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The #MakeLawBetter Confernce – Presented by The Law Lab at Illinois Tech (Chicago Kent Law)

Daniel Katz

On August 15, 2019 – The Law Lab at Illinois Tech Chicago-Kent College of Law presents #MakeLawBetter – A Conference on Legal Innovation. Tickets are *FREE* but registration is required. So please visit makelawbetterconference.com for a registration link.

Continuing its legacy as an academic leader in legal technology and innovation, Chicago-Kent will bring together a wide-ranging and diverse group of industry leaders and academics for this day long event. Speakers will be announced over the coming weeks but videos from previous Law Lab events can be found at TheLawLabChannel.com

We will see you in Chicago on 08.15.19 ! #LegalInnovation #LegalTech #LegalData #LegalEducation 
#LegalTechnology #LegalAI

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

clsadmin

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.  

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

clsadmin

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 ?

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Teaching in the Legal Tech Masters Program at IE Law School

clsadmin

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 !