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Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

lawtechnologytoday.org

61–70 of 72 posts

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#61

I hear http://thoughtly.co moved into e-discovery for visualization and summarization. Are there any other machine learning startups in the space right now?

There's a long history of search/knowledge management/AI startups recognizing that eDiscovery was their last, best hope for revenue. Recommind is one example (founder invented latent semantic indexing), and Autonomy (yknow, the folks who cratered HP) is another.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#62
post #20
post #11

The article mentions some interesting things, but I have a few quibbles: > But even with today’s modern communication tools, both customer experience and lawyer workflow have remained stagnant. At a large firm, legal practice is unrecognizable compared to even 10-15 years ago. Everything is electronic: filing and docketing, document collection/scanning/OCR, legal research, document management (DMS + version control).…

One lawyer I talk to says that every single filing he makes at court has to be paper. He bought a wheely suitcase to carry all this documentation around to court. If everything is electronic, his firm and the judges they deal with didn't get the message...

Law firms may be electronic, but sadly some courts are not.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#63
post #2

It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.

Having worked in e-discovery for many years, "exponential improvements" is a huge overstatement. What they have is in pretty much any e-discovery product on the market. And they are missing a huge piece--predictive coding and advanced analytics (email threading and near-dup are EXTREMELY common). If you are in NLP, ML and/or IR, the legal industry is probably one of the most exciting places to be. Huge datasets, avai…

The other thing is that lawyers don't get re-trained. Relativity has won the current generation of lawyers, and Relativity is a good product (unlike the products it replaced, Concordance and Summation). It will not be easy to displace.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#64
post #2

It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.

Having worked in e-discovery for many years, "exponential improvements" is a huge overstatement. What they have is in pretty much any e-discovery product on the market. And they are missing a huge piece--predictive coding and advanced analytics (email threading and near-dup are EXTREMELY common). If you are in NLP, ML and/or IR, the legal industry is probably one of the most exciting places to be. Huge datasets, avai…

On the research end of things, NIST's TREC has a legal track, and that's probably the best place to look for what's happening in the "applied research" space of the field.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#65
post #49

I currently write software for an e-discovery company. Most tasks that our software is expected to be able to perform are simple-sounding tasks, at first glance, such as ... 1. extracting documents from within other documents (attachments out of an email, files out of a zip, embedded excels out of a word doc, images out of a powerpoint, etc) 2. convert all said documents to some kind of standard media format so that…

The other issue is the absolutely bonkers number of attorney-hours racked up in reading all of those documents once they've been systematized.

That's where I see potential in this market. Ediscovery is a pain-point for law firm clients - especially large corporate clients who are constantly involved in complex litigation. Document review has to happen in order to effectively litigate (gotta find the smoking gun!) but when a bill comes through with hundreds or thousands of attorney-hours devoted to reading your opponent's old emails, ouch. The client hasn't even seen a work product yet.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#66
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And computers still don't really understand either what issue you're looking for or what issue a case is about. So ancient technology (search for this word near that word) still rules the day. I think this is the key. The big revolution in legal research that I'm waiting for is the ability for the computer to understand something like: all cases where a) Claim X was brought as a counterclaim and not as the original…

FWIW: This is entirely solvable, it's just that the worlds search experts are not working on legal search, because it's not a large enough market :)

I wonder if pieces of the Watson API would work for something like this?

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#67
post #49

I currently write software for an e-discovery company. Most tasks that our software is expected to be able to perform are simple-sounding tasks, at first glance, such as ... 1. extracting documents from within other documents (attachments out of an email, files out of a zip, embedded excels out of a word doc, images out of a powerpoint, etc) 2. convert all said documents to some kind of standard media format so that…

Feature requests in e-discovery bloat your original software out of all proportion. Nevermind getting past the original part of effectively searching large troves of data in different formats.

Amen

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#68
post #2

It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.

Your definition of exponential needs-sum-splaining.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in e-discovery for many years, "exponential improvements" is a huge overstatement. What they have is in pretty much any e-discovery product on the market. And they are missing a huge piece--predictive coding and advanced analytics (email threading and near-dup are EXTREMELY common). If you are in NLP, ML and/or IR, the legal industry is probably one of the most exciting places to be. Huge datasets, avai…

On the research end of things, NIST's TREC has a legal track, and that's probably the best place to look for what's happening in the "applied research" space of the field.

TREC HAD a legal track. It's a shame it hasn't been done in 3 years.

Re: Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in e-discovery for many years, "exponential improvements" is a huge overstatement. What they have is in pretty much any e-discovery product on the market. And they are missing a huge piece--predictive coding and advanced analytics (email threading and near-dup are EXTREMELY common). If you are in NLP, ML and/or IR, the legal industry is probably one of the most exciting places to be. Huge datasets, avai…

Interesting. What type of advanced analytics do you mean?

Any and everything to do with text analytics so that lawyers can find relevant documents faster. Concept searching (LSI, LDA, other topic models), query expansion, clustering, network analysis (emails), etc.
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