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.

/by Luminance

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.”

 

/by iManage

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

/by Jeffrey Wolff

ZyLAB Launches Legal Hold Solution
Enhanced platform now available for sending and tracking of legal hold notices continuing in ZyLAB’s methodology focusing on ease of use.

TYSONS, Virginia, January 25, 2021: ZyLAB, manufacturer of ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery, announced the launch of its new Legal Hold application for corporations and governments.

A legal (or litigation) hold is a notification sent by an organization’s legal department to inform employees of current or pending litigation that will impact their handling of electronically stored information (ESI) pertinent to the case. Many corporations today still issue legal holds manually and painfully track responses via spreadsheets.

ZyLAB Legal Hold provides an easy-to-use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that allows organizations to deploy a fully-configured legal hold management system within their enterprise within hours. Custom message templates, automated reminders, custodian questionnaires and the ability to automatically integrate and synchronize with their corporate directory eliminates risk and vastly increases the efficiency for corporate legal teams to manage their hold process.

“ZyLAB ONE Legal Hold truly completes our next-generation SaaS offering to the eDiscovery community. It brings together best-of-breed infrastructure and security with ease-of-use for our customers and tightly integrates to our collection and review platform.” says Dennis van der Veeke, CEO of ZyLAB.

“Our new application was built from the ground-up to streamline the legal hold process for corporations who routinely have to notify and manage hold tracking.” says Jeffrey Wolff, Director of Legal Technology for ZyLAB. “Real-time dashboards along with detailed reporting and a self-service custodian portal will vastly reduce the amount of time organizations spend on this often manual process.“

ZyLAB Legal Hold is available now to organizations in North America.

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

/by Jeffrey Wolff

ZyLAB Adds Audio Review to eDiscovery
Audio and video analysis will enhance the ZyLAB ONE platform and provide new abilities for its users across all markets

TYSONS, Virginia, January 25, 2021: ZyLAB, manufacturer of ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery, announced the integration of Intelligent Voice Audio Review to their platform.

Intelligent Voice’s solution is already successfully helping law firms and government agencies around the world to ingest, transcribe, analyze and review vast amounts of audio, in a secure environment, freeing up valuable lawyer time and cutting down on costs. By automatically transcribing and indexing audio and video files, the new combined solution makes audio review as easy as reviewing any other document. The new enhancement lets users ingest and search vast quantities of audio securely using Intelligent Voice’s unique ultra-high-speed GPU-powered speech recognition algorithms. Working across more than a dozen languages and dialects, IV’s market leading SmartTranscript™ technology cuts review time by 70%.

“Audio files and video recordings make up a large part of the data that needs to be reviewed in legal fact-finding missions.” says Yaron Goldstein, Chief Technology Officer at ZyLAB. “The integration of IV’s speech review software in our eDiscovery platform allows our customers to directly review these video and audio files, saving them valuable time in the review process.” Nigel Cannings, Chief Technology Officer of Intelligent Voice states “We believe that ZyLAB’s approach to audio and video review places them in a leadership position in the eDiscovery space, and we are delighted to be working with them.”

Audio Review will be available shortly to all ZyLAB ONE customers in both the North American and European markets and will be priced by the amount of audio hours 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

About Intelligent Voice
Intelligent Voice Limited is a global leader in the development of proactive compliance and eDiscovery technology solutions for voice, video and other media. Its clients include government agencies, banks, securities firms, Call-Centres, litigation support providers, international consultancy, advisory businesses and insurers, all involved in the management of risk and meeting of multi-jurisdictional regulation. Visit www.intelligentvoice.com for more information.
TYSONS, Virginia, January 25, 2021: ZyLAB, manufacturer of ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery, announced the integration of Intelligent Voice Audio Review to their platform.

Contact information:
1775 Tysons Boulevard, 5th Floor
Tysons, VA, 22102
703-442-2400
sales@zylab.com

/by Jeffrey Wolff

Modern Document Management: How Law Departments Can Work Smarter.

Read more. 

 

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Companies can seamlessly shift to the new hybrid workplace and balance between remote work and the future workplace.

In a time where the COVID pandemic has forced businesses and its employees to veer from traditional working practices, opportunities have risen for companies to transform their workspaces and hours in order to continue operations whilst ensuring the safety of their workers and customers.

Earlier this year, Smarten Spaces, a global workplace technology brand creating future-ready spaces, announced the availability of Jumpree 3.0 – a fully integrated end-to-end software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that helps companies get back to work and employees comfortable with the new workplace. Smarten Spaces can better meet the needs of users in the post-pandemic world, combining the latest innovative technology with a deep understanding of the cultural forces that shape workplace interactions and engagement.

/by Smarten Spaces

ne of the characteristics of the workplace of 2020 has been the lack of people in the office. COVID-19 saw a significant proportion of businesses adopt remote work in support of efforts to contain the pandemic.

Is there a better way, a smart way for businesses to organise their workforce so that they can optimise fixed assets like facilities?

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) forecasts that “upwards of 40% of today’s office assets need some form of enhancement to stay relevant.” The JLL report, Home and away: the new workplace hybrid?, suggests that during the COVID-19 period, 68% of employees were working from home.

FutureCIO spoke to Dinesh Malkani, founder and CEO of Smarten Spaces, how COVID-19 is forcing organisations to reimagine the workplace.

Smarten Spaces has built technology and platform to make smarter and better use of workspaces. Malkani acknowledged that technology penetration in space management remains low although the pandemic may be changing that.

“Every office is being re-done as people are moving towards the hybrid workplace. We happen to be a startup that has the entire technology solution ready to bring companies to hybrid working in the hybrid workplace.”

Dinesh Malkani

Sundar Nagarajan, head of Consulting at JLL, noted that the pace of digitization and adoption of automation in 2020 has accelerated businesses to 2023-2024 levels right away, adjusting decision-making and way of working – all in the name of revenue.

Malkani noted that the shift to a hybrid model of work is not entirely driven by COVID-19. Organisations have been studying this opportunity even before that. He did acknowledge that many such discussions floated around experimentations. He credits the pandemic as proving that it is possible to sanction work from anywhere without sacrificing productivity or risking security.

“Companies have been moving in the direction of being able to work from anywhere – in the office, co-working space, or home, in what we now classify as hybrid work strategies,” he concluded.

Challenges for leadership

According to Malkani, the challenge for CHROs is to ensure that they’re able to offer the notion of flexibility to all of the workforce. “They will then need to consider the policies and rules around such arrangements. HR teams today are grappling with the fact that we can now hire anyone from anywhere in the world, as we work remotely,” he added.

For CFOs and CEOs, the discussion will become mainly about cost considerations and the optimum use of whatever approach is taken by the company. The CIO’s task will be around the use of technology to facilitate hybrid work strategies.

Technology-led adoption

“To create a frictionless environment where workforce productivity is at its peak, a lot of data needs to be relooked at. The CIO will need to ensure that the environment and network are secure and that regulations are complied with,” he added.

According to Malkani, the pandemic has influenced what and how technology is being used in the workplace. Employee safety and the ability to find available space have become important considerations in the adoption.

“Incorporating technology is key in making it easy and essential for the user to address their concerns, and that’s when the adoption rate becomes high. Technology is no longer a nice to have. Beyond providing data, AI-incorporated technology that provides recommendations to business owners has a huge role to play in driving adoption rates,” he added.

He saw the shift to AI within the realm of workspaces as an essential ingredient to achieving a successful hybrid workplace that is very productive and cost-effective.

Click on the podchat player above to listen to Malkani share his opinion and recommendations on the better use of workspaces using technology.

  1. How do you see space-as-a-service and office decentralization changing the workplace of the future?
  2. But how do you see space-as-a-service and office decentralisation changing the workplace of the future?
  3. Analysts suggest that the post-COVID workplace normalisation will combine remote work together with the traditional office environment. How will this shift impact the way CIOs, CEOs, CHROs and CFOs these executives do their job?
  4. How does the CIO ensure that they are able to connect or to manage the workforce and the facilities that they use including network infrastructure, the applications, even when those persons are not in the actual enterprise facility, the operations itself?
  5. How do technologies like those of Smarten Spaces protect data privacy?
  6. What is the Smarten Space value proposition for mall operators?
  7. What will further drive the adoption of technologies, similar to what Smarten Spaces offers today?
  8. When you pitch a Smarten Spaces solution to prospective clients, what’s the typical objection that they would present to you?
  9. What do you see in terms of emerging technologies that will further influence the proptech market that you are in?

 

/by Smarten Spaces

The Session, Featuring Software Company Legal Experts, Will Reveal How AI Can Increase Productivity by 50% or More for Corporate Legal Departments

HOUSTON, January 19, 2021 – Onit, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise workflow solutions, including enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management and business process automation, today announced that experts from Onit and Adobe will present on AI and contract management at the first session of 2021 for Legalweek(year). The CLE-eligible virtual discussion, scheduled for Tuesday, February 2, at 3:45 p.m. EST and titled “The Potential Impact of AI on Managing Contracts,” will center on the challenges of contract drafting and review and how AI and automation can address them.

The pandemic has underscored the growing need for efficiency and cost savings for corporate legal departments. Contract management is a process ripe for digital transformation, as manually reviewing and drafting contracts can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. When AI is properly and strategically applied, the results can be substantial. For example, in a recent study, new AI users became 35% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive and users discovered cost reductions of 33% related to contract processing.

A panel of experts will tackle this topic, examining the impact of AI and automation on contract lifecycle management. They’ll also discuss how lawyers can dramatically streamline many activities typical of contract work, such as redlining, comparing clauses to corporate standards and ensuring that fine details comply with corporate policy. The speakers include:

  • Stasha Jain, Vice President of Legal and Compliance for Onit, an attorney with extensive experience for organizations including Onit, ZS Associates, Hewitt Associates and Venture Law Group
  • Nick Whitehouse, General Manager of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, an AI expert focused on digital transformation for legal organizations
  • Jean Yang, Vice President of the Onit AI Center of Excellence, a technologist who began her career as a solicitor and was named the Emerging ICT Leader of the Year 2019
  • Letitia Hsu, CIPP/US, Associate Legal Counsel, Adobe Inc., in-house counsel within Adobe’s product legal group with experience in privacy, data security and intellectual property matters

To register for Legalweek(year) visit here.

Onit, AI and Contract Lifecycle Management

Onit recently launched two new AI-enabled technologies. Precedent, an artificial intelligence platform, reads, writes and reasons like a lawyer while automating and improving legal and business processes. ReviewAI uses artificial intelligence to quickly review, redline and edit all types of contracts. Nonlegal business users can automatically receive approved contracts via email or a self-service portal in less than two minutes. Lawyers and contract professionals can use the ReviewAI Word Add-in to automatically review, redline and edit contracts, including NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, purchase agreements, lease agreements and more against corporate standards. To schedule a demo or learn more, visit here.

Visit Onit During Legalweek(year)

Legalweek(year) attendees are invited to join exclusive demonstrations of Onit’s AI and automation technologies. Onit will be holding group and individual product demonstrations of ReviewAI and Precedent, as well as its solutions for Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management and Legal Service Request. Email marketing@onit.com for more information or to schedule an appointment.

About Onit     

Onit is a global leader of workflow and artificial intelligence platforms and solutions for legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR and finance departments. With Onit, companies can transform best practices into smarter workflows, better processes and operational efficiencies. With a focus on enterprise legal management, matter management, spend management, contract lifecycle management and legal holds, the company operates globally and helps transform the way Fortune 500 companies and billion-dollar corporate legal departments bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement. Onit helps customers find gains in efficiency, reduce costs and automate transactions faster. For more information, visit www.onit.com or call 1-800-281-1330.

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Managing risk at an organization is a full-time job, especially for a general counsel (GC) or chief legal officer (CLO). As a company’s chief internal lawyer, they are expected to provide legal advice on a vast range of subjects – legal rights, risk mitigation, compliance with new and existing laws and so much more.

If that weren’t enough, GCs and CLOs are also expected to manage the organization’s legal matters, oversee outside counsel spend, conduct legal research, review internal litigation strategy, and be the ultimate approver and keeper of the organization’s contracts. Despite handling all these critical, sensitive matters, legal departments are often seen as “cost centers” and therefore are forced to do their challenging jobs without all the resources they need to succeed.

Technology, automation and artificial intelligence are key to doing more with less and streamlining processes, particularly when it comes to contracts. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools allow busy lawyers end-to-end control over contracts, freeing up time to focus on other tasks in the process. They can also play pivotal roles in helping corporate legal departments reduce contract management costs. For example, Pearson’s commercial transactions shared service center for more than 10,000 users worldwide achieved a 35% cost reduction and 30% improved contract turnaround time.

Contractual Pain Points

Even the simplest contracts can expose an organization to risk and liability if it’s not handled correctly. GCs and CLOs are tasked with overseeing the crucial job of examining and creating draft agreements, maintaining knowledge of the organization’s operations and legal documents, approving non-standard contract language and more.

Without a centralized solution for managing contracts on an organization-wide basis, legal departments run into countless hurdles, including:

  • Inconsistent language between contracts, often caused by employees using out-of-date contract templates
  • Competing objectives of moving contracts through quickly yet still having enough oversight to effectively manage risk obligations
  • A lack of insight into all the organization’s current contracts
  • An inability to track changes in contracts and ensure that contracts are in compliance with new and existing laws and regulations
  • The risk that contracts might expire or renew without notice because no one’s tracking them
  • Complicated review and approval processes for even standard contracts
  • Manual review and approval processes that create longer contract cycle times
  • Human error and inconsistencies inherent in manual processes, increasing the organization’s risk exposure
  • Lost revenue when add-ons, upgrades and renewals are missed
  • Being seen by other aspects of the business as a barrier to closing deals

The above list is by no means exhaustive. Given the large volume of contracts at today’s modern businesses, the challenges presented by trying to manage those contracts can become overwhelming when you rely on manual processes or basic contract tools that lack automation and AI and a means of creating a single source of truth for the organization’s contracts.

The Benefits of CLM Tools

While the challenges outlined above may seem daunting, they’re not insurmountable. CLM tools use automation and AI to remove the tedious, manual aspects of traditional contract management, increasing accuracy and efficiency, eliminating errors, and freeing up precious time that GCs and CLOs can use to focus on the many other critical tasks they’re responsible for handling.

Among other things, the right CLM solution will allow you to:

  • Find every contract you need, when you need it
  • Store all your contracts in one cloud location, creating a single source of truth for your organization’s contract data
  • Have full visibility at all times into the status of contract drafting, negotiations, amendments, and renewals, ensuring that nothing’s missed or overlooked
  • Implement uniform templates and playbooks to speed up contract cycle times, reduce manual errors and ensure you’re always using preferred terms
  • Automate approval processes to eliminate bottlenecks
  • Be notified of contract renewals to get a jumpstart on the process
  • Allow for self-service, so that other departments can create standard contracts with the correct language without legal review
  • Better manage risk across the organization
  • Demonstrate that the legal department is a strategic partner of the business, not a cost center

The ideal CLM tool will give you real-time insights into all phases of the contract lifecycle and provide you with actionable intelligence to make informed decisions for the business. More information means a better ability to identify and control risks across the contract process.

It’s time to take control of your contracts and let automation and AI do the heavy lifting for you. Contact us today to learn more about how Onit can help you implement end-to-end CLM for your organization.

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