The Notice: News and Resources for Paralegals, Litigation Support & Docketing Professionals
Is your firm still manually downloading court documents in ECF notices??
If you're planning to attend the 2024 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting & Conference in Chicago, - we'd love to connect with you and show you a better way! Visit Booth 617 from July 20-23 to see how ECFX revolutionizes this process by automating the entire ECF notice processing workflow for Federal & State courts and Agencies. Plus... you can select your very own magic wand! Find out more and schedule a meeting with us below.
? ??
In recent legal news: Large law firms target Boston to leverage booming tech and health care markets; Lawyers in the Johnson & Johnson talc litigation are seeking to expose each side's strategies - with plaintiffs claiming J&J misused bankruptcy to evade liability and pushing to access the company's internal communications; LexisNexis announced it will acquire Belgian legal tech company Henchman, integrating its document management and generative AI technology to enhance legal drafting solutions for customers worldwide;? and more!
We hope you enjoy this issue of The Notice!? ?
~The Team at ECFX
WORKING IN LARGE LAW
Big Law Firms Eye Boston to Tap Hot Tech, Health Care Markets
Large national law firms settling in Boston could edge out local players, several of which have operated as single office firms or regional setups for decades.???
Big Law firms, including Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Paul Hastings and Blank Rome announced new Boston offices this year. Covington & Burling, Arnold & Porter and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld are among firms that opened outposts in the city last year.???
“A lot of these firms are chasing industries that are hot,” said Jennifer Moss, a managing director in search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa’s Boston partner practice group. In Boston, that includes life sciences, health care, investment management and energy, including clean tech and tech, she said.?
Goodwin Procter in April poached a five-partner technology and life sciences team from Cooley in Boston. “There’s going to be a consolidation in legal services around these verticals,” Pat Mitchell, one of the partners who moved over to Goodwin and had cofounded Cooley’s Boston office in 2007, said at the time.?
Health and energy have both been bright spots in a slow deals market, outperforming other industries. That’s in part due to generous cash on the balance sheets of health care giants such as CVS, Pfizer and others, and favorable commodity prices and tax incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act that bolster the energy industry’s spending on clean technology.?
“Boston is in a bit of a bubble compared to a lot of other markets around the country and we haven’t been as impacted by some of the economic conditions that impact other markets,” Moss said. Law firm openings in Boston have grown exponentially in the last decade. More than 40 firms have opened shop in the city since 2016, including four in the past month, according to a list compiled by MLA. The wide swath includes regulatory-focused Covington and UK-founded Magic Circle firms like Allen & Overy, now A&O Shearman, which launched a Boston office in 2022.
Law Firms Start Training Summer Associates on Using Generative AI
Some Big Law firms are now making summer associates learn the ins and outs of generative AI as they begin integrating what’s considered to be a game-changing technology for the profession.???
K&L Gates, Dechert, and Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe have incorporated training on the technology for this year’s class of summer associates, teaching them how to use research and chatbot tools now being used by the firms. The programs offer a window into what some firms believe artificial intelligence will mean for those now entering the profession.?
Future junior lawyers won’t be replaced by AI, as some fear, but they will need to harness it to be successful, said Brendan McDonnell, a K&L Gates partner and member of the firm’s AI solutions group. That includes understanding how to effectively interact with generative AI chatbots to unearth the most useful information for clients, he said.?
“That’s the whole idea about the training program: You need to teach people how this is going to impact the way they come to work,” said McDonnell. While AI will automate many tasks, he said, it’s also going to open up new lines of legal practice while freeing up new professionals’ time to learn and master the complex work they went to law school for.?
Most firms are still in an experimentation phase when it comes to deploying generative AI chatbot and research tools. Firms’ use of the tech is also dependent on clients’ openness to it. “We’re in a transition period,” said Alex Su, the chief revenue officer at Latitude Legal, a global flexible legal staffing firm. “It’s hard to say there’s going to be a huge impact in how law firms staff in the near-term.” Still, legal experts caution that future lawyers need to address the technology.?
“It used to be that a lawyer was sufficiently tech savvy if she knew her way around Word and Westlaw,” said Nora Freeman Engstrom, the co-director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School. “Those days are over. In order to offer top-tier legal services in the 21st century, lawyers need facility with a suite of sophisticated tech-based tools.”
??
NEWS FOR 2024
J&J’s Talc Litigation Saga Gets Attorney-Client Privilege Twist
Lawyers in the multibillion-dollar battle over Johnson & Johnson‘s allegedly cancer-causing baby powders are now fighting on a new front, seeking to reveal the strategies behind each side.???
Some key plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that J&J illicitly transferred assets and abused the bankruptcy process in response to the massive talc litigation. They want a court to invoke the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege and force J&J to turn over emails and other communications among some of its top in-house attorneys. That could allow a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the strategies that J&J has used to try to limit liability and resolve some 61,000 talc cases.??
The lawsuit highlights some of the creative tactics being employed on both sides as J&J seeks approval of an $11 billion global settlement deal. The company is taking a third crack at the “Texas Two-Step,” a controversial move in which it takes a subsidiary loaded with the talc liability and has it file for bankruptcy. J&J also is looking to disqualify some of the lawyers leading the suits against it.??
The latest salvos are a sign that the major players are pulling out all the stops to gain an edge in the eventual outcome, said a source familiar with the campaigns of the warring camps, who requested anonymity.??
领英推荐
“What, in litigation, isn’t for settlement leverage?” said Bruce Markell, a former Nevada bankruptcy judge who is now a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, when asked about the most recent machinations in a litigation free-for-all that’s now wound its way through various US appellate, bankruptcy, and district courts. “Especially if you’ve got a plausible point and want to apply pressure. Things are done for mixed motives all the time.”??
Six plaintiffs firms are steering a putative class action filed last month in a New Jersey federal district court on behalf of clients claiming to have been adversely affected by asbestos-contaminated talc in former J&J baby powder products. The suit accuses the pharmaceutical and health care technology titan of abusing the US bankruptcy process with two unsuccessful Chapter 11 attempts by an affiliate it formed to resolve the sprawling litigation.
Industry Groups Back Drugmakers' Appeal in Zantac Cancer Lawsuits
A bid by GSK? and other drugmakers to stop more than 70,000 lawsuits in Delaware over discontinued heartburn drug Zantac has received the backing of leading U.S. industry groups, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.??
In a friend-of-the-court brief posted to the Delaware Superior Court's docket on Thursday, the groups said that a Delaware judge's recent ruling allowing the lawsuits to proceed jeopardized the state's business-friendly reputation and threatened to turn it into "a hotbed of products-liability and mass-tort litigation."??
GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Boehringer Ingelheim, which all sold Zantac at times, had asked Judge Vivian Medinilla to bar plaintiffs from offering expert testimony linking Zantac to cancer, arguing that it was not based on sound scientific methods. The plaintiffs' cases depend on that testimony, and cannot go to trial without it.??
After the judge refused, the companies petitioned her for leave to appeal directly to the Delaware Supreme Court. The industry groups in Thursday's filing are asking the judge to grant that petition.??
The groups, which also include the National Association of Manufacturers and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said Medinilla's ruling was at odds with a Florida federal court that in 2022 tossed about 50,000 Zantac claims after rejecting similar evidence as unreliable. Some plaintiffs are appealing that ruling.??
If Delaware courts adopted a more relaxed evidence standard for mass tort cases, they said, the state would quickly become a venue of choice for plaintiffs since many U.S. companies are incorporated there.??
The groups urged Medinilla to "consider the importance to the business community of clarity, consistency and predictability in Delaware jurisprudence on expert testimony." A lawyer for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.??
Lawsuits began piling up after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2020 asked manufacturers to pull the drug off the market over concerns that its active ingredient, ranitidine, could degrade into a cancer-causing chemical called NDMA over time or when exposed to heat.
TECHNOLOGY & LEGAL SUPPORT
How Legal Technology Boosts Team Efficiency and Performance
Inform your legal technology investments by understanding GenAI’s capabilities: By 2027, the global legal technology market will double in size because of GenAI — and legal leaders face growing pressure to respond. Sixty-six percent of legal leaders report plans to accelerate their investments in legal technology as a cost-effective way to manage workloads amid rising budgetary limitations. The most effective legal technology solutions do more than save costs and improve automation; they maximize the value contribution of legal staff by allowing them to focus on high-priority tasks.?
Increasingly, legal leaders are moving away from the traditional, siloed approach that focused on sourcing legal technology solutions solely for short-term task automation. To best equip your team, assess specific technology services or solutions based on their utility to in-house legal employees. This approach creates an “augmented legal workforce” in which technology investments complement and enhance employee capabilities to perform legal tasks. By 2026, 50% of office workers in global enterprises will be AI-augmented in one form or another, either to boost productivity or raise the quality of their work.?
The following trends support the idea of an augmented legal workforce for in-house legal teams:
? Increased use of generative AI (GenAI) to boost legal tasks such as conducting research, drafting and managing contracts, and streamlining intake and self-service systems.?
? Increased demand for self-service offerings to streamline legal request intake and provide automated guidance to access legal services, reducing the need for direct legal intervention.?
? Expected short-term rise in the use of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) to outsource high-volume legal work and gain access to innovative technologies that are not available in-house.?
GenAI and its emerging use cases, which can automate high-volume, routine tasks and replicate human-like abilities to conduct data analysis, are accelerating legal work. This is leading to increased GenAI adoption for increased productivity, an enhanced employee experience, greater innovation and fewer risks. Your in-house legal team can benefit from GenAI adoption in two primary ways:?
1. Use GenAI-enabled technologies to accelerate legal work — for instance, by using natural language processing to streamline the legal research process, or by using GenAI to automate repetitive tasks such as drafting and reviewing contracts.?
2. Integrate GenAI into existing legal technologies to augment their capabilities — for example, by using predictive and probabilistic risk analysis, which can assist in mitigating risk by raising red flags sooner and helping you predict the likelihood and frequency of a risk occurring.
??
Belgian Legal Tech Startup Henchman to be Acquired by US-Based LexisNexis
LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a New York-based company that provides information and analytics, announced on Monday, June 3, that it will buy Henchman, a legal tech company from Ghent, Belgium.??
Henchman improves data from Document Management Systems (DMS) to help draft documents faster. Founded in 2020 by Gilles Mattelin, Jorn Vanysacker and Wouter Van Respaille, Henchman has over 170 customers worldwide, including major law firms and companies in the US and Europe.?
Co-founder Mattelin, says, “We see this union with LexisNexis as an extension of our drafting vision to proactively surface valuable and strategic insights for customers – delivering a center of knowledge to legal teams. We believe the combination of our teams and tech will empower customers to make informed decisions faster, generate outstanding work, and drive economic value for their organizations.”?
The deal is expected to close early in the second half of 2024, pending customary regulatory approvals. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. By acquiring Henchman, LexisNexis will offer personalized generative AI solutions to customers worldwide. Henchman’s core features will be available to both existing and new customers.??
LexisNexis plans to integrate Henchman’s technology with its Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 (RAG 2.0) platform in the Lexis+ AI solution. This will use customer data for generative AI drafting.??
Henchman’s capabilities will also be added to Lexis Create, a Microsoft 365 add-in that allows generative AI drafting within Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. Law firms and corporations use Henchman to improve internal work products and speed up drafting tasks. It works with a company’s DMS to index documents at the clause level, providing insights and aiding in contract drafting.