LegalTech Glossary is here to help you to quickly navigate through main and important LegalTech and closely related concepts. Collected terms are structured alphabetically, this is why this comprehensive Glossary represent immediate access to LegalTech terms.
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Access to Justice (A2J) includes the right to receive legal counsel and access fair and efficient legal proceedings. Modern A2J is usage of LegalTech which have potential to improve access to justice for low-income individuals. Some organizations have started to use legal tech to improve access to justice and are seeing great results, making an impact, and paving the way for other law firms and organizations.
Accounts Payable (AP) Systems allow your internal financial department to track invoices in order to make the appropriate payments to your suppliers, vendors, and creditors. Although AP and legal are separate entities, it’s important for the two departments to be closely aligned to ensure accurate bookings. By integrating a legal e-Billing and matter management system with an AP solution, organizations can automate the invoice handoff to increase efficiency.
Algorithmic Accountability is a process of holding certain level of moral and ethical responsibilities when developing and updating technological solutions with goal to prevent unfair outcomes. Algorithmic accountability can be used to assess the impacts of the automated systems the companies use and sell, create new transparency about when and how automated systems are used, and empowers consumers to make informed choices about the automation of critical decisions.
Algorithmic Content Moderation involves a range of techniques from statistics and computer science, which vary in complexity and effectiveness. They all aim to identify, match, predict, or classify some piece of content (e.g. text, audio, image or video) on the basis of its exact properties or general features.
Algorithmic Governance is a way of using actors, mechanisms, degrees of institutionalisation and distribution of authority in achieving social ordering. It is a form of social ordering that relies on coordination between actors. It is based on rules and incorporates particularly complex computer-based epistemic procedures.
Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) is fee for law firm services that is not on standard hourly rates, such as fixed fees by matter or phases of a matter. In strict sense, not at all based on the billable hour, so excludes blended or discounted hourly rates, but often these hourly fees are lumped in with true value-based fees.
Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) are not law firms, they are service providers that provide specialized work , often at a lower cost with more expertise and flexibility. ALSPs aren’t exclusively for in-house departments. Law firms are leveraging their services to support work that would require too many in-house resources. To ensure your legal team is getting the most out of its vendors, get a vendor management system to track performance of both Law firms and ALSPs.
Application Programming Interface (API) enables software to access data, server software, or other applications to create a connection between disparate applications and eliminate outdated, manual transfer of information. For in-house legal teams, using an API to connect legal tech such as e-Billing with finance’s AP/ERP system can eliminate manual transfer of information between legal and finance, ensuring both teams have visibility into legal’s financial data. However, not all API’s are the same and may not be the right choice for your legal department.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) are computer science methods that allow computers to complete tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as speech recognition, problem solving and learning. AI is being incorporated into legal technology that helps automate certain manual processes and administrative tasks which currently burden attorneys. While there is great promise for AI, legal departments have been slow to adopt this type of technology due to concerns over accuracy, reliability, and implementation cost.
Augmented Reality is an enhanced version of the real physical world that is achieved through the use of digital visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered via technology. It is a growing trend among companies involved in mobile computing and business applications in particular. It can make delivery of legal services more efficient and accessible.
Automation is the process of having tasks originally manually performed by humans completed by computers in order to increase efficiency. Automation becomes a key ally in improving efficiency and lowering cost for legal departments. Standard processes like contract review, approvals, NDAs, and matter management can all be automated and streamlined with a legal operations management platform.
Autonomous Agent – a software entity (goal-oriented) capable of executing actions in its environment, either virtual or physical (e.g. autonomous intelligent cars (AIC), drones/unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV), satellites).
Backups copy your data to remote servers and store the data in case anything happens to your main server. If something were to happen to your main server, you would be able to easily get your data back from a backup server. Legal teams handle a lot of sensitive business data and therefore should constantly be backing up their servers. Automatic backup systems are recommended to make sure all your data is backed up.
Benchmarking is the process of reviewing historical data and industry best practices to set expectations and accountability on the performance of projects, vendors, and departments. In legal departments, benchmarking law firm performance and cost will allow you to identify law firms that are underperforming or too expensive. In order to benchmark successfully, you’ll need a management platform that has built-in reporting capabilities for accurate data tracking.
Big Data refers to a database that holds all your raw data without filters and segments. As the prioritization of data continues to grow in legal departments, it is critical for legal teams to work with their vendors to ensure their data is protected.
Blockchain Technology is a system of blocks (information captured) aligned in a chain (linear order) in order to capture edits, transactions and distribution. The goal of this technology is to allow information to be captured and shared, without the fear of false/insecure information. For example, if a transaction is made by someone, the block would capture all the transaction data and assign a unique identifier to that transaction. If a hacker were to go into that transaction and try to increase the charge, a new block along the chain would be created. Therefore, you will always be able to identify your original transaction. Although blockchain technology is fairly new to the legal sector, it is expected to play an important role in revolutionizing contracts, corporate filings, document notarizations and even the criminal justice system.
BSD licenses (Berkeley Source Distribution) is a low restriction type of software license that does not put requirements on redistribution. It can be used for any purpose, including commercial use. Companies and individuals can use, modify, and distribute the software without restrictions. Additionally, they are allowed to charge for the software or include it as a component in a commercial product.
Business Intelligence Software is used to gather and analyze data about your legal functions. Examples of data that can be analyzed
includes legal spend, legal case data allows, and eDiscovery metrics. It typically provides dashboard, report creation, or other
methods to represent data in various formats.
Business Process Management (BPM) refers to the operational tasks that automate, analyze, track, and improve current business processes in order to support the organization’s goals. For legal departments, legal operations has emerged to help manage and streamline business processes, ensuring the department is working efficiently. These efforts can be further optimized with legal operations software with matter management and e-Billing functionality.
Cartel Screening is data-based method by which suspicious patterns, indicative of possible cartel activity, can be identified, can be structural or behavioural. For example, structural screening techniques can be used on a systematic and cross-industry basis in which industries were classified based on structural factors associated with the risk of collusion.
Change Management is the planning and execution behind moving a person, team, or entire organization from their current state to a new or future state. Planning for and executing a change management program can help increase product or process adoption, boost legal department productivity, and minimize wasted resources and delays.
Chatbot is a computer program that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand customer questions and automate responses to users through simulating human conversation.
ChatGPT is a Natural Language Processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, and code.
Clickwrap is a license agreement which is read and accepted typically by clicking ‘I agree’ after being shown the agreement (usually as part of the process of installing the software).
Cloud-Based Software are applications that are stored on an online server as opposed to your local server. An advantage to these platforms is that software vendors are now responsible for maintaining the platforms versus having your internal IT department maintain the platforms. In addition, you can access these platforms from anywhere as long as you have internet access. Many of the modern legal operations management platforms are cloud-based applications that allow legal teams to store their matter data and access it wherever needed.
Cloud Storage refers to offsite data centers that hold your data. These data centers are always on and connected so you’re able to access your documents and data anywhere as long as you have internet access.Many legal departments use document management platforms for cloud storage in order to store their contracts, case documents, emails, and even videos.
Compliance Management Software allows legal compliance departments to monitor and track an organization’s activities and processes to ensure they are complying with all laws and regulations. Compliance management also consists of correcting any violations in order to stay compliant and avoid lawsuits against the organization.
Computational Antitrust is a field of computational law aimed to improve antitrust analysis and procedures by assistance of legal informatics which applies to anticompetitive practices, merger control, and the design or monitoring of antitrust policies. For example, Relativity is a software used by American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in order to analyse companies’ internal communications for the purpose of identifying monopolistic conduct.
Computational Law is a branch of legal informatics law dealing with the automation of legal reasoning with the primary focus of work in the field on compliance management, such as the development and deployment of computer systems capable of assessing, facilitating or enforcing compliance with rules and regulations.
Concurrent User License is a type of license that is based on the maximum number of users who will use it simultaneously.
Configuration in technology refers to adjusting general platform features to align with your business requirements without changing the platform completely. In legal technology, configuring a matter management platform might include changing field labels to match internal nomenclature or setting up roles and permissions based on your internal organization structure. Check out our blog on customizable vs configurable legal technology to learn more.
Continuous Active Learning is machine learning document review that identifies & prioritizes the documents most likely to be relevant.
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the managing of contracts an organization has with a third party in order to reduce financial and legal risk. This could include contracts with vendors, customers, partners, or even employees. In order to facilitate and automate the management of contracts, legal teams are turning to CLM software.
Copyleft is a general license agreement granted by a copyright owner permitting anyone to freely use copyrighted property but under specific terms.
Corporate Secretary Tools are used to manage board governance cycles including online board books, event scheduling, collaboration and reporting.
Court Digital Case Management Systems is a digital environment for storage and handling of court cases. Once such example is eSpis. eSpis is a Croatian information system that completely replaced the previous court registers and thereby virtually enables better management of court proceedings, faster exchange of data between courts and transparency in the operations of the judicial authority. It is an application for managing court cases that includes municipal, commercial and county courts, the High Commercial Court of the Republic of Croatia and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Croatia. An important functionality of eSpis is the automatic allocation of files to judges on the day of establishment, as well as the automatic algorithm that allocates files established on the occasion of an appeal against a first-instance decision to all county courts, in proportion to the size of each county court, i.e. the total number of adjudicators in the court, except for certain exceptions prescribed by special regulations.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows your department to manage customer relationships and interactions by tracking all forms of engagement and customer/potential customer information. The goal is to help improve business and customer relationships by streamlining engagement processes. There are a number of law firm specific CRMs that focus on client acquisition, contract management, and outreach. It is important to understand that a CRM is not a Case Management Software, but many CRMs integrate with popular case management platforms available.
Data Analytics or Data Analysis, is the process of transforming and cleaning data to discover insights about your organization/department in order to make key decisions and increase efficacy. While in legal departments, data analytics can cover a range of metrics, many legal departments are leveraging analytical data to improve their spend management to avoid becoming a cost center.
Data Message is an information generated, sent, received, stored or processed by electronic means, such as electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic mail or facsimile.
Data Mining represents processing of large data sets to identify patterns and relationships that can help solve business problems through data analysis. Data mining techniques and tools enable enterprises to predict future trends and make more-informed business decisions. It could be used in search for the model documents which could be reused, if still applicable, in order to reduce search time and increase efficiency.
Data Subject Access Request is a right of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A request from an individual to obtain a copy of their personal data as well as other supplementary information. It helps individuals to understand how and why you are using their data, and check you are doing it lawfully.
Decentralized Justice represents a new online dispute resolution methodology based on blockchain, crowdsourcing and game theory. It seeks to leverage blockchain and mechanism design in order to build dispute resolution procedures able to efficiently and fairly address different types of disputes. Decentralized stands for the process fully driven by peers and built on blockchain technology and cannot be controlled by any single agent. Justice stands for the design compliance with a number of conditions to be considered fair by the people using it. One of the examples of decentralized justice is Aragon Court. Aragon Court is a dispute resolution protocol that handles subjective disputes that cannot be solved by smart contracts which is achieved by having a set of guardians drafted for each dispute who will vote to guarantee a certain ruling.
Deep Learning is a subset of machine learning, which is essentially a neural network with three or more layers. These neural networks attempt to simulate the behavior of the human brain—albeit far from matching its ability—allowing it to “learn” from large amounts of data. While a neural network with a single layer can still make approximate predictions, additional hidden layers can help to optimize and refine for accuracy.
Diffusion probability models are a class of latent variable models that are common for various tasks such as image generation. Formally, diffusion probability models capture the image data by modeling the way data points diffuse through a latent space, which is inspired by statistical physics. Specifically, they typically use Markov chains trained with variational inference and then reverse the diffusion process to generate a natural image. A notable variant is Stable Diffusion. Diffusion probability models are also used in commercial systems such as DALL-E and Midjourney.
Distributed Ledger represents a collection of records (making up a database), where identical copies of each record are held on numerous computers across an organisation, a country, multiple countries, or the entire world, either jointly or partitioned by the parties to which each record relates.
Document Comparison Tools are used to identify changes between two or more versions of the same document for the purposes of document editing and review.
Document Management Systems (DMS) allows you to store, manage, and track your documents electronically to ensure all documents are in a central location while reducing paper waste. Many of these platforms, like Box and iManage allow versioning control, restricted access and sharing capabilities. In legal departments, DMS systems help improve the tracking and management of matters via integration or by leveraging a matter management system with built-in document management.
eDiscovery Software streamlines your eDiscovery process by holding all your data in one place for easy researching, collaboration, and sharing. Before eDiscovery software, the collection and sharing of data for cases involved physically shipping documents in boxes. With eDiscovery software, legal teams can easily share information with law firms, clients, and vendors all from one platform.
E-filing represents the electronic filing of court documents. European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) uses inter partes eFilling for filing of Cancellation (EUTM/IR Revocation or Invalidity) and RCD Invalidity actions electronically.
Encryption is a method of data protection that turns your documents into gibberish that can only be understood with specific software/code. If a hacker were to steal your encrypted files, they would have a hard time reading the files if they didn’t have the codes to de-encrypt. In today’s digital era, more and more legal departments and law firms are using software to encrypt their data to reduce the risk of data loss and unauthorized access.
End User License Agreement (EULA) is a legally binding document defining the user’s rights and restrictions in using a specific software product.
Electronic Service (eService) is the electronic transfer of legal documents between a client/organization and a court/legal service provider. Transferring documents electronically ensures the correct document and version reaches its destination versus mailing and emailing documents.
eSignature Software allows users to sign contracts and documents online without the need for paper copy exchanges. These signatures are legally binding like a paper signature. eSignature Software is gaining popularity amongst legal departments for contract processing with vendors, clients, and outside counsel.
Financial Management is a key responsibility for legal operations teams as they need to align with their finance department and operate efficiently. This is where spend management platforms come in. Spend management platforms allow legal departments to track legal spend and integrate with finance software for payments and invoice approval.
Fine-Tuning refers to the process of training an LLM on a specific task or domain to make it more proficient in that area. LLMs that are referred to as “domain-specific” or “verticalized” for use in legal have been fine-tuned on legal information to make them more suitable for use in legal environments such as law firms.
Fork/forking occurs when participants in a blockchain system cannot immediately choose between two (or more) blocks upon which to continue the chain of blocks, so that two (or more) separate blocks are built on at the same time, creating a “fork” in the chain.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in Europe (EU) in May 2018. GDPR overhauls how business process and handle data; regulates, among other things, cross-border transfer of personal data. It significantly affected information governance practices for multinational companies.
Generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of neural network architecture with a custom, adversarial learning objective A GAN consists of two neural networks that contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, so that samples from a specific distribution can be generated. Formally, the first network G is called the generator, which generates candidate samples. The second network D is called the discriminator, which evaluates how likely the candidate samples come from a desired distribution. Thanks to the adversarial learning objective, the generator learns to map from a latent space to a data distribution of interest, while the discriminator distinguishes candidates produced by the generator from the true data distribution.
Hackathon is an event at which a lot of people come together to write or improve computer programs. LegalTech Hackathons are bringing the world’s legal industry together with tech and innovation, with one purpose: Rapid development of solutions for improving the legal industry.
Hashing is the process by which a grouping of digital data is converted into a single string of characters, called a hash. The set of characters is unique (effectively a “digital fingerprint” of the source data) and the source data cannot be reverse engineered and recovered from it.
Hash Address represents an identifier (typically seen in alphanumeric string form) constituting a hash over the participant’s public key for the authentication of messages from that participant.
Hash Collision (hash-clash) occurs when two pieces of data in a hash table share the same hash value. The hash value in this case is derived from a hash function which takes a data input and returns a fixed length of bits. For example, assume a hash function h(text) sums of all character codes in a text. It will produce the same hash value (collision) for texts holding the same letters in different order, i.e. h(‘abc’) == h(‘cab’) == h(‘bca’). For example, possibility that the evidence has been tampered with.
Information Governance is the management of an organization’s information with processes, controls, and tracking in order to make information available to all employees within the organization and mitigate compliance risk.
Integrations, specifically application integrations, allow you to connect your tech stack with other platforms through native, custom, and API integrations. For legal departments, having a legal operations platform that can easily integrate with 3rd party applications in different departments helps improve data exchange reliability and accuracy, automate workflows, and increase efficiency.
Internet of Things (IoT) is the ability to transfer data over a network connecting people, objects, wearable devices, animals, and machines without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. IoT can be used in crime prediction for predicting the rate and probability of crimes because IoT devices, when aligned with Artificial Intelligence (AI), help in capturing real time data from a variety of sources. European Union made The European strategy for data. It was an intention to create of a European single market for IoT. The strategy contains policy and legal solutions concerning the free flow of data across national borders within the EU and liability in complex environments such as that of the IoT in order to enhance legal certainty around IoT products and services.
Intellectual Property (IP) software is used by attorneys and law firms to manage IP filings and litigations. With a legal operations platform integration with your IP management solution, you automate operational aspects of IP prosecutions and allow your attorney’s to focus on the prosecution.
Intellectual Property Assets is a part of the non-physical property of a business that can be independently identified, is transferrable, and have an economic lifespan. For example, IP asset may be a company name, website content, domain name etc.
Interoperability is the ability of a system or components thereof to function effectively together by providing or accepting services from other systems. Croatia for example introduced e-Građani system that is part of the state information infrastructure. It consists of the central state portal system, the national identification and authentication system, and the personal user mailbox system. It was prepared in accordance with the European Interoperability Framework and the Law on the State Information Infrastructure.
Judicial Ontology Library (JudO) is an ontology that represents the interpretations performed by a judge when conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. For the purposes of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed by a judge when considering a material instance, and assigning it to an abstract category (type). JudO is centred on a core ontology featuring some judicial ontology patterns. The final goal of the framework is to detect and model of jurisprudence-related information directly from the text, and to perform shallow reasoning on the resulting knowledge base. JudO also constitutes the basis for the application of argumentation patterns through reasoning on a set of rules, which represent the grounding of judicial interpretations in deontic and defeasible logics.
Justice Gap can be understood as the number of people who have at least one unmet justice need. It undermines human development, reinforces the poverty trap, and imposes high societal costs. LegalTech plays important role when closing the justice gap and si therefore vital to realize the broader development agenda and its vision of a “just, equitable, tolerant, open and socially inclusive world in which the needs of the most vulnerable are met.
Knowledge Management refers to the way teams create, share, and find information within their organization. This has grown in popularity within Legal departments because it reduces duplicate work, streamlines internal processes, and increases collaboration among team members. Knowledge management platforms allow users to easily share information amongst peers, find all the information related to specific cases, and understand vendor relationships all within one platform.
Law Company is a term prefered by some to ALSPs (avoids “alternative,” which can be seen as marginalizing). May also more narrowly refer to the managed legal services providers.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are very large deep learning models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data. The underlying transformer is a set of neural networks that consist of an encoder and a decoder with self-attention capabilities. The encoder and decoder extract meanings from a sequence of text and understand the relationships between words and phrases in it..
LEDES File Format, created by the LEDES Oversight Committee (LOC) in 1995, is a standard format for billing and information exchange between corporations and law firms. LEDES format is simple and allows law firms to easily create invoices while allowing your legal department to easily accept invoices in a uniform format. Ensuring your e-Billing solution supports LEDES will allow smoother transactions between your vendors and your team.
Legal Design is the application of human-centered design to the world of law, to make legal systems and services more human-centered, usable, and satisfying. The term is often connected to Legal Design Thinking as an creative problem-solving approach. Legal Design Thinking means understanding the context and needs of people interacting with law and being able to apply improvements based on these insights to make justice accessible for everyone.
Legal e-Billing refers to software that replaces the traditional billing model where legal teams receive bills from their law firms via email or snail mail. With e-Billing, legal teams no longer have to review stacks of paper bills and manually enter line items into spreadsheets to generate reports. Legal operations teams utilize e-Billing systems to manage invoice intake, enforce billing guidelines, and automatically route invoices for approval.
Legal Engineering is the interface between legal experts and technology experts – they get both sides of the equation. There are typically two routes into this role: from the legal side or from the tech side. Sometimes legal engineers are technologists who become familiar with legal processes, having developed their legal knowledge after years of working in technology roles in law firms. Other times, legal engineers can be lawyers (or ex-lawyers) who are technologically adept and see the opportunity to improve legal processes with the intelligent use of technology, so they move from a fee earning role to an innovation role.
Legal Operations (Legal ops), describes a set of business processes, activities, and the professionals who enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services. Legal ops provides the strategic planning, financial management, project management, and technology expertise that enables legal professionals to focus on providing legal advice.
Legal Operations Platform, also known as Legal Operations Management (LOM) Platform, help legal departments manage all their operational tasks in one location. These platforms tend to capture matter data such as progress and outcomes, spend and e-Billing, vendor performance, and much more. In addition, they are reporting tools that allow legal ops departments to uncover insights and optimize processes.
Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is the process of transferring the work from in-house legal departments to outside legal agencies in an effort to increase their in-house efficiency on high priority tasks. Some teams also practice legal process offshoring where they transfer legal work to international organizations to help reduce cost. In order to manage LPO, legal teams turn to vendor management platforms to track all vendor activity such as billing, projects, and timekeeping.
Legal Project Management, a form of matter management, leverages the practices of project management to manage legal matters. Legal technologies, such as matter management platforms, provide legal project managers full visibility into matter spend, timing, and vendor performance.
Legal Service is the legal work a lawyer completes for their client. This can be between a lawyer and an individual or a law firm and an in-house legal department. In the past, tracking the progress of legal services and billing was very manual, but with legal technology such as vendor management and e-Billing, this process is now automated.
Legal Technology allows legal departments to streamline processes in order to improve efficiency. Types of legal technology can be leveraged by in-house counsel and law firms, and can include billing technology, matter management platforms, contract management platforms, e-Signature, and timekeeping software, to name a few. Some might argue that there’s no such thing as legal tech, but instead, tech that’s been adopted to the legal field.
Lex Cryptographia is a set of rules administered through smart contracts and decentralized organizations. By developing complex systems of smart contracts, blockchain technology can be used to establish or code of self-executable rules among the individuals participating in a blockchain network.
Machine Learning is pattern recognition software that allows computers to find solutions to new problems from historical data. The more historical data, the more accurate a machine learning model becomes. Similar to artificial Intelligence technology, machine learning technology has not been widely accepted by lawyers due to accuracy concerns.
Matter Management refers to the process of creating, sharing, tracking, and managing legal projects. Specifically in regards to legal technology, matter management platforms help improve legal department efficiency by streamlining workflows and tracking all matter activity in one location.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as LegalTech, the MVP can help the product team to receive user’s feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product. COmpanies choose to develop and release minimum viable product to enter the market as quickly as possible, test an idea with real users before investing in the product’s full development and to evaluate particular market potential.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that combines computational linguistics with statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models which enable computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to understand its full meaning, complete with the speaker or writer’s intent and sentiment derives meaning, context, or sentiment in textual data or conversations with humans using grammars and graph structures.
Neighbouring Rights are rights granted to protect the interests of performers, producers of phonograms, and broadcasting organizations relating to the activities of the public use of an author’s work.
Neuron Network is a computational learning system that uses a network of functions to understand and translate a data input of one form into a desired output, usually in another form. The concept of the artificial neural network was inspired by human biology and the way neurons of the human brain function together to understand inputs from human senses. Neural networks are just one of many tools and approaches used in machine learning algorithms. The neural network itself may be used as a piece in many different machine learning algorithms to process complex data inputs into a space that computers can understand. Neural networks are being applied to many real-life problems today, including speech and image recognition, spam email filtering, finance, and medical diagnosis, to name a few.
NewLaw represents any model, process, or tool that represents a significantly different approach to the creation or provision of legal services than what the legal profession traditionally has employed. There are three variables to NewLaw: 1.) How the work is won; 2.) How work is done; 3.) How the firm is run. For a law firm to actually provide value, it must truly work differently, have an incentive for efficiency, embrace technology and have access to scale.
Off-chain Transaction is a transaction occurring outside a distributed ledger, for example on a legacy system.
Online Case Management is a system that allows attorneys to manage all documents and progress of a case they are working on. These tools come in handy when a case is large in scale, document-heavy, and involves multiple teams of attorneys. Online case management systems focus on the progress of specific cases while matter management platforms take a holistic view of all legal activity, not just case progress.
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) represents the use of technology to resolve or aid in the resolution of a dispute. ODR stands for active platforms where businesses and individuals can seek to resolve their disputes by having access to a network of experienced mediators and negotiators in different areas of expertise. It can be used for negotiations, mediation, arbitration, consumer disputes. The Domain Name Commission’s Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform was first piloted in March 2022 as a free mediation tool to assist people in resolving disputes for both domain names and conflicted domain names (New Zealand). The European Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform is provided by the European Commission to make online shopping safer and fairer through access to quality dispute resolution tools. Czech Arbitration Court (CAC) launched online platform for UDRP disputes for Top Level Domain name disputes (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .mobi, .tel. and others), .eu domain and .cz domain.
Online Reverse Auction (RA) is an internet-based (electronic commerce) acquisition tool that allows the government to procure goods and services from suppliers in a competitive environment in which sellers, anonymously, bid prices down until the auction is complete.
Optical Character Recognition is technology that allows you to convert pdf, images, and scanned files into text files for editing. For example, you scan a contract but you want to edit the text; instead of typing it all out, an optical character recognition system will analyze the scan and convert the content into text.
Outside Counsel Rationalization is the process of evaluating outside counsel market alternatives and in-house standards in order to improve quality and reduce cost. With vendor management platforms, implementing OCR processes is easy and tracking vendor performance is all on one screen.
Patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application.
Permissioned (private) Ledger as a form of distributed ledger is permissioned where its participants are preselected or subject to gated entry on satisfaction of certain requirements. For example, a requirement that a participant must first satisfy “know your client” (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements or on approval by an administrator of the distributed ledger. A permissioned distributed ledger may use a consensus protocol for determining whether a distributed ledger should be updated, or it may use an administrator or sub-group of participants to do so.
Permissionless Ledger as a form of distributed ledger is permissionless when anyone is free to download the software, submit messages for processing and/ or be involved in the process of authentication, verification and reaching consensus. Permissionless distributed ledgers will typically use the blockchain’s public proof-of-work method because permissionless implies open entry and a global mechanism. Such systems are typically controlled by no-one and the participants are usually pseudonymous, making use of an administrator or sub-group theoretically possible but awkwardly non-representative of the open, free-entry community of users.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) represents a network in which computers share data directly with each other without the need of a central server and is mainly used for sharing digital files electronically. For example, P2P architecture is included in Bitcoin. Main argument against P2P network is copyright infringement due to sharing copyrighted works without copyright owner’s permission.
Platform is the medium that users experience your product on. Some common platforms are mobile phones, desktop computers, smart displays, tablets, wearables.
Practice Management Software helps lawyers manage their cases and legal operations in order to allow lawyers to focus more on practicing law and less on operational tasks. Legal practice management software is primarily for law firms and vendors and includes case management, matter management, client communications, billing, and more. Practice management software helps improve legal matter tracking by keeping all data in one location.
Predictive Analytics is a branch of advanced data analytics that uses techniques including statistics, predictive modelling, machine learning and data mining to analyse data in order to make predictions about the future. It can determine correlations between various data points, a substantive understanding of the law or the merits of any given case to predict possible litigation outcomes. It can be used in judicial decision-making process in order to increase efficiency and fairness.
Private Key represents an instance of data, privately held, and paired with a public key, used to initiate algorithms for text encryption and signing. A private key is created as part of a public key cryptography algorithm, and generates both the private and public key as a pair.
Procurement is the buying of goods and services, usually at a large scale for organizations. Legal procurement is the buying and vetting of outside counsel to ensure they are getting the best value from their legal spend. To help facilitate this, vendor management platforms allow legal departments to compare the performance and cost of their vendors to make data-driven purchasing decisions. In a lot of larger organizations, legal procurement also focuses on identifying and vetting technology for the legal department.
Public Key represents an instance of data, available to anyone, paired with a private key to decrypt or verify text as part of public key cryptography.
Records Management is the management of information within an organization including storing, securing, and tracking information. Many legal operations management platforms have record management features like matter information storage and invoice storage to allow users to access data whenever needed.
Reinforcement Learning works based on input data and the result can be used as an input in next analysis to improve its performance. The algorithm uses a trial and error method to come to a clear objective. It can be used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in cases such as predictive text, text summarization, question answering and machine translation.
Request for Proposal (RFP) is a business document that provides information on a project to support a request for proposals from multiple vendors to identify the best option.Similarly, a legal RFP is when an in-house counsel presents vendors with a request for new legal tech or presents law firms with a legal project and requests them to provide pricing proposals for the legal work required.
Robot Lawyer LISA is an legal intelligence support assistant, the world’s first impartial Artificial Intelligence (AI) lawyer.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a natural language processing technique that provides the ability to retrieve the information from which an LLM generates an answer. Adding an information retrieval system allows for greater control over the data used by an LLM when it formulates a response. In other words, it allows you to point the LLM at specific data for the purpose of generating an answer. This typically allows for more accurate and contextually relevant responses and mitigates risk of hallucination.
Robotic Process Automation is a business process technology that performs basic tasks across applications just as human workers do, replacing and dramatically speeding up simple, repetitive tasks which are performed by robots.
Secure Cryptographic Hash Functions are hashes that appear to be random, giving away no clues about the content from which they are derived. It should also be very difficult to construct an input whose hash value will collide with that of another. It is useful for checking the integrity of a piece of data or code to make sure that no unauthorised modifications have been made.
Semantics is the study of meaning in a language. It may be quite challenging to present legal terms through computer language. Legal Semantics develops theories and methodologies for extracting reasoning patterns from legal documents, in order to use those patterns to formulate better arguments in future legal cases. It requires developing semantic types for labeling legal information, as well as creating annotations or labeled data that can be used to develop and test Artificial Intelligence application in legal domain.
Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) refers to machine learning approaches where an input sequence is mapped onto an output sequence. An example is machine learning-based translation between different languages. Such seq2seq approaches consist of two main components: An encoder turns each element in a sequence (e.g., each word in a text) into a corresponding hidden vector containing the element and its context. The decoder reverses the process, turning the vector into an output element (e.g., a word from the new language) while considering the previous output to model dependencies in language. The idea of seq2seq models has been extended to allow for multi-modal mappings such as text-to-image or text-to-speech mappings.
Shrinkwrap Agreement is a license agreement where a consumer is found to have accepted the terms and conditions contained inside a product that were unknown to the consumer until after purchase.
Smart Contracts are computer generated contracts that track the contract rules and execute specific actions in accordance with the contract terms without the need of manual monitoring. For instance, making payments as contracted work is completed or alerting when a contract is violated. Smart contracts leverage blockchain technology to ensure security and track changes, as a result, they are most commonly used in cryptocurrency transactions. Smart contracts aren’t widely adopted by legal departments, but as technology continues to modernize legal teams, we won’t be surprised if we start seeing smart contracts around more.
Smart Courts are courts where judges use software applications to conduct the judicial process in a digital environment created with aim to make judiciary more efficient and transparent, consistent, and free from unwanted internal and external interference. For example, China introduced smart courts in order to automate and digitize justice. It includes non-human judges, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and allows participants to register their cases online and resolve their matters via a digital court hearing.
Software as a Service (SaaS), is exactly as the name describes, software delivered by a vendor as a service for a specific amount of time depending on the contract between the vendor and the customer. This software is hosted online by the vendor and doesn’t require users to install on their local server. Majority of the modern legal operations platforms available are SaaS and offer features such as matter management, e-Billing, vendor management, and more.
Source attribution in the context of AI building involves appending, displaying, or linking to the sources of information an LLM drew upon for the purpose of generating an answer. Source attribution helps users understand where the information came from and assess its credibility, and gets around the “explainability” problem inherent to foundational LLMs. One of the reasons RAG and grounding techniques are so valuable in the context of AI development (especially in legal) is the ability to provide source attribution. Since the data source is controlled and information retrieval or search capabilities have been added to solutions that use RAG, it is therefore possible to also build in source attribution. To attribute a source correctly, it’s essential to ensure that the generated content is grounded in the information retrieved from the source. Grounding therefore plays a key role here, helping to verify the accuracy and relevance of the content to the source.
Spend Management Software allows users to track their spend and management of invoices, budgets, e-Billing, accruals, and more from one system. This provides legal departments with complete visibility into their department’s spend to help departments make data-driven decisions that helps lower cost and increase productivity.
Split Contract is a contract where non-human performance is encoded into computer code, and wider human obligations, remedial and other provisions are written into natural language, the two components operating together as a cohesive contract.
Subject Matter Expert is the expert of certain field of expertise. In the legal department, it’s often a lawyer with knowledge that is specific to a certain practice area.
Supervised Learning is a subcategory of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses labelled datasets to train algorithms with goal to classify data or predict outcomes accurately.
Third Party Applications are applications developed by vendors to add on to platforms from other vendors. In legal tech, integrations between your legal operations management platform and third party applications such as AP software and IP software can help increase collaboration between legal departments and the rest of the organization.
Technology Assisted Review (TAR) is a machine learning document review that utilizes algorithms created using a seed set of documents reviewed by subject matter experts (predictive coding), or coding by human reviewers (continuous active learning) without creating a seed set.
Time Stamp represents a number representing a point in time at which something was created or done. It is usually embedded into legal documents as o prove of certain activity.
Tokens: In the context of LLMs, tokens are the parts of language (including words, punctuation, and other characters) that models digest, with 750 tokens representing about 1000 words. Instead of words or word count, LLMs operate in terms of tokens.
Trademark is a sign capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one enterprise from those of other enterprises.
Trade Secrets is an intellectual property rights on confidential information which may be sold or licensed.
Transformer Architecture: In 2017, researchers at Google published a paper called “Attention is All You Need”, which introduced a type of deep learning model called transformer architecture. The innovations described in that paper paved the way for the first large language models. Transformer architecture is designed to process sequential data (like text) by efficiently capturing the contextual relationships between elements in the sequence (or sentence). Models with transformer architecture are better at understanding linguistic concepts and dealing with variability in the way that language expresses a concept, because they understand meaning based on the relationships between words and parts of words and their context.
Uberisation of Legal Services means to modify a market or economic model by the introduction of an affordable and efficient alternative or to change the market for legal services by introducing a different way of buying or using it, especially using mobile technology.
Uniform Domain Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) represents a set of rules to regulate complainants which aims to demonstrate that the disputed domain name someone is using is identical or confusingly similar to theirs. With other words the registrant does not have a right or legitimate interest in the domain name, and that the registrant has registered and used the domain name in bad faith.
Unsupervised Learning uses Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to analyse and cluster unlabelled datasets. These algorithms discover hidden patterns or data groupings without the need for human intervention. Its ability to discover similarities and differences in information make it the ideal solution for exploratory data analysis, cross-selling strategies, customer segmentation, and image recognition.
Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a type of neural network that is trained to learn a low-dimensional representation of the input data by encoding it into a compressed latent variable space and then reconstructing the original data from this compressed representation. VAEs differ from traditional autoencoders by using a probabilistic approach to the encoding and decoding process, which enables them to capture the underlying structure and variation in the data and generate new data samples from the learned latent space. This makes them useful for tasks such as anomaly detection and data compression but also image and text generation.
Vendor Management is the process of managing vendors and evaluating vendor performance to ensure your organization is getting the most from your vendors. e-Billing and spend management platforms with vendor management capabilities allow legal teams to analyze performance data such as projects completed, timing, and cost in order to improve vendor relations.
Vendor Portals allow vendors and law firms to submit invoices, propose matter budgets, manage timekeepers, and track assigned matters. These portals connect with the department’s matter management software, allowing legal departments to track vendor activity.
Virtual Court is a real concept aimed at eliminating the presence of litigant or lawyer in the court and for adjudication of cases on a virtual platform. There are more and more countries that had already started and are considering to start using virtual courts. For example, virtual courts are used in India but limited on offences regarding motor vehicle and some petty offences.
Virtual Law Firms operate online without a physical office location by having their lawyers work from anywhere they have internet access. As virtual law firms become more popular, it is important for a legal department to have a vendor management platform that tracks all vendor activity and documents electronically as you can’t fax to a virtual location.
W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) is an international organization committed to improving the web. It promotes a set of recommendations for knowledge graphs, knowledge graph schemas and a query language for querying knowledge graphs.
Workflow Automation is the process of converting human manual processes to automated processes through technology. Workflow automation helps increase a legal department’s efficiency by allowing lawyers to focus more on legal work versus operational tasks. An example of workflow automation is the transferring of invoices from law firms to in-house teams to AP departments. With eBilling platforms, the invoice transferring no longer has to be handled by an individual, instead, the invoice arrives to the appropriate approver and sent to AP after approval.
Workflow Management allows workflow automation to be possible and is the management of an organization’s processes and technologies. Workflow management typically involves an organization’s IT department to set up the technology and workflows between different platforms and teams, such as legal departments and AP. Ultimately the goal of workflow management is to improve and organizations efficiency with structured processes.
XML is a markup language similar to HTML, but without predefined tags to use. Instead, user define his own tags designed specifically for his needs. This is a powerful way to store data in a format that can be stored, searched, and shared. XML was designed to store and transport data. XML is not a document format, although there are document formats created from XML.
Rather, XML is a grammar (or syntax) for defining mark-up-based document formats. The following is an example of a simple XML document with legal elements.
<Legal>
<Contract>
<Clause>
<Paragraph>
I agree to give you a penny in exchange for your services.
<Paragraph>
<Clause>
<Contract>
<Legal>
Zero-shot learning and few-shot learning refer to different paradigms of how machine learning deals with the problem of data scarcity. Zero-shot learning is when a machine is taught how to learn a task from data without ever needing to access the data itself, while few-short learning refers to when there are only a few specific examples. Zero-shot learning and few-shot learning are often desirable in practice as they reduce the cost of setting up AI systems. LLMs are few-shot or zero-shot learners as they just need a few samples to learn a task (e.g., predicting the sentiment of reviews), which makes LLMs highly flexible as a general-purpose tool.
