Enter Harvey, today's golden child that lives at the intersection of technology and law. Harvey is an A.I. platform that can help lawyers perform legal tasks in areas such as due diligence, litigation, and compliance. Described as "the innovative artificial intelligence platform built on a version of Open AI's latest models enhanced for legal work," legaltech startup Harvey, the self-styled "generative A.I. for elite law firms," is about to play in the big leagues. Harvey is being rolled out for use by 3,500 lawyers in 43 offices of Allen & Overy, the seventh largest law firm in the world and part of London's "Magic Circle." I've watched legaltech evolve from the inside for decades.

A decision into develop a peer-reviewed search engine with artificial intelligence has launched a four-step movement to eliminate the problem that young lawyers cannot access paid legal services. In the second step, they put forth actions amongst other industry stakeholders in the field of legal technologies. According to the data obtained, they plan on transferring ten percent of the income obtained in the third step to a fund. They want to make purchases for lawyers who aren't able to buy legal technologies with this fund. After diversifying their income models, they want to open the free version of the dejure.ai

Let's face it - the meteoric rise in digital and text communication has drastically changed the way we speak to one another. This ever-evolving shift in language creates a massive burden for ediscovery teams, who need to understand how text is used in context in order to effectively use legal technology to navigate massive amounts of data. In this episode, Amanda Jones of Lighthouse joins Bill and Rob to illuminate some common challenges and pitfalls that can arise with modern language in ediscovery. Let's face it - the meteoric rise in digital and text communication has drastically changed the way we speak to one another. This ever-evolving shift in language creates a massive burden for ediscovery teams, who need to understand how text is used in context in order to effectively use legal technology to navigate massive amounts of data.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow SimpleLegal and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates! Corporate Counsel magazine reporters spoke to several general counsel about what they say will impact their work and the legal industry. From outside counsel merging with other law firms to the use of artificial intelligence to keep down legal department costs, this article outlines some of the trends in-house counsel may find themselves dealing with in the new year.

Improving efficiency is an ever-important but never-ending aspect of maintaining and growing any business, including law firms. Having a finger on the pulse of technological advancement keeps a firm "in the know" of applications that can make their jobs easier, reduce overhead, and make their clients happier. Because only around 30 percent of law firms employ a technology specialist with the primary goal of keeping the firm at the cutting edge of innovations, the task of staying up to date with the best solutions often falls on lawyers themselves. In fact, most states have adopted ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.1's duty of technology competence, making lawyers directly responsible for keeping up to speed. Nevertheless, adapting to relevant technology is one of the biggest challenges facing law firms today.

Improving efficiency is an ever-important but never-ending aspect of maintaining and growing any business, including law firms. Having a finger on the pulse of technological advancement keeps a firm "in the know" of applications that can make their jobs easier, reduce overhead, and make their clients happier. Because only around 30 percent of law firms employ a technology specialist with the primary goal of keeping the firm at the cutting edge of innovations, the task of staying up to date with the best solutions often falls on lawyers themselves. In fact, most states have adopted ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.1's duty of technology competence, making lawyers directly responsible for keeping up to speed. Nevertheless, adapting to relevant technology is one of the biggest challenges facing law firms today.

The sentiment across the legal technology community is that this year's ILTACON was a smashing success. More than 1500 members and 1700 exhibitors attended the conference in Orlando this year. Their vibe was energetic and people were definitely in good spirits. The need for and growth of technology continues and that's ultimately why we were there. We spent time in the exhibit hall and demo rooms talking to companies in the legal technology space to identify what's new and interesting.

The sentiment across the legal technology community is that this year's ILTACON was a smashing success. More than 1500 members and 1700 exhibitors attended the conference in Orlando this year. Their vibe was energetic and people were definitely in good spirits. The need for and growth of technology continues and that's ultimately why we were there. We spent time in the exhibit hall and demo rooms talking to companies in the legal technology space to identify what's new and interesting.

It's been an incredible year for the'New Wave' of legal technology and Artificial Lawyer has hopefully been able to bring you some of the key moments in this evolutionary journey that is unfolding week by week all around the world. Now, as we head toward 2018, many of the leading players and commentators in the legal AI, legal bot and data analysis world have been asked to give their views on what has taken place and what will happen next. Plus, next year there will be predictions from the world of smart contracts and legal blockchain, (Hi, Clause, Integra Ledger and IBM's Cognitive Legal team, to name a few!) Artificial Lawyer asked an array of experts to name what was the biggest development for legal AI and the New Wave of legal technology this year, and what they expected to see happen in 2018. They were invited to respond with text or images to illustrate their views, and if they were up for it, a haiku or longer poem. Naturally, we couldn't fit everyone in – the legal tech world is just so massive now – but hopefully you'll find this collective wisdom both inspiring and thought-provoking – and fun – I know Artificial Lawyer did.

According to Kreutzer, "It's only AI when you don't know how it works; once it works, it's just software." Why did Liberty Mutual even consider using AI? As a life long geek, Jeff thought that AI was a cool thing to explore. The purpose of this exploration was to try to reduce some of the cognitive load, some of the lower-value tasks that slow the legal department's lawyers down. Ultimately, it was intended to allow the lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks. With all the hype about AI, it is easy to be dazzled by the "pixie dust" aspects of the technology.