In-house legal teams including Vodafone, Featurespace and Ferrero are using London-based legaltech firm Luminance's new artificial intelligence platform to help their departments get a better grip on their contracting issues. The platform – Luminance Corporate – streamlines the contract lifecycle process by automating contract drafting, version control and renewal, enabling in-house lawyers to better understand, manage and negotiate their contracts. The platform's AI capabilities also provide insights on those contracts, meaning lawyers don't have to manually search for key information. Rosemary Martin, group general counsel and company secretary at Vodafone, said: "Good technology can make a really positive difference in corporate legal departments. Being able to rapidly analyse contracts and display critical information means lawyers no longer have to waste time trawling through their contracts."

Technologies like AI, blockchain, cognitive computing, and advanced data analytics will be a boon for the judicial system in many ways. Countries are even thinking about robot judges.

BlackBoiler, an AI-based pre-execution contract review start-up, has bagged four patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But, perhaps the bigger question is: are patents for legal tech companies of any real use (see below)? Profiled in Artificial Lawyer this September – BlackBoiler aims to reduce the time that lawyers spend reviewing and marking up documents such as NDAs, service agreements, and other high-volume contracts. One of the approved patents, is a'Method and System for Suggesting Revisions to an Electronic Document', which the company says is a core component of its pre-execution technology for contract analysis. The technology suggests revisions to a document-under-analysis (DUA) and is part of a family of three patents as well as additional patent applications claiming this method.

My regular readers will recognize Zaid's name. In 2012, at LegalTech New York, I used his very cool "The Mashup App" which was a vision for the future of the web: a web where we control our personal information and curate our digital data -- from memories to knowledge -- from all from our personal devices. The app is a personal database in which you save your digital data. You can save all types of data including web, PDF, images, video, audio, location, and time data. Since your personal database is on your device, you can save everything that is important to you – in this case, a log of every place I visited during my 3 days at LegalTech that year, plus the 3 days after in NYC at client meetings. From this I could generate a "diary" of my day, or my week and I could also associate any document (such as a PDF or a restaurant receipt or dry cleaning bill) I had to that "pin" location and/or day.

We are incredibly proud to announce today that LawGeex has been selected as a Gartner Cool Vendor. Every year, Gartner selects tech companies with a product or service that is "interesting, new and innovative". More importantly, the global consultancy also flags to the business world major new disruptive sectors they need to know about. The distinction of being Gartner Cool Vendor has been achieved in the past by names such as Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Cloudera, and Instagram--then operating in disruptive spaces they created, but which we now take for granted as obvious leaders and benchmarks. This year for the first time ever Gartner recognized legal Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies making a "profound efficiency impact on the way legal services are delivered."

The current applications of AI in legal work includes drafting and reviewing contracts, mining documents in discovery and due diligence, answering routine questions or sifting data to predict outcomes. AI is a human-like legal issues spotter providing relevant information on contract terms, therefore allowing lawyers to focus their review on the relevant segments of each contract, saving countless lawyer-hours. The tools are simple to use, making litigation document management easier and more efficient, allowing companies to manage more of this work in-house without resorting to outside counsel. Predictive technology analyzes past legal reference data to provide insights into future outcomes, powered by advances in machine learning.

FinTech (financial technology) is a term that many of us are familiar with. It is an area now receiving billions of pounds in investment, seeing new start-ups every week and that even has its own awards event. While lawyers may traditionally be late to the game to integrate technology, things are now rapidly changing across the profession. LegalTech has become a talking point across not just the legal world but across the entire media. Forbes, the Financial Times, and even the Royal Society have all commented on it in the past few months, with articles and reports exploring the future of artificial intelligence in law. LegalTech is many different things.

My team and I attended several legaltech-focused conferences this month and of course, as expected, machine learning and AI were the topics that everyone wanted to discuss in between sessions. Yet interestingly, at the Emerging Legal Technology Forum put on by Legalx, one of the panelists -- Mark Tamminga, leader of innovation initiatives at Gowling WLG -- was against using these terms in reference to emerging legal technologies. He pointed out that often what is being called AI is really not that at all, and felt that these words were being used as fancy buzzwords that escape the real mechanics of these technologies. As someone deeply involved in the development community here in Toronto, I wholeheartedly agree with his perspective. Many of the conversations occurring in legaltech around what people are calling machine learning are actually algorithmic solutions preprogrammed (that's right, programmed by humans) to do a particular task; nothing that deviates greatly from anything that's already been done many years ago.

My team and I attended several legaltech-focused conferences this month and of course, as expected, machine learning and AI were the topics that everyone wanted to discuss in between sessions. Yet interestingly, at the Emerging Legal Technology Forum put on by Legalx, one of the panelists -- Mark Tamminga, leader of innovation initiatives at at Gowling WLG -- was against using these terms in reference to emerging legal technologies. He pointed out that often what is being called AI is really not that at all, and felt that these words were being used as fancy buzzwords that escape the real mechanics of these technologies. As someone deeply involved in the development community here in Toronto, I wholeheartedly agree with his perspective. Many of the conversations occurring in legaltech around what people are calling machine learning are actually algorithmic solutions preprogrammed (that's right, programmed by humans) to do a particular task; nothing that deviates greatly from anything that's already been done many years ago.