to be able to identify people, places, organizations and other entity types mentioned within their documents and have those references automatically flagged or redacted will greatly enhance the speed with which document review is performed while reducing the risk of unintentionally releasing sensitive or privileged information.”
Named-entity Recognition (NER) or entity extraction is an artificial intelligence-based methodology that locates and classifies named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre-defined categories. This extracted information is then added to the metadata of the documents and is indexed along with the content to be searchable within the review platform. Users will be able to view, search for and automatically redact the names of people mentioned in documents, for example.
More importantly, this type of enrichment allows for smarter fact-finding within datasets, permitting the users to perform searches such as “PERSON w/5 LOCATION” where any person mentioned in any document within 5 words of any named location is revealed.
ZyLAB Insights will be available shortly to all ZyLAB ONE SaaS customers in both the North American and European markets and will be priced in bundles by the millions of characters indexed.
About ZyLAB
Founded in 1983, ZyLAB is a proven solution partner to legal professionals in corporations, law firms and governments worldwide. Its flagship solution, ZyLAB ONE is an end-to-end eDiscovery system used to facilitate information requests in litigation, regulatory responses, internal investigations and public records. Visit www.zylab.com for more information
Contact information:
1775 Tysons Boulevard, 5th Floor
Tysons, VA, 22102
703-442-2400
sales@zylab.com
