Litera has grown and grown, often via acquisition of other legal tech companies, including Kira Systems among others. What is its strategy now? Artificial Lawyer spoke to Adam Ryan, Head of Product, to find out.
Ryan, who previously worked at Magic Circle firm Freshfields, explained that the company’s overall strategy is based on ‘The Three I’s’, which are: 1 – investing in everything on the platform, and improving those products, 2 – integrating the products together in a seamless workplace, and 3 – driving innovation at the cutting edge, such as its Foundation Dragon capability.
One could also perhaps call this Litera 3.0, i.e. the earlier version before the rush of acquisitions in the early 2020s was V.1, then we had version 2.0 with a range of products brought into the platform that needed to be integrated, and then with the arrival of genAI we now have 3.0 for the LLM era.
But, if that’s a lot to hold in one’s mind, Ryan has a single term to describe what Litera now does.
‘It’s the experience company, across end-to-end workflows. It serves the needs of lawyers and business services,’ he explained.
That is to say, they help lawyers and support groups to understand the work they’ve done through multiple dimensions, all supported via the data that law firms or inhouse teams already have, but perhaps have not tapped or organised in order to leverage its value. Then that data is turned into useable insights that can be applied to a current work project.
So, for example, they can help surface contract intelligence to help with drafting; and they can help firms see who they’ve advised and who did that work, which helps with project management and future marketing efforts. In short, they have placed themselves at the intersection of the legal business’s data streams and KM systems, whether for legal or operational information about the work product.
And to get a sense of the wide range of what’s on offer now see the image below. It’s a lot…!
‘It’s all about experience and then transforming the legal experience,’ Ryan underlined, whether this is via using Litera’s Foundation Dragon capability, Transact, or other elements of the platform.
So, where does genAI fit into all of this?
Ryan explained that the mission is to ‘embed genAI into each part’ of the platform so that you can surface, even more deeply, data related to marketing and BD, client relationships, pitches, pricing, drafting, deal points, due diligence and more.
One way they will be doing this is via Lattice, which one could see as a natural language Q&A portal to access all of the above.
Lattice will connect to all of the tools Litera has and the data that they can surface. Plus, they’ve already added genAI summaries and natural language searches for Kira. And, with regard to clause and deal data intelligence mentioned above, Foundation Dragon is also tapping genAI already.
Overall then, Litera is powering ahead, moving from rapid growth via acquisition, to integration of multiple tools into a single platform, to now tapping genAI to make the surfacing off all that legal data produced by law firms and inhouse teams so much easier to handle.
The end goal: to turn your prior work into new value. In short, as Ryan noted, they’re all about being the experience company.