Robert Ambrogi Blog
Last week brought a flurry of legal technology news, thanks to the first in-person Legalweek conference in two years. In this first of two posts, I will round up the week’s notable announcements. I’ll publish the second half tomorrow.
SurePoint Launches SureTime, Law Firm Time Management Solution
The cloud practice management company SurePoint Technologies announced the launch of SureTime, a cloud-based time management system. The new platform integrates with the existing SurePoint Legal Management System (LMS), allowing SaaS law firm clients to benefit from an improved time management experience.
[Read more about SurePoint on LawNext Legal Tech Directory.]
Accessible by smartphone, laptop or desktop, the SurePoint platform allows users the option to make time entries by voice command and typing, the company says. It also automatically tracks time when users are working in Microsoft applications such as Word, Excel and Outlook.
The platform’s timekeeping also tracks entries for future calendar items, eliminating the need for the user to do this on their own.
The software includes advanced search capabilities and a predictive feature, remembering recurring tasks and anticipating the clients and matters users are most likely to select when making entries. The company said that it will add compatibility with Google Workspace in the future.
“Our goal was to create a time management application for law firms that is increasingly intuitive, easy to utilize and captures time automatically,” said SurePoint Chief Executive Officer Tom Obermaier. “In addition to its simplicity, we also wanted to create a solution that can be adopted by everyone at a law firm, from paralegals to IT staff to the marketing department — not just lawyers.”
I previously wrote about SurePoint just last month, when it acquired Cole Valley Software, developer of the ContactEase CRM software for law firms.
DISCO Acquires Legal Hold and Workflow Products Hold360 and Request360
E-discovery company DISCO announced that it has acquired two legal workflow products, Hold360 and Request360, from Congruity 360 LLC. It will integrate the products with its cloud-based e-discovery platform to enable corporate legal customers to meet legal hold obligations and legal request compliance.
[Read more about DISCO on LawNext Legal Tech Directory.]
By acquiring Hold360 and Request360, DISCO said, it will expand its solution set to address the legal hold requirements of customers, including the ability to hold data and documents in place electronically rather than recreate, store and manage copies of duplicative data.
In addition, the products’ silent hold capabilities allow legal teams to enact holds directly, without the need to engage IT departments to ensure retention of sensitive information, DISCO said.
“The legal hold product team that is joining DISCO has built modern, complete solutions for the legal workflow needs of today, complementing DISCO’s solutions that empower legal departments to focus on delivering better legal outcomes,” said DISCO Chief Product Officer Kevin Smith.
Casepoint Adds Slack and Teams Connectors
Cloud-based e-discovery company Casepoint now offers connectors for Slack and Microsoft Teams, enabling collection of data from those applications. Notably, Casepoint recently became an official Slack Technology Partner, enabling its customers to collect directly from Slack.
“The addition of Slack and Teams is in direct response to corporate and government customers’ growing use of these messaging and collaboration platforms,” said Casepoint’s Chief Revenue Officer David Carns.
Among the benefits to clients of direct connectors is that they reduce the number of touch points, data exposure risks, and costs of the process, Casepoint says. Using its platform, it says, a single legal professional can import data into the platform, apply integrated analytics capabilities to gain immediate insights into results, and identify relevant data to be provided to counsel.
In a conversation during Legalweek, Carns said that Casepoint saw significant growth in its business during the pandemic, as the result of an industry-wide shift from on-premises software to cloud software.
That has also driven greater efficiencies and security in areas such as preservation and collections, as it is now most often a matter of one SaaS system talking to another SaaS system, he said.
While law firms remain the company’s largest proportion of customers, it has also significantly expanded among government and corporate customers, with the latter its fastest-growing market.
Elevate Releases Version 2.0 of Elevate ELM
Law company Elevate said it has released version 2.0 of Elevate ELM, an enterprise legal management product that combines requests, projects, RFPs, contracts, billing, and spend management within one platform, together with embedded AI, reporting, and analytics, and that integrates with the legal tech point solutions customers already use.
[Read more about Elevate ELM on LawNext Legal Tech Directory.]
“The Elevate ELM addresses the need of law departments and law firms for an easy-to-use system to manage their legal operations,” said Sharath Beedu, VP of products at Elevate. “Elevate has extensive experience consulting and providing services, and we understand the key activities and desired outcomes.”
“Lawyers and legal ops want easy-to-use solutions to get the job done for the businesses they serve,” said Liam Brown, founder and CEO of Elevate. “The Elevate ELM is an integrated platform for law departments and law firms to operate efficiently, collaborate effectively, and use data to improve business outcomes.”
For the Record Unveils Speech-to-Text Transcription
For the Record, a company that provides digital audio, visual, and record-keeping technology for court systems, released FTR RealTime, a speech-to-text transcription service that it says can keep pace with the spoken word while processing dialects, complex legal terminology, and multiple languages, all at up to 95 percent accuracy.
“Providing a searchable, instant written record is a critical step in modernization for the legal justice system,” said Tony Douglass, president of For The Record. “And after six years of testing and refining technology to do just that, FTR RealTime is ready. This automated transcription service will be revolutionary in terms of efficiency and access.”
For The Record says it developed FTR RealTime specifically for courtroom applications by introducing artificial intelligence from top-tier platforms — such as AWS and Microsoft — to millions of hours of acoustically optimized legal proceedings.
The software not only delivers reliable transcription, it also links the written word with the corresponding audio for review and automatically stores records in the cloud for security, the company says.
“FTR RealTime is a technological leap in the speech-to-text market that will make a significant impact on our legal justice system,” said Michael Rose, For the Record CEO.
Onna Announces In-Place Preservation for E-Discovery
E-discovery company Onna announced the availability of Onna eDiscovery In-place Preservation, which it says can deploy data preservation in real-time across content, communication, and collaboration applications, thereby helping legal teams improve the efficiency and reduce the risk of the legal hold process.
While Onna already allowed customers to preserve their data within its own centralized archive, its new In-place Preservation offers customers the additional choice to preserve data within the source application.
It does this by allowing IT or legal departments to simply upload a list of targeted custodians into Onna eDiscovery, select their applications, and execute preservations across each of those applications in a single action.
Onna says key benefits include:
- Efficiency, by reducing manual work and unifying the legal hold and preservation process for all applications and targeted custodians into a single step.
- Real-time holds, allowing legal teams to validate which custodians are relevant to their case prior to a collection.
- Centralized management, allowing teams to preserve data once and manage holds from a single location.
Once In-place Preservation is completed, users will be able to search, cull, and export the resulting data set to their review tool for further analysis
SirionLabs Integrates Adobe Sign
SirionLabs, a provider of AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM), announced that it has entered into a partnership with Adobe Sign to integrate e-signatures into its contracting platform SirionOne.
[Read more about SirionOne on LawNext Legal Tech Directory.]
The certified integration with Adobe Sign allows SirionLabs’ customers to electronically sign contracts anytime, anywhere in minutes, with Adobe Sign’s secure e-signature features built into their CLM platform.
The new integration can be accessed from the Adobe Exchange App Marketplace.
“Through our integration with Adobe Sign, we are giving our customers more flexibility in execution of contracts,” said Puneet Bhakri, senior vice president, Global Alliances & Partnerships, at SirionLabs. “With the combination of SirionLabs and Adobe Sign, customers can truly ensure that their contracts are compliant and risk-free while simultaneously ticking off the boxes of contract execution, automation, collaboration, and intelligence, leading to enhanced business impact.”