5 Key Factors to Consider When Integrating AI into Your Legal Department

 Integrating advanced legal AI tools like LLMs catalyzes a significant shift for in-house legal teams. These models are evolving from mere tools to invaluable partners, extending in-house professionals’ capabilities. Adopting legal AI software is a strategic decision for in-house teams that can transform service delivery, enhance productivity, and provide data-driven insights.

Here’s a closer look at five key factors to think about when integrating AI:

  1. COST CONSIDERATIONS

Immediate Efficiency Gains: AI automation of repetitive tasks like contract reviews can yield direct time savings, reducing manual hours spent.

Optimize Spend: The cost savings allow for investments in training, advanced AI tools, and other high-value initiatives rather than repetitive manual work.

  1. WORKFLOW EVOLUTION

Reskilling: With AI excelling in routine tasks, in-house team members can take
on more complex responsibilities, upskilling into higher-value work.

Ongoing Learning: As AI evolves, so must in-house professionals’ skills. Regular AI training ensures everyone stays updated on the latest developments.

  1. DATA-DRIVEN INSIGHTS

Instant Analysis: AI for legal documents can provide real-time insights from data that previously required extensive manual analysis. This empowers faster, informed decisions.

Proactive Risk Monitoring: AI analysis of contracts and documents can proactively detect risks, allowing preventative mitigation.

  1. CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Addressing Hesitancy: Hosting regular workshops provides a venue for hesitant team members to gain familiarity with AI systems in a collaborative setting. This can ease adoption.

User Feedback: Encourage continuous user feedback on AI tools. On-the-ground insights allow refinements tailored to team needs.

  1. INTEGRATION WITH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES

Legal Tech AI Synergy with Blockchain: AI can help validate blockchain data beyond smart contracts, offering a more robust solution for secure transactions or records.

Collaborative Platforms: AI can seamlessly integrate with collaborative tools and platforms used by legal firms, ensuring a cohesive workflow. Whether it’s document collaboration or scheduling client meetings, AI can bring efficiency to these tasks.

Adaptive Systems: The beauty of modern AI is its adaptability. By connecting it with tools like CRMs or document management systems, it can learn and adapt based on historical data and user interactions.

Integrating AI is an ongoing journey requiring strategic planning, skills development, and a willingness to evolve. The payoff makes this effort invaluable for in-house productivity and insights. With thoughtful change management, AI transitions from an external tool to an intrinsic capability. Involvement and feedback from professionals is the key to ensuring the tech aligns with team needs. With meticulous implementation, AI becomes a seamless ally rather than a disruptive presence, propelling teams to new heights.

Want to learn more about how you can unlock the true potential of AI systems (including advanced prompting techniques)? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

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Combines real-time notifications with AI-enabled analysis of risk indicators for antitrust and white collar concerns

NEW YORK – Jan. 17, 2024—Epiq, a global technology-enabled services leader to the legal industry and corporations, announced today the launch of real-time, data-driven Regulatory Risk Insights™. The antitrust and white collar compliance solution empowers corporate legal departments to identify, measure, and act on organizational risk as it happens.

Click for full press release.

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Priori, the leading legal technology platform for outside counsel decision-making, recently announced the latest version of its award-winning product, Scout, is now powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI). With Scout’s AI launch, legal teams can unlock even more valuable data and insights about their trusted law firm relationships and elevate their decision-making processes for outside counsel hiring, law firm panel management and rate reviews.

“AI is profoundly changing the way legal professionals work,” commented Basha Rubin, CEO and Co-Founder, Priori. “Using AI to power Scout allows for a more seamless integration of in-house and law firm data, including better search and matching. These capabilities empower companies to find the best legal talent for their need at that moment with minimal friction, taking administrative tasks off of our users’ plates and freeing them up to spend more time on strategic tasks that deliver business value. We are thrilled to be partnering with Hearst, Marsh McLennan  and other Fortune 500 companies to bring the first AI-based outside counsel data platform to the market.”

HOW IT WORKS

Scout automates the process of managing a law firm panel and interaction with outside counsel by centralizing knowledge, structuring data from disparate sources and surfacing insights in an easy-to-use, searchable platform. Using Scout, legal teams can better understand their outside counsel’s experience, rates, expertise, engagement history and more. To achieve this, Scout connects internal data on law firm experience and expertise, e-billing and performance, enriches the information with public data sources and uses AI to aggregate and organize that data to make it “decision grade.”

Legal departments find many benefits with Scout, including:

  • Centralizing key information about outside counsel relationships. Law departments can get as granular as they like with data points, including combining information from billing systems, expertise and experience data, internal reviews and more.

  • Clearly surfacing impactful data, such as performance reviews. Scout enables and tracks internal reviews of attorneys and firms, presenting them in a clear visual interface and preserving institutional knowledge.

  • Quickly finding best-fit firms for new matters. Legal departments can compare key decision-making factors to optimize legal spend and align hiring with important internal initiatives (e.g., panel management, rate review processes or diversity certifications).

“Scout creates a new category of legal department software that broadens and deepens in-house team’s relationships with their external counsel,” commented An Trotter, Senior Director of Operations, Office of the General Counsel, Hearst. “We use the platform to quickly and effectively identify best-fit attorneys for new legal work and manage our rate review process, saving an estimated 325 hours annually.”

This announcement comes on the heels of the company’s expansion of its services, adding legal operations professionals to its industry-leading global marketplace. Since its founding, Priori has continuously responded to the needs of its clients, adding ALSPs and other “New Law” companies in 2021. Now, Priori Marketplace’s expansion integrates legal operations  providers into the company’s transparent legal marketplace that serves clients who want to compare a wide range of legal services providers.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Over the past year, Priori has been recognized for the impact Scout is making in legal departments across the country and within the legal ecosystem. Below are a few examples of this recognition:

To learn more about how top legal departments are using our award-winning platform to save time and money and align outside counsel hiring with their goals, visit us online and schedule a demo.

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by Ryan Spear

Law firms are witnessing a resurgence in the popularity of partner and firm-wide retreats.

Table of contents

Click to read the full article on AttorneyAtWork.com.

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Attorneys are starting to deal more and more with digital tools to help prosecute and defend cases. A crucial part of any legal case is the discovery phase. Discovery is when both sides of a case gather all of the witnesses, evidence, and testimonies relevant to the case. This helps avoid surprise ambush moments in a case and is a key part of a fair trial.  

One of the biggest problems with discovery is the growing amount of digital evidence in cases. It’s not uncommon for evidence to include texts, emails, direct messages, and other digital content. Electronic discovery, also known as eDiscovery, involves sorting through potential terabytes of information within a case to find relevant information.  

The size of eDiscovery can change depending on the size and scope of the case. On average, a U.S. civil case will contain over 130 gigabytes of information. To put that into perspective, 3 GB of information is required to stream a film in HD on a streaming service like Netflix for an hour. That means that the average eDiscovery for a civil case is the same amount of information as streaming a film in HD for almost two days straight.

It can be difficult to sift through the piles of emails, databases, and documents involved in eDiscovery, and it only gets more complicated if the documents are in another language. That’s where multilingual eDiscovery software comes into play.  

eDiscovery software helps in the legal discovery process by making it easy to sort, search, and understand each piece of potential information.  

What Is Included in eDiscovery?  

eDiscovery covers more than just email. It can include any digital communication or document, also known as electronically stored information (ESI). This can be:  

  • Digital photographs and video 
  • Mobile data 
  • Electronic databases 
  • Text messages 
  • Slack and other group messaging apps and programs 
  • Direct and instant messaging in apps and programs 
  • Cloud-based documents 
  • Word processing documents 
  • Spreadsheets 
  • Call logs 

ESI can be retrieved from a wide variety of sources. Anywhere a file or document is stored can be part of the eDiscovery process. This can include:  

  • Hard drives 
  • Company networks 
  • Thumb (USB drives) 
  • Mobile devices, including phones and tablets 
  • Smart devices 
  • Social media 
  • Online forums or websites 

Why Use eDiscovery Software?  

eDiscovery translation software helps automate common discovery steps and provides legal teams a better tool in handling large quantities of digital information. The software completes time-intensive work and automatically goes through data investigation, file indexing, virus scanning, and translation. The software does this through various applications and processes, preparing documents for discovery almost instantaneously.  

Once the information is uploaded, translated, and cataloged, legal teams can begin reviewing the data. Because the information is digital and has been indexed by the eDiscovery software, it is easy to search and sort through information using metadata fields. This helps legal teams quickly find information relevant to the case. It also does the critical job of allowing teams to quickly remove files or documents that are not relevant to discovery.  

SYSTRAN helps with  multilingual eDiscovery. With a continually growing global economy, it’s not uncommon for cases to involve documents, programs, or files that need to be translated. Rather than adding even more time to the eDiscovery process to deal with translating each document, SYSTRAN can translate and manage digital files as part of the discovery process. This automated translation helps legal teams save time and find relevant information even if documentation was created in a different language. 

How Does eDiscovery Work With SYSTRAN?  

SYSTRAN uses a machine translation solution. That means we go beyond just word-for-word translation, using a mix of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and human experience to create a revolutionizing eDiscovery service.  

Translating with AI helps tackle complex tasks while still considering the nuances and subtleties involved with translation. This only becomes more complex with eDiscovery because there is a wide diversity of inputs, document size, sentence structure, and even grammatical correctness to take into account.  

For example, it can be easy to translate a sentence like, “Are you home yet?” into other languages because it is a full sentence. But how do you deal with a short-handed text where someone texts, “u home”? There’s no subject. There’s no object. No punctuation even shows that it’s a sentence. It’s a single letter and a noun, so how can that be translated? That’s where machine learning comes into play.  

Machine learning allows programs to learn and develop beyond their initial programming. Traditional translation software acts like a language-to-language dictionary. If the program encounters the word “hola,” it searches the databases and translates it to “hello.” This works great for formal writing, but what happens when people misspell, use incorrect grammar, or abbreviate?  

For basic translation programs, they can’t translate if a word isn’t in their established dictionary. But that’s where machine-learning AI makes a difference. Machine learning takes those unique, abnormal situations and uses them to expand beyond its original programming.  

The first time a machine learning translation software encounters an abbreviation like “pq,” it might have a hard time translating it. It has no direct translation. It doesn’t even look like a word, so it can be a struggle to translate. However, once the AI learns that “pq” is an abbreviation for “por que,” it’s automatically added to the dictionary database. It will quickly translate “pq” to “why” the next time it’s encountered.  

With machine learning, the more translation a program is used in, the more experienced it becomes. With over 5 billion words translated daily,  SYSTRAN’s machine learning translation program continuously improves and makes translation in the eDiscovery process easier. 

Click for PDF.

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With the growing use of AI in litigation and number of data storage locations, the process of ediscovery gets increasingly more complex and must be more agile, comprehensive, and integrated. The tools legal professionals need in today’s digital environment necessitate using advanced tools such as AI to locate the relevant data quickly and securing data in a way that complies with myriad regulations and major challenges.

To help you secure data and address your needs efficiently in the age of AI, we’re making it easier to safeguard and manage compliance of data using generative AI tools. Recent advanced capabilities of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery are aimed at giving you the advantage. If you’re attending the Legalweek conference in New York City from January 29 to February 1, 2024, we’d love to connect. Read on for an overview of what you can expect our experts to discuss, and keep scrolling for sessions and other ways to connect with us at Legalweek.

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UPDATE

QuikData, the E-Discovery platform rising to the top for law firms and service providers searching for alternatives  

Houston, Texas, January 22, 2024 – QuikData is a software development and legal services company that has been rising through the ranks since the first release of the Quik E-Discovery and Data Room platform in 2017.  The industry veterans behind QuikData include the same development team that developed the “Viewpoint” E-Discovery platform, the on-premises E-Discovery platform that paralleled Relativity from 2007 to present. 

For the last six years, the same development and support team has focused their effort and talents in developing its powerful cloud-based platform, Quik. In speaking with the Vice President of Operations, Greg Anderson, the message is clear:

 “Our mission is to create a platform that offers advanced features while remaining user-friendly and easy to learn.  We concentrate our development efforts on providing intuitive, yet sophisticated, E-Discovery features and workflows. We recognize that a significant segment of the market is looking for an E-Discovery platform capable of handling complex tasks while reducing requirements for training, support overhead, and extensive change management efforts.” 

The most common first impression of the layout is that the user interface feels very familiar. Users immediately notice that they can easily drag and drop or right click and find a wealth of high-powered automation and analytics capabilities right away.

When evaluating a new E-Discovery platform, the primary considerations often revolve around its power and range of features.  Key questions include whether the software is light-weight or robust enough to handle complex cases involving large and varied data sets.  

QuikData addresses those concerns by prioritizing the needs of its E-Discovery users.   The Quik platform offers essential features tailored for litigation professionals, facilitating their engagement with complex data sets and extensive document collections.  QuikData’s intuitive interface simplifies the E-Discovery process for litigation service providers, attorneys, and support staff, enabling them to navigate the complexities of E-Discovery with ease.  This user-focused approach boosts legal team productivity and reduces the learning curve, allowing users to concentrate on winning legal cases, rather than struggling with software intricacies.

QuikData streamlines the e-discovery process with its drag-and-drop functionality, powerful templates, and customizable interface, allowing users to initiate projects swiftly and in their preferred manner. This efficiency eliminates the prolonged wait times previously experienced while preparing data for review. Moreover, QuikData provides many advanced features that enable users to access crucial information quickly and effortlessly.

Sophisticated Features

QuikData’s effectiveness stems from its combination of simplicity, affordability, and a rich array of features specifically designed for legal teams and technologists.  A key component is its integration of predictive coding, a potent E-Discovery tool that significantly improves the accuracy and speed of document review for litigation service providers.  Additionally, QuikData offers advanced email threading and communication analysis tools, including the ability to handle short message formats. These features provide a thorough understanding of communication patterns, an essential aspect in many legal cases.

QuikData distinguishes itself with its concept clustering feature, which facilitates a nuanced comprehension of how documents are interrelated. This feature is particularly valuable in scenarios where identifying connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information is crucial. 

The platform’s dedication to technological advancement is clear in its ongoing evolution, guaranteeing that litigation service providers and legal professionals always have access to cutting-edge tools to efficiently manage and understand the complexities of electronic data.

Come meet the QuikData team and see Quikdata for yourself at booth 3116 on the Americas 2 Level. 

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Centerbase Launches Native Document Management for Modern Law Firms – Replacing Need for Stand-Alone, Paid Solutions 

The new capability adds additional convenience and cost efficiency to Centerbase’s single-platform solution for comprehensive law firm management. 

DALLAS, TX (January 2024) – Today, Centerbase, a leader in legal technology solutions, proudly announces the launch of its innovative Native Document Management Solution, designed specifically for the legal industry. With this new solution, Centerbase’s state-of-the-art platform continues to simplify operations, such as how law firms manage documents across various matters, clients, and practice areas. The new intuitive and automated document workflows are expected to significantly enhance firms’ service delivery and ability to bill more hours. 

Traditionally, law firms relied on stand-alone, paid platforms for document management, which often led to fragmented user experiences and disjointed core processes between matters, clients, and practice areas, resulting in increased operational costs. Centerbase’s new integrated solution is engineered to provide a seamless user experience that mirrors how modern firms practice every day. The launch of the native document management solution is part of a larger strategic imperative at Centerbase to continue to power the most efficient operational solutions available for legal firms. 

A significant advantage of the native document management solution is its alignment with Microsoft Office technologies. By leveraging these widely-used tools, Centerbase ensures that law firms can maximize their existing technology investments. This synergy not only boosts cost efficiency but also ensures smooth and successful user adoption. 

Paul Bridgewater, President & CEO of Centerbase, remarks, “Our commitment to enhancing legal practice through technology is unwavering. The introduction of our Native Document Management Solution is a testament to this promise. By harnessing the power of the Microsoft ecosystem, we are not just providing a tool for today but future-proofing law firms for tomorrow. This solution paves the way for incorporating advanced technologies like AI, ensuring that the technology journey for law firms is both beneficial and cost-effective in the long term.” 

The native document management solution is also a step forward in reducing the additional costs and complexities associated with using external vendors. As an integrated part of the existing Centerbase platform, law firms who subscribe to Centerbase will have this new document management solution included at no additional monthly cost, further driving cost efficiencies. 

To learn more, visit Centerbase’s Document Management.

To see what the legal tech press is already saying Centerbase’s Document Management, click here.

To access Centerbase’s Press Kit, click here.  

About Centerbase 

Centerbase is a leading provider of legal technology solutions, specializing in delivering innovative, user-friendly, and efficient platforms to mid-sized law firms. With a focus on improving legal practice management, Centerbase remains at the forefront of technological advancements in the legal sector. 

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