Bob Ambrogi

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With Legalweek starting tomorrow, MaxVal, a Silicon Valley-based intellectual property software company, is today announcing the release of a major update of its IP management system. Symphony 3.6 is “an innovative leap forward” for the product, the company says, providing new analytics, intelligence, reporting, and automation features. The new release introduces the Analytical Insights Module, an advanced reporting engine capable of integrating data from different sources to provide complex, powerful analytics. The Symphony dashboard. Built using Salesforce’s Lightning platform and Einstein Analytics, the Analytical Insights Module simplifies the aggregation of disparate patent, financial and other external data to produce IP data…
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Lawyer marketplace UpCounsel is shutting down. The San Francisco based company, which has raised a total of $26 million, including a $12 million Series B in April 2018, notified customers by email this morning that it will shut down permanently on March 4. The company served corporations by providing freelance lawyers for anything from a one-time consultation to staffing a legal department. It was cofounded by Mason Blake, an engineer who was its CTO,  and Matt Faustman, its CEO and an attorney who previously represented startups in Silicon Valley. Following is the email that went out today: We want to…
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Five U.S. law firms — three in the last 24 hours — have been among the companies and organizations targeted by a new round of ransomware attacks. In two of the cases, a portion of the firms’ stolen data has already been posted online, including client information. This according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst with Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that is also an associate partner in the No More Ransom Project, an initiative between multiple law enforcement agencies and the private sector. Hackers have stolen data from at least five law firms, using the threat of releasing…
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I am thrilled today to announce the official launch of a website whose purpose is to provide broad coverage of legal technology news, reviews and insights, through a range of voices from throughout the United States and around the world. LegalTech Monitor will aggregate and curate the best writing on legal technology — drawn from bloggers all over the world who are covering this essential field. Our hope is that LegalTech Monitor will bring their posts together in a site that will become a one-stop shop for all things legal tech. Today is a soft launch of the site, with…
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Reynen Court, the Amsterdam-based company that has often been described as the app store of law, and which launched in beta last August, announced today that it is now commercially available. This comes after news yesterday that the international law firm Orrick has become an investor in Reynen Court, joining global firms Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins as financial backers of the business. Earlier this month, the company said it had raised an additional $3 million of financing through Prins H LLC, an investment vehicle controlled by Reynen Court founder and CEO Andrew Klein. In September, I interviewed…
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The e-discovery technology company Relativity is today announcing a new payment and pricing model for its cloud-based SaaS product RelativityOne. Under the new model, customers can now choose a pay-as-you-go pricing plan, under which they will pay for the software month-to-month based on utilization, measured by quantity of data and number of users. It was one year ago, almost to the day, that Relativity last announced new pricing and licensing options for RelativityOne. The changes last year reduced data fees by half, introduced a more flexible billing model, and created a special licensing option for e-discovery service providers. This…
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Prepare, dear readers, for an onslaught of legal technology news. Next week brings Legalweek in New York, the international legal mega-conference that encompasses Legaltech, one of the leading events in legal technology and a major venue for company announcements of product roll-outs and enhancements. First out of the gate today is e-discovery company CloudNine, which is announcing that it will next week release enhancements across its full suite of e-discovery applications: CloudNine Explore, LAW, Concordance, and Review. The company will also be previewing enhancements in the works for its Collection Manager, the new data-collection product that the company…
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Managing email is among the most frustrating problems lawyers face. ZERØ, launched in 2018, is a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to target lawyers’ email woes, automatically capturing billable time spent on email, automatically filing emails to the proper folders in a firm’s document management system, and guarding against inadvertently sending sensitive emails to the wrong recipient. Today, ZERØ is releasing a new “lite” version of its product, targeted at smaller and mid-sized firms. ZERØ Lite provides virtually the same functionality as the flagship product, except that it lacks the flagship product’s ability to integrate with and file emails…
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We live in an age in which how we buy a good or service matters as much as what we buy. The success of companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Uber and Netflix has less to do with what they sell than with how they sell it. They have changed the experience of how we consume, making it so you can get what you want, quickly and easily and in a way that you understand. We all get this when it comes to buying new headphones on Amazon or booking a rental on Airbnb. But for some reason, many legal professionals…
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In the legal industry, the concept of design thinking has become synonymous with the name Margaret Hagan. Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, she is also a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, a ubiquitous speaker at legal conferences worldwide, and a leading advocate for making the law more accessible. After graduating from Stanford Law in 2013, she became a fellow at the d.school, where she launched the Program for Legal Tech & Design, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful and engaging. She also…
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When I first read that the legal communications and marketing firm Baretz+Brunelle had launched a NewLaw practice to advise law firms “on ways to thrive in the modern marketplace,” my reaction was, “Well, isn’t that what every legal PR firm should be doing for its clients?” But in a telephone conversation this morning with the two principals of the new practice, legal industry veterans Brad Blickstein and Beatrice Seravello, I came to the realization that this is something more than a PR consultancy. Rather, it is a soup-to-nuts advisory group that will help law firms at every step, from…
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Litigation analytics is a rapidly growing area of legal technology, promising lawyers valuable insights into courts, judges, opposing counsel and parties. But these products are not created equal. Their results can vary widely depending on the sources and quality of data they use and the types of analytics they provide. I wrote about this last November, in a post, Legal Analytics Products Deliver Widely Divergent Results, Study Shows, where I reported on a study conducted by a group of law librarians who compared federal court results across seven legal analytics products and found major differences in the kinds of…
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James Sandman, who as president of the Legal Services Corporation for the past nine years has championed innovation in the delivery of legal services and the use of technology to enhance access to justice, is stepping down. In an email this morning to executive directors of LSC grantee organizations, Sandman said that his last day will be Feb. 19. After he leaves, Ronald S. Flagg, the LSC’s vice president for legal affairs, general counsel and corporate secretary, will step in as interim president as the LSC board begins a national search for a permanent replacement. Just yesterday, I posted Jim …
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In multiple ways, Stacy Butler is immersed in seeking to innovate the justice system and the delivery of legal services. As director of the Innovation for Justice program at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, she leads students in thinking critically about the power of technology and innovation to close the justice gap. As president of the board of Step Up To Justice, she is helping to rethink the provision of free legal services. As a member of the Arizona Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services, she is helping to reshape the…
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Just last week, I reported here about the name change of Axiom Managed Services, one of two companies spun off last year from alternative legal services provider Axiom. With its new name, Factor, and a “doubling down” by two long-term investors, the company characterized the move as a relaunch to position it for rapid growth. Now the company, which has operated without a formal chief executive officer since last year’s spin-off, has named the person who will lead it into this period of ambitious investment and growth. The company is announcing today that Varun Mehta, 34, has…
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Few would dispute that an essential ingredient in addressing the access-to-justice crisis is technology. Technology can provide the economies of scale, efficiencies of process and tools of innovation that can enable legal services to be provided more broadly and equitably. But what must be done for technology to improve access-to-justice? How can we best harness technology and put it to effective use in bridging the justice gap? At the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology conference last week in Portland, Ore., LSC President James J. Sandman opened the event with a talk in which he outlined the five requirements that…