Lawyers always want to have an edge. Sometimes that edge comes in the form of a news alert,  a breaking court case or even a breaking docket complaint. Add to this – clients’ expectations that lawyers follow developments in their business and industry.  No lawyer wants to get breaking news from their clients.
Librarians – the original knowledge managers – have been introducing lawyers to alerting systems for the past three decades starting with Lexis Eclipse and WESTLAW’s Westclip. With the explosion of web content and specialty newsletters librarians were challenged to tame the firehose of daily news using sophisticated aggregation platforms. There are specialist electronic services librarians who live and breathe alerts and aggregation platforms.
Osmosys  entered the legal market almost 20 years ago.  In the past decade founder, Eric Gr Gross  focused on expansion in  financial services market. Ozmosys has come roaring  back into the legal market with a new AI enabled alerting system which Gross describes as being powered by their propriety AI or “lawyer brain.” I talked with Gross about the latest developments at Ozmosys.
Osmosys is on its fourth generation analysis engine. Gross, no stranger to hyperbole, claims that his new technology will “leave old AI in the dust.”  According to Gross the  Ozmosys “lawyer brain“ was trained on legal concepts and terminology by ingesting over 1 million legal memos in every area of law. The system is powered by 300+ “no code,”  “no train.” neural networks which produce highly relevant results..
After a targeted alert is set up the  “lawyer brain” identifies relevant stories and uses advanced contextual search technology to filter the results and deliver alerts. Over the past decades we have all learned the limits of keyword search.
 What matters is context.  The Ozmosys AI “lawyer brain” discerns the relationship between words and concepts  in order to generate relevant results, even if the specific words searched for don’t actually appear in the relevant article:
● AI Topical Neural Networks: 300+ neural networks trained to think like attorneys can determine specific relevance to virtually any practice area, even to specific entities
● AI Company Disambiguation: distinguishes between a company vs an object with the same name, e.g. Apple
● AI Trust and Relevancy: removes irrelevant articles
● Advanced De-duplication against all content sources
Mines Social Media for Business-Critical News, Removing the Chatter. Ozmosys Social captures and analyzes the notices, announcements and press releases now published on social media, including LinkedIn, instead of traditional newswires.
Improving Alert Management and Control.  The platform allows Librarians to organize and manage third-party subscriptions and news alerts in a central platform. Ozmosys ingests all subscriptions, email newsletters, alerts and external content from disparate sources into a centralized repository. The more content sources that flow through Ozmosys, the smarter the system gets. It promises to be a virtuous circle of improving results.
ROI – My Favorite Topic
According to Gross the Ozmosys management dashboard will provide accurate usage and ROI analyses of paid subscriptions . In addition, it uses analytics to identify the content each lawyer has been reading in order to enhance future alerts. The usage data will not only advise librarians about the impact of the search results but will provide powerful analytics on the “open rates” of stories delivered from high ticket news sources. This type of data is critical in making renewal and cancellation decisions.
The Competition –  Ozmosys will be faced with a fair amount of competition in the legal market. LexisNexis Newsdesk, Manzama, Bloomberg Law Convergence ( no longer being sold  – but well liked) and Vable (formally branded as Linex) each have some share of the legal market. Moving to a new aggregation platform takes a lot of planning, a thorough RFP process and a careful migration plan if alerts need to be moved from a legacy platform. Based on my experience, overall cost, the ability to ingest the majority of the alert sources and a powerful management platform are among the most critical factors weighing into the product selection decision. Will the AI enabled “lawyer brain” results give Ozmosys an edge?  We shall see…