The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had a problem. Its investigation into corruption at Rolls-Royce was inching towards a conclusion, but four years of digging had produced 30 million documents. These needed to be sorted into "privileged" and "non-privileged", a legal requirement that involves paying junior barristers to do months of repetitive paperwork. "We needed a way that was faster," says Ben Denison, chief technology officer at the SFO. So, in January 2016, he started working with RAVN.

Despite being at its core a knowledge industry, the legal profession has been remarkably slow to adopt information technology outside of online databases such as LexisNexis and e-discovery software. The conservative nature of the profession, the intensive training that focuses on developing individual skills and knowledge and the lack of incentive for efficiency that is built into the hourly billing model all contribute to that resistance. Over the last few years, however, numerous artificial intelligence (AI) solutions have been developed for legal use, and the profession has begun to embrace, or perhaps be embraced by, those tools. A number of forces have converged to catalyze this market. First, the software products meet specific, well defined needs and therefore have been well accepted.

Artificial Intelligence provider RAVN Systems has appointed former Ashurst CIO David Lumsden as its new CEO. Lumsden, who is also formerly CEO of technology provider Tikit Group and who joined RAVN last year as chief strategy officer (CSO), replaces Peter Wallqvist, one of the founders of RAVN. Lumsden has more than 30 years' experience in the legal IT and professional services market. He was CEO of Tikit Group between 2000 and 2013 and spent seven years as CIO at Ashurst. "RAVN has a strong reputation in the markets we're currently operating in," said Lumsden.