"You Don't Need to Do this In-House"

Here's a "solution for GCs, designed and delivered by GCs” – now backed by a 20% stake from Pinsent Masons, this NewLaw outsourcing startup, Yuzu takes over part (or all) of your in-house legal work, freeing up your team to focus on the meaty stuff.

In the words of co-founder and former Colt GC, Robin Saphra:

"You don't need to do this in-house, I can provide a better service at a lower cost and give more investment to this in order to achieve that. And you can focus your activity on the top 10% - 30% of work which is really strategic and really important."

Examples of work that could be outsourced include commercial contracts, employment work or property transactions – not the type of work typically done by LPOs – but work that's still core to an in-house legal team.

And given that Yuzu proposes to take on that part of the team doing this work, keeping them either onsite with the original crew or shipped to a new location, it's sure to raise a few eyebrows in the junior-mid ranks of in-house counsel.

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LiquidText: Reimagine document mark-up and review

For iPad users, this app will take your review and note taking experience to the next level. I’ll let this 1 min video do the talking.

In the words of its CEO, Craig Tashman (via Robert Ambrogi’s review):

“Legal apps to date tend to use touch and pen the way we use a mouse and keyboard… [h]ere’s one of the first that really tries to rethink how the tablet, touch and pen can improve research, discovery, trial prep, etc.”

Might start saving for an iPad…

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This Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours

JPMorgan have built a machine learning engine called COIN (Contract Intelligence) that breezes through the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that used to consume 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers.

Powered by Gaia, JPMorgan’s own computing cloud, the software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation.

According to its designers:

“the program has helped JPMorgan cut down on loan-servicing mistakes, most of which stemmed from human error in interpreting 12,000 new wholesale contracts per year.”

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What's the Civil Penalty?

If you geek out on civil penalties (and who doesn’t) here is one for you.

This engine lets you search 1,569,269 laws from 79 countries, extracts the civil penalties from those laws, converts them to USD and voilà!

For example, search “money laundering” and you’ll see 22 results from Australian laws.

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Reimagining Contracts

For anyone managing contracts, T&Cs etc, Meeta Gournay and her team at Nift have collaborated with NatWest to develop a platform to help customers understand what they’re signing.

Through a series of user-friendly annotations, quizzes, FAQs and clever design, users can verify their understanding, increase engagement, while giving you detailed analytics and an audit trail for each issued contract.

In the words of Alison Rose, CEO, NatWest Commercial and Private Banking:

“It’s important customers understand what they are signing so we wanted to find a way to encourage more people to read before they sign. Working with prehype to develop Nift has enabled us to bring an innovative product to market quickly whilst also helping us to improve customer experience and trust.”

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QnA Markup

Finally clicked into this little beauty called QnA Markup - a free, open source app for in-house and private practice lawyers alike to create interactive Q and A sessions, or to be fancy about it, build stand-alone expert systems or for rule-based document construction. Or even, dare I say, a bot!

Creating the rules feels like writing clauses in Word (if you’re used to flowcharts/rules, you’ll have an edge) and the end result is a super clean chat interface that looks easy enough to implement on a webpage.

Tonnes of scope for creative lawyers to add-value to clients/the business.

Start playing with the chat on the right, then watch the video intro to get a good feel.

Hat tip to David Colarusso for crafting it :)

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The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2016

Here's another brilliant LegalTech wrap (primarily US) by Robert Ambrogi.

My picks would be AI (#1) and data analytics (#4), with the digitisation of US case law (#8) feeding into both of those nicely.

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