The Small Country Making a Big Impact on Blockchain Adoption

July 17th, 2018 → 4:43 pm @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Ian Gauci, a founding partner with GTG Advocates, a law firm of 22 professionals in Malta. He serves on Malta’s National Blockchain Task Force and is one of the drafters of a new law on smart contracts, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, and advises the government and financial institutions on fintech and blockchain matters.

We discussed why distributed ledger technology like blockchain has become so popular in Malta, the unique characteristics of the Maltese legal community that fuel adoption of new technology thrive, how lawyers can take advantage of blockchain and other DLT tools, the risks of doing so, and where this sector is headed in Europe.

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GDPR and the Value of Cyber Clarity

July 13th, 2018 → 11:42 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Imran Jaswal, a managing director at Duff and Phelps who serves as the commercial lead for the company’s new CyberClarity360 solution.

We discussed the genesis of CyberClarity360, factors that impact an organization’s cyber risk profile, how CyberClarity360 helps third-party vendors improve their cybersecurity, and ways that it is being used to navigate GDPR.

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Auto-classification, Artificial Intelligence, and Legal Tech in Belgium

July 5th, 2018 → 8:39 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Yves Lefere, the commercial director at Knowliah, a Belgium-based provider of a new digital workplace platform for corporate legal departments in Europe.

We discussed what Knowliah offers the legal market, how its technology has evolved since it was founded two decades ago, the overall appetite for legal technology in Belgium, the challenges European corporate legal departments are trying to overcome with legal technology, and where the European legal tech market is headed in the next year.

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The Future of Legal Tech in Israel

June 27th, 2018 → 8:04 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Esther Dediashvili, the legal knowledge manager and head of legal technology implementation at Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co, one of the largest law firms in Israel.

We discussed the impact of knowledge management in Israeli law firms, its significance, how technology contributes to legal knowledge management, and the future of legal technology in Israel.

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Custom Software Solutions for Legal

June 22nd, 2018 → 12:19 pm @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Doug Geller, the founder and president of GDSI, a software company that specializes in solving challenges in the legal industry by developing custom tools and augmenting existing applications for law firms, legal departments, and legal software vendors focused on document and records management, case management, and practice management.

We discussed the genesis of GDSI, the benefits of writing custom software, and where the market for custom software is headed.

Listen to our interview below:

AI Transcript below:

Introduction: Welcome to reinventing professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst, Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas, guidance, and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services.

Ari Kaplan: This is Ari Kaplan and I’m speaking today with Doug Geller, the founder and president of GDSI, a software company that specializes in solving challenges in the legal industry by developing custom tools and augmenting existing applications for law firms, legal departments and legal software vendors, primarily focused on document and records management, case management and practice management. Hi Doug. How are you?

Doug Geller: Good, how are you? Thank you so much for inviting me.

Ari Kaplan: It’s a privilege. So tell us about your background and the genesis of GDSI.

Doug Geller: I started in the legal software industry in the early nineties and immediately got actively involved in the document management and records management space from a consulting perspective, but later on started getting more into the development side of legal software. In about 2006, there was this big trend, of course, of implementing iManage in the document management world, as many law firms were moving off of DocsOpen and we saw a trend which law firms needed software solutions that went beyond your average integrated application. They were more integrated at a much higher business level and interest in taking different applications and making them play together and just taking development for these standard legal applications to a whole new level is what started GDSI.

Ari Kaplan: For what types of projects do law firms, law departments, or legal software vendors typically engage GDSI?

Doug Geller: GDSI concentrates on custom development for, as you mentioned, law firms and legal departments and even legal software companies. So small law tends to reach out to us to build templates and macros and even desktop databases like Microsoft access databases while medium to large firms want more integration with document management, financial products, or workflow solutions. But the larger firms want to take it to the next step, which is creating standalone custom case products or custom practice management suites. We’ve even had law firms ask us for a custom document management system that’s very specific to how they work and so we’ll work with them building these products regardless of the size of the firm to tackle whatever challenges they’re facing that need to be addressed.

Ari Kaplan: How is GDSI’s approach different from an internal development team or one that’s based overseas?

Doug Geller: This has been a problem that we noticed for quite some time. There was that whole big rush to utilize overseas development teams in other countries for a while and one of the problems that we noticed is you have to deal directly with the developers themselves or maybe a very technical project manager and it was always a timing issue of because they are so many hours ahead and budgets go out of whack, or you’re not on the same page and your expectations are never met. Then, there’s the whole scope creep problem. When we built GDSI, we planned to remove the complexity from the development and deal with the problem of developers and budgets and timelines. We deal with that behind the scenes, but we’ve introduced product management and the product managers who sit down with our clients and truly understand what needs to be tackled, and the real problems that they are trying to solve. We concentrate on legal and we can concentrate on product management, which is really understanding what needs to get done, what are some of the benefits of writing custom software as opposed to buying a product off the shelf and customizing that. So when we’re dealing with custom software, it doesn’t have to be a big expensive project that needs to be written. Typically, an organization will ask us to build a solution because they cannot find it. Some firms come to us requesting specific features and others want a solution that ties various items together in one screen. We are often building custom software to create something with a single interface. It’s capturing exactly what needs to get done as opposed to all the many features that these other products have and we’re solving a very specific need.

Ari Kaplan: Does GDSI also sell its own software?

Doug Geller: We don’t. We make it a point that that GDSI is dedicated to custom development, augmenting existing development teams. We work with many legal software companies and help out their development teams with new versions and new products and getting products out the door, but every now and then we come across a pretty cool concept or a pretty cool idea. Maybe what I’ll do is I’ll set up a separate company. We just did this with a company that we created called Red Rock for contract management software. We had a law firm who came to us with a pretty big problem and we built a contract management application to handle it to solve their problem. It solved that challenge and we felt that many law firms throughout the world can take advantage of this, so we created a separate company for that. That happens time to time, but really GDSI is dedicated just to creating software for our clients and then we hand over all intellectual property and we do not keep anything.

Ari Kaplan: Where do you see the market for custom software headed?

Doug Geller: You’re always going to have the situation of CIOs, IT directors, and application managers who are just dead set against any form of custom work and I get it, but I think a lot of that has changed. The more larger firms that we speak to, the more we realize that their clients are actually demanding custom solutions. I think firms are realizing that in order to stay up to date, they need some form of custom solution. And I also feel, again, firms do not have to spend a lot of money to build some form of a custom solution. They can certainly just take advantage of solving very specific niches with very specific web apps or mobile solutions or databases of some sort of where they need to go and we see more and more of that every day than ever before. It’s more common. As Microsoft puts more and more into making their Sequel Express or Visual Studio available and free, it just becomes more common and it becomes easier to write. So there’s always going to be that need for custom solutions.

Ari Kaplan: This is Ari Kaplan speaking with Doug Geller, the founder and president of GDSI, a software company that specializes in solving challenges in the legal industry by developing custom tools and augmenting existing applications for law firms, legal departments, and legal software vendors. Doug, thank you very much.

Doug Geller: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Closing: Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast. Visit ReinventingProfessionals.com or AriKaplanAdvisors.com to learn more.

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AI and the Law Firm of 2030

June 21st, 2018 → 12:21 pm @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Emily Foges, the CEO of Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession.

We discussed the genesis of Luminance, the challenges associated with the adoption of technology at law firms, characteristics of the law firm of 2030, and what the emergence of technology like Luminance means for the future of legal services.

Listen to our interview below:

Ps. I have included an AI-generated transcript below for your reference.

Introduction: Welcome to the Reinventing Professionals podcast hosted by industry analyst, Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas, guidance, and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services.

Ari Kaplan: This is Ari Kaplan and I’m speaking today with Emily Foges, the CEO of Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession. Hi Emily. How are you?

Emily Foges: Hi, Ari. I’m fine. Thank you very much.

Ari Kaplan: Emily, tell us about your background and the genesis of Luminance.

Emily Foges: I have always worked on M&A projects, but on the end of things where you find typically that somebody bought a company and actually it’s never quite what you expected it to be. No matter how much due diligence you do, there are always surprises, so I was very interested when I was approached by the early Luminance team who were all technologists from the University of Cambridge who had been working with advanced machine learning techniques to develop technology that could read and understand documents, legal documents, and then learn from the interaction between lawyers and those documents to get smarter. I was really fascinated by this and this is a really good opportunity to tackle, first of all, the problem with due diligence, then how the team of lawyers can possibly get through such vast quantities of documentation and make sense of it. I came on board with those guys back in early 2016 and we worked together to develop the interface with some leading lawyers in London to make it fit seamlessly within the thought processes of corporate lawyers conducting M&A due diligence in the first instance. And then we launched the platform in September 2016 and we’ve come a really long way since then. We’ve now got nearly 80 customers in 23 countries around the world and we are now at the point where we’re starting to provide services to corporate legal teams as well. So it’s a very exciting time.

Ari Kaplan: I saw Luminance representatives at both the Lexpo conference in Amsterdam and at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Institute in Las Vegas. How have audiences both in the U.S. and Europe been responding to your approach?

Emily Foges: So it’s been very interesting, actually. One of the interesting things about the legal profession is that it’s an industry that hasn’t changed very much over the years and so change is in itself quite a new thing and actually we found certain European countries would be much faster to adopt the technology than anywhere else, so Lexpo in Amsterdam is quite poignant for us because one of our first customers, in fact our second customer, was a Dutch law firm. We swiftly moved onto the Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. They were very quick to adopt and then we went around the other side of the world and ended up in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and even Thailand. What was really fascinating to me was that it was only once we’d gone on that sort of journey around the whole world, kind of collecting up customers all over the place that we started to get the U.K. and U.S. law firms interested, you’d kind of think it would work the other way around. But yeah, it was interesting that it did that and it tells you a lot, I think, about scale really. If you’re a huge law firm, it’s much harder to make changes than if you’re a smaller, more agile shop.

Ari Kaplan: Can you tell us how Luminance works and how these different firms are deploying it?

Emily Foges: What Luminance does is you can upload the documents and really quite quickly it reads and understands all of those documents and places the findings in a very intuitive interface and that interface, we call it the Intelligent Viewer, gives a team of lawyers an instant understanding of a whole data room in a way that’s never been possible before. So you can look at a glance and see where the likely issues are. Bring the most important documents to the top of the pile immediately and start your review by focusing in the right places. That’s been very powerful for firms who want an additional layer of insight into their due diligence so that when they start the transaction, they start from a position of much greater control and much greater confidence in what they’re looking for. So for example, most law firms, when they conduct due diligence, there’s so much documentation they know they’re never going to get through it all, so they negotiate samples right, so you decide which documents are going to put in the samples for your review, those and the rest of them are just massive scope. What we find with Luminance is very often you’ll upload a set of documents and find that some of the most interesting documents, some of the most telling ones in terms of how the business operates, would have fallen outside the sample because they’re not particularly material, but they might come from a jurisdiction that makes a big difference to the transaction overall. So Luminance has really turned around that data room and rather than just showing you the most important material documents from a commercial point of view, it shows you first the ones that are most anomalous, most unusual, that differ from norm for some reason, and as a corporate lawyer, that’s where you’re likely to find those kinds of hidden gems of information that might otherwise get missed. That’s what Luminance does and in terms of how firms are adopting, there is a huge variety. Luminance is a technology that you can get up and running in under an hour and you don’t need to do any pre-setup configuration, pre-training or anything like that. That has made it possible, I think, for smaller firms with fewer resources to adopt the technology and just get going on a real life piece of work where they can really use the technology to work faster, find issues more quickly and spend more of their time on the more meaningful analysis rather than the sort of repetitive grunt work going through document after document. For the bigger firms, and we’ve got some very big firms – we’ve got 10 of the global top 100 law firms on our books now, there’s a different approach. Sometimes, they might decide to adopt one transaction at a time, so one partner will conduct one transaction. They’ll learn from that, and then other partners will decide that they want to get on board as well. Or, they’ll do the full roll out through their knowledge management team in terms of redefining the way that they work on a transaction and training all of their new associates in that way. It really varies from firm to firm.

Ari Kaplan: What are the challenges associated with the adoption of your technology at law firms?

Emily Foges: I think the first one is obviously just the nature of law firms, right? They are very complicated organizations as we all know. The partner model means that you very often need consensus across the firm, across lots of different stakeholders before a decision can be made, particularly about adopting technology which changes the way that you work. That’s always going to be a challenge in legal tech to get firms to make a decision about how they’re going to move forward with technology. That hasn’t been easy, but we’ve kind of cracked it. I think with 78 customers on board in 18 months, I think we can say that we’ve managed to convince them. That’s been probably the hardest thing. You know that the spirit is willing and you meet lawyers who say: “Oh, you know, we just need an end to this long, painful process and need to find a better way of working. There must be a better way of working. Oh look, here it is right now. How do we get on board with this?” And, then it does get more complicated. We’ve got some customers who carried out the pilot with a 15 months ago, right back in the early days, and have only just signed up because that’s how long it takes to get all of these things signed off, but that’s just the nature of this business.

Ari Kaplan: Does your technology represent the end of lawyers as we know them?

Emily Foges: I don’t believe it does for a minute. In fact. I think what we’re seeing here is a real return to proper legal work. I mean, when I talk to very senior lawyers in the city of London, they’ll say: “You know what? I worry about trainees today. [So, junior associates as you’d call them in the New York.] We hire the best of the best, the brightest young minds out of law school and we cream off the top and we bring them into the firm and then we give them unbelievably boring, repetitive work to do.” One of a number of things is going to happen. Either they’re going to get bored and leave and do something else or they’re going to burn out or they’re going to sort of get Stockholm Syndrome, become repetitive, boring lawyers and we don’t want them to be the partners of the future and they’ll say when they were in their twenties, you know, they’d come out of law school and it was really exciting going work for a big corporate law firm and be on the cutting edge of a deal and it doesn’t feel like that now as a young lawyer now. You feel like you’re doing machine work, so the law firm of the future. I think it’s a very bright future. It’s a future where lawyers will be back doing this meaningful work that they studied for. Most people go into law because they want to make a difference. Getting back to a profession where lawyers are working in a way where they’re learning everyday rather than doing the same repetitive exercise every day until they manage to move beyond that into something more meaningful.

Ari Kaplan: What does the law firm of 2030 look like?

Emily Foges: I think it is going to be a really exciting place full of bright, enthusiastic, interesting lawyers who have been freed up from the shackles of all of this tedious, repetitive work that increasingly young lawyers have to deal with now and are really applying their minds to really creatively solving problems on behalf of their clients and adding huge amounts of value to their clients. Not through the crunching through of documents but through really kind of informed analysis where they can work on more transactions than ever before and so they learn more from that and they become real experts in their field and are able to really guide their clients and advise them in a very meaningful way.

Ari Kaplan: What does the emergence of technology like yours mean for the future of legal services?

Emily Foges: I think it means that the commercial model will probably change because at the moment we have a commercial model which is very much driven by billable hours still. I think we’re starting to see that go into decline, but I think realistically in the future that will become a lot less relevant. You will no longer be judged by how long it took you to do something. It will be much more outcome focused, and I think clients will value the firms who are able to get to the answers most quickly and most meaningfully. I think it’ll be positive for everybody concerned. I really don’t see a downside to this for the legal profession. It is potentially an issue for paralegals who are currently plugging the gap. I think the market for that kind of work will disappear and be replaced by technology, but not for the brightest legal minds.

Ari Kaplan: This is Ari Kaplan speaking with Emily Foges, the CEO of Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession. Emily, thanks so very much.

Emily Foges: Thanks, Ari. Nice to speak to you.

Closing: Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast. Visit ReinventingProfessionals.com or AriKaplanAdvisors.com to learn more.

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Why Legal Tech Conferences Have Become a Global Phenomenon

June 14th, 2018 → 7:58 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Andrew King, the founder & strategic advisor of E-Discovery Consulting, which provides litigation support guidance to law firms and corporate legal departments throughout New Zealand. He is also the creator of the LawFest New Zealand conference.

We discussed the genesis of LawFest New Zealand, why legal tech conferences have become so popular, the challenges associated with developing a legal tech conference, the legal tech climate in New Zealand, and the value of a legal tech index.

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The Emergence of Legal Tech in Malaysia

June 13th, 2018 → 7:49 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Soon Yi Loo, the co-founder and CEO of CanLaw Asia, a legal tech consultancy for law firms and corporate legal departments in Malaysia. He is also the creator of the LexTech conference, which is an event focused on educating legal professionals in Malaysia about how to enhance their practices through technology.

We discussed the genesis of CanLaw Asia and the LexTech conference, how legal technology is perceived in Malaysia, the most popular type of legal technology in the country, whether lawyers in Malaysia are receptive to the application of technology to their practices, where the legal tech sector in Malaysia is headed.

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Less Email, Better Managed

June 12th, 2018 → 7:52 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Dan Hauck and Bradlee Duncan, the vice president of Product & User Experience, and the senior product manager, respectively, for NetDocuments, a cloud-based content management platform for law firms and corporate legal departments.

We discussed the company’s recent launch of ndMail, a predictive email tool, its implementation of ndThread, based on its acquisition of ThreadKM, how NetDocuments reconciles security with usability in its approach to developing technology, and the future of collaboration.

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Empowering Proficiency with the Legal Tech Assessment

June 6th, 2018 → 7:28 am @ Ari Kaplan

I spoke with Casey Flaherty, the founder of Procertas and the creator of the Legal Technology Assessment, a competency-based learning and benchmarking platform focused on the core technology associated with the delivery of legal services.

We discussed the genesis of the Legal Technology Assessment, its advantages for employers and professionals, how law schools are leveraging it to transform legal education, and the misalignment between hiring expectations and technological proficiency.

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