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Category Archives: Marketing

Harvey Eyes ‘All Sorts’ of Lawyers in AI Legal Hiring Spree

Bloomberg: Harvey, a generative artificial intelligence startup that quadrupled in value last year, has spent the first quarter of 2024 embarking on an expansion spree that shows no signs of slowing. “The privately held company, which has 82 employees, wants to double that number by year’s end, said its 29-year-old co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in one of the few interviews he’s given since Harvey surfaced on the legal technology scene a year ago. “We do very little press,” he said. Weinberg attributed his and Harvey’s desire to stay quiet to a policy of letting its new clients speak for themselves, as well as to a personal bandwidth issue for him as he sought to create a company from scratch. The San Francisco-based startup, which just opened an office in New York, is currently looking to fill nearly 50 job openings, many of them for lawyers. “Normally, at a tech company, you hire lawyers to be in-house lawyers,” he said. “We’re looking at them to fill a unique, interdisciplinary type of role. We want them to do all sorts of different things.” Harvey, whose official name is Counsel AI Corp., derived its brand name from an “amalgamation” of things, not just the fictitious corporate lawyer Harvey Specter from the legal drama “Suits,” Weinberg said.Whatever the moniker’s origin, Harvey quickly made a name for itself. The company was valued at $715 million in December after raising $80 million from investors such as the startup fund affiliated with generative artificial intelligence unicorn OpenAI and venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.Harvey, which straddles the larger generative artificial intelligence market, has drawn much hype by touting a time-saving technology that it and a growing number of other legal technology companies are offering to various clients.

In recent weeks Harvey has brought on lawyers who have worked at firms such as Gunderson Dettmer; Katten Muchin Rosenman; Latham & Watkins; O’Melveny & Myers; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and White & Case…Ralph Baxter, a veteran legal industry innovator and former leader of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who now advises firms and legal technology companies, said how Harvey fares going forward will be a good gauge for how generative artificial intelligence applications permeate into private practice.

ABA Free Legal Answers

“The American Bar Association web program ABA Free Legal Answers, which gives income-eligible users the ability to pose civil legal questions to volunteer attorneys, has released a nationwide list of lawyers, law firms, corporate law departments, law schools and other legal organizations who in 2023 handled the most online questions. Launched in 2016, the program… Continue Reading

LLRX February 2024 Issue

Articles and Columns for February 2024 Scam Baiting: An Innovative Approach to Combating Online Fraud – Kyra Strick AI in Banking and Finance, February 29, 2024 – Sabrina I. Pacifici Toward a durable, dictator-proof Washington Post – David H. Rothman What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt? – Jon Keegan Publishing… Continue Reading

Axel Springer vs. Google

Fortune: “Axel Springer is at Google’s throat again. The German news-publishing giant (for which I worked in my days at Politico) has a long history of battling Google over the issue of so-called ancillary copyright fees—payments for carrying snippets of text and thumbnail images in search results. But now it’s waging war on another front:… Continue Reading

Publishing for Profit: Selecting the Best Publisher

Via LLRX – Publishing for Profit: Selecting the Best Publisher – Jerry Lawson offers his expert advise on how lawyers (and other ambitious people) can profit by publishing. One method is to begin by focusing on your desired result. What are the best publishers for you and your work product? Lawson offers a couple of ways… Continue Reading

OpenAI’s Sora Explained

YouTube / WSJ – “OpenAI just revealed Sora – an AI video generator that creates hyper-realistic scenes and animated worlds in moments. But the tech isn’t perfect. There are also concerns over misinformation, with OpenAI saying it’s taking actions to get ready for the 2024 presidential election, including prohibiting the use of its tools for… Continue Reading

OpenAI shows off life-like videos made with AI

OpenAI – “Creating video from text. Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read the Technical Report – Video generation models as world simulators. We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable… Continue Reading

Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers

ArXiv – Lauren Martin, Nick Whitehouse, Stephanie Yiu, Lizzie Catterson, Rivindu Perera. 2024. Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers. 1, 1 (January 2024), 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn “This paper presents a groundbreaking comparison between Large Language Models (LLMs) and traditional legal contract reviewers—Junior Lawyers and Legal Process Outsourcers (LPOs). We dissect whether LLMs… Continue Reading

Book Review: Transformative Negotiation Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures

Via LLRX – Book Review: Transformative Negotiation Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures – Jerry Lawson writes – So you think you know how to negotiate? You’ve done some deals, maybe a lot, maybe some for big bucks. Maybe attended some classes. Maybe read some books. Surely you can’t have all that much left to… Continue Reading

The 2024 ‘Burning Issues’ Confronting Firm Leaders

Via LLRX – The 2024 ‘Burning Issues’ Confronting Firm Leaders – At the end of December 2023, Patrick J, Mckeena and Michael B. Rynowecer presented 200 Firm Leaders with a selection of over 40 timely and potential ‘Burning Issues’ – and asked of them “what do you anticipate as the highest priorities occupying your leadership agenda going… Continue Reading