Lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster Bob Ambrogi has put together an article on the year’s most important developments in legal technology here. 

We highlight his top three here:

Analytics

‘At the center of the analytics story this year has been LexisNexis.

Following its acquisitions of Lex Machina in 2015 and Ravel Law, it has been steadily working to build on the foundations established by those products and integrate them into its legal research platform Lexis Advance. It has steadily expanded the practice areas covered by Lex Machina’s analytics, and from Ravel it added both visual search results and the unique Context analytics that examine the language of judges’ opinions.

The defining moment for LexisNexis this year came in July, when it put a stake in the ground to claim the analytics space.’

Global Legal Tech

The world of legal tech got flatter. That was largely thanks to the Global Legal Hackathon.

This audacious effort by organizers who had never before run even a local hackathon turned out to be a huge success. They rallied participation by 600-1,000 teams in 40 cities and 22 countries around the world.

Our Legal Hackers Global Community also grew to 130 Global chapters since inception in 2012, hosting over 450 events with a total community estimate of almost 45,000 members.

Smart Legal Research

Not only did research get smarter, thanks to a whole new generation of tools powered by AI and natural language processing, but it also got more expansive, thanks to a momentous project that put all U.S. case law online.

 

Legal research platforms introduced product after product designed to make their research platforms “smarter” and to further separate them from their competitors.

That started with ROSS Intelligence’s introduction of EVA, a brief-analysis tool similar in concept to the previously released CARA from Casetext and Clerk from Judicata. That led to the aforementioned robot fight, Vincent from vLex, Attorney IO, and CaseIQ from Casemine, as well as to major updates to the product that started it all.

Beyond brief analysis, this was the year in which Thomson Reuters introduced Westlaw Edge, the next generation of its industry-leading legal research platform, that LexisNexis put a “stake in the ground” to claim the legal analytics space with its Lexis Analytics, and that the American Association of Law Libraries selected Bloomberg Law’s AI-powered Points of Law as new product of the year.

Read the entire article here.