Canadian Lawyer

w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 9 31 V ery late last year, Tel Aviv-based business-to-business company LawGeex announced that total 2018 investment in legal technol- ogy — a.k.a. "law tech" or (more frequently) "legal tech" — had surpassed US$1 billion. That was up from the US$233 million invested in 2017, said LawGeex — a four-year-old, 80-employee legal tech firm that has itself attracted US$21.5 million — more than half of that last year. An arguably more modest view was provided by San Fran- cisco market monitoring website Crunchbase News, which told Canadian Lawyer in late December that total global legal tech investment for 2018 stood at almost US$700 million — up from the US$250 million it reported for 2016. Also in late December, Stanford CodeX — a database run by Stanford University's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics in Stan- ford, Calif. — tallied actual legal tech firms worldwide at 1,107 — just less than half the number reported by Netherlands-based legal tech website legalcomplex.com. Recent Thomson Reuters research, meanwhile, reveals a five-year 484-per-cent increase in global patent filings for new legal tech, with the U.S. and China among the most prolific applicants (Thomson Reuters is the pub- lisher of Canadian Lawyer). LawGeex vice president of marketing Shmuli Goldberg says that despite the industry's apparently "explosive" growth, it remains "very early days" for the legal tech industry due to law- yers' low adoption levels. Bust? Toronto-based lawyer Mitch Kowalski — a professor of legal service innovation at the University of Calgary Law School and author of the book Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Ser- vices for the 21st Century — is bearish by comparison. He says legal tech remains stuck in "hype mode" in a "bubble that will burst and taint the entire sector." Says Kowalski, "Just like the fog of war, there seems to be a lot going on out there with legal tech, but it's becoming more and more difficult to keep up with all the players. Like the dot.com boom, it has become nearly impossible to sort out what's real and what's just good marketing." Kowalski adds that while the market is seeing increased acquisitions, and while there have been a handful of big funding rounds, this is "very normal for nascent sectors."

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