Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) at North American Association of Computational Linguistics Conference

The First Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) will take place as part of the larger North American Association of Computational Linguistics Conference in Minneapolis June 2019.  NAACL is one of the  premier technical events in the field of NLP / Computational Linguistics.  Thus, I am very happy to give one of the Keynotes at this workshop.  It is one more step toward making Legal Informatics and Legal AI / NLP a mainstream idea within the technically oriented portion of the academy. 

I plan to highlight both my work with Mike Bommarito and others as well as provide an overview of the state of the field from both a technical and commercial perspective.  

Law Firm DWF Raises £95m in First-Ever Main Market Legal Listing (via City AM)

So I think this is one of the more interesting developments worthy of consideration.   The 21st Largest UK Law firm DWF went public last week on the mainboard of the London Stock Exchange.

Here is the rough numbers as of the go public date —
2018 Revenue of £236m and a go public valuation of £366m = ~1.6x times Revenue.

I view this as being about the right multiple here (particularly given the fact that expensive labor is such a large part of the equation).

To my knowledge,  they do not have serious software or AI offerings with which the can boost the revenue multiple … (product/software biz gets like 3x – 7x+ Rev).

One question is whether they can use the new money to build products and then press for a higher multiple downstream?    Everyone is trying to nail the {product, service} bundle … perhaps a £95m cash infusion will help ?

Teaching in the Legal Tech Masters Program at IE Law School

This week I am teaching at IE Law School here in Madrid -The Masters in LegalTech program features students from across the globe interested in how to use tech to #MakeLawBetter…. 

It is worth noting that the The Spanish Market has grown significantly since I was here first in 2015 (when there were barely 10-20 LegalTech companies to be found — now there are 122 Legal Tech startups in Spain alone as of Feb 2019) … see this company map !   

Chicago LegalTech and Legal Innovation Meetup at Skadden during ABATechShow Week

Full house last night for Chicago Legal Innovation and Technology Meetup at Skadden during ABATechShow Week here in Chicago.   Both Dan Linna and yours truly (Dan Katz) thank you for attending. 

Thanks to our host Kim deBeers from Skadden for having us !

Thanks for our speakers   —
• Kristen Sonday
• Ivy Grey
• Kristian Hammond
• Robert Ambrogi
• Chicago-Kent College of Law Student, Benjamin Jackson
• Northwestern Law Students, Andrea Leon Garcia, Julio R., Brian Trujillo, Weihua (Melody) Yao

The Three Forms of Legal Prediction – Experts, Crowds & Algorithms (Online Seminar with IE Law School)

Legal Technology and Innovation is global and I am proud to have the chance to teach in the LegalTech Masters Program at IE Law School in Madrid. This week, I will offer an online kickoff seminar on topics related to the program (sign up using the link) I look forward to meeting all of the students in the program next month in Madrid.

#PredictiveAnalytics #LegalInnovation #LegalAI#LegalData
#MachineLearning #LegalTech#LegalTechnology #LegalScience

Now Accepting Applications for the Legal Technology and Operations Summer School – July 1 – 19 at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg

Now accepting applications for the Legal Technology and Operations Summer School – July 1 – 19 at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. This program is open to both law students as well as legal professionals looking to learn more about how to bring both technology and operations discipline to the legal industry. I am happy to help direct this program with Dirk Hartung and look forward to 2019 Edition of the Summer School.   #LegalTech#LegalInnovation #LegalOperations