After a one-week hiatus, the Legaltech Week journalists’ roundtable returns today, live at 3 p.m. Eastern time. We’ll hash out the top legal tech stories of the last couple weeks. Anything notable happen? We’re on every Friday at 3 p.m. E.T. Hope you’ll join us. It’s on Zoom and all free, but registration is required. Once you register for one, you’re registered for every subsequent week. All prior episodes are also available, both as a podcast and on YouTube. The panel changes from week to week, but usually includes: Nicole Black, legal technology columnist and legaltech evangelist…

The companies X1 and Relativity today announced that the X1 Enterprise Platform, which allows remote searching of data on the end-user’s machine, now integrates with RelativityOne Collect, an application for collecting data from various sources and custodians. The companies say the integration will simplify and streamline the remote collection of electronically stored information from employee laptops, company servers, cloud repositories and applications. The need for effective tools for remote and web-enabled collections has become even more critical in this time of so many employees working remotely, the companies say. “The paradigm has shifted from a slow, inefficient, disruptive…

Have you ever wanted to found a tech company but needed the right idea? A California company called LaunchFactory has the ideas and is looking for founders to take them on – including in the legal tech space. The company takes a decidedly unique path to launching companies. Rather than invest in existing startups, it identifies and vets startup ideas and then recruits entrepreneurs to launch them, providing them with $300,000 in seed capital, domain advisors, incubation tools and office space. For 2021, one of the companies for which LaunchFactory is seeking founders is in legal technology, a vertical the…

The results are in. Readers have been voting to select the 15 legal technology startups that will get to participate in the fifth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2021, which will be held virtually March 8-12, 2021. These 15 will face off in a virtual pitch competition that will be the opening event of this year’s TECHSHOW, with the conference’s attendees voting to pick the top winner. The first-place winner gets a package of marketing and advertising prizes. In November, we issued a call for entries. From all the entries we received, a panel of judges narrowed the…

The deadline is Friday to vote to help pick the legal technology startups that will be selected for the fifth-annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW 2021. Your votes determine the 15 companies that will be selected to face off in a virtual pitch competition that will be the opening event of this year’s TECHSHOW. In November, we issued a call for entries. From all the entries we received, a panel of judges narrowed them down to 25 semifinalists. Your votes now pick the final 15. See the full ballot for descriptions of the 25 companies in contention and…

Veristar, a two-year-old company that provides services in e-discovery and litigation support, has acquired the assets of Planet Data Solutions, a 20-year-old company that provides contract analysis and e-discovery technology and services. Under the terms of the acquisition, Planet Data’s Exego software division will operate under a separate Exego LLC. Exego is a platform that provides contract analysis, data extraction and data processing. The Planet Data team will now report to Veristar President and CEO Rick Avers. Dave Cochran, COO at Planet Data, will become president of Exego. Launched in November 2019 by veteran litigation support…

Barely six months into his new position as senior vice president and general counsel for The Coca-Cola Company, Bradley M. Gayton has taken dramatic action to increase diversity and inclusion among the company’s outside counsel, telling firms that they must meet minimum diversity commitments or face consequences ranging from fee reductions to outright firing. While even he describes this as a bold move, he is no stranger to bold moves. Before moving to Coca-Cola in September, he spent 29 years at the Ford Motor Company, where he rose from law student intern to become that company’s top lawyer, managing a…

This week saw the first virtual version of Legalweek, typically one of the largest legal tech and legal industry conferences. How well did the physical conference translate to the virtual world? Our panelists share their thoughts. (Listen to audio above or scroll down for video.) Stories this week (and the time when we discuss them) include: 4:07 – Legal Week(year). 15:20 – Collaboration between legal tech companies and law firms. 24:00 – Judicial ethics and Reality TV. 30:40 – Troutman’s hire of a “remote” partner. 41:20 – 23andMe going public. 47:32 – A new company that rates Saas vendors’ contracts.…

The Ireland-based company Brightflag, whose platform uses artificial intelligence to help corporate legal departments better manage their legal spend and legal matters, is adding a set of new reports to its existing reporting feature that are designed to provide companies with a more nuanced perspective for assessing their relationships with outside counsel. The news comes fresh on the heels of the company’s news in December that it had raised $28 million in a growth equity investment, which followed an $8.5 million Series A round in April 2019. The company launched in 2015. With the new reports, for each matter…

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. said today it is enhancing its Kluwer Competition Law resource with the addition of the Merger Thresholds Monitor, a knowledge management platform maintained by Granville Knowledge Management that provides up-to-date merger control thresholds, procedural information, exchange rates, interpretation and guidance for 135 jurisdictions worldwide. Merger thresholds are the dollar values that determine which mergers and acquisitions must be reported to government regulators before consummation. Keeping track of them can be labor-intensive and require research across multiple resources. Granville KM maintains the Merger Thresholds Monitor, which it sells as a subscription product, regularly updating and…

The annual Legalweek conference in New York is always the occasion for legal technology companies to roll out announcements of new products and features. This year’s conference, which kicked off yesterday in a virtual version redubbed Legalweek(year) and reformulated as a year-long series of events — is no different, although the announcements seem a bit fewer so far. In particular, the first day of the conference yesterday brought a flurry of news releases from e-discovery companies. Here are some of the highlights. Logikcull Offers Free Legal Hold Platform E-discovery company Logikcull has announced that it is offering free, unlimited access…

TermScout is a unique legal technology startup devoted to reviewing, rating and comparing the software contracts of leading business-to-business companies so that software buyers can better and more easily understand what they are being asked to sign. Today it marked its official launch with the release of the first major set of its customer-favorability ratings, evaluating the contracts of 150 top SaaS companies, including well-known brands such as Salesforce, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Solarwinds. “For the first time, the world can easily and affordably understand and compare the terms their vendors impose on them,” founder and CEO Otto Hanson said…

In an alliance announced today, KPMG and SirionLabs are teaming up to offer digital contract management to enterprises worldwide, combining KPMG’s consulting expertise in addressing complex business problems with SirionLabs’ AI-driven contract lifecycle management technology. The alliance encompasses KPMG in the U.S., KPMG in the U.K., and member firms of the global professional services network KPMG. KPMG will both promote SirionLabs’ technology to its clients and use it internally. “We see contract management as a strategic enterprise capability that delivers commercial value,” said Nicola Brooks, KPMG UK’s head of contract management transformation. “All too often we find that contracting…