2018 Awards Announced

For the 14th year, the InnovAction Awards have recognized outstanding innovation in the delivery of legal services, demonstrating to the legal community what can happen when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, resolve to create effective change. 

This year we are proud to announce two InnovAction Award-winning entries: LawGeex, based in Tel Aviv, Israel and NetApp, Inc., based in Sunnyvale, CA. The awards will be presented Friday, October 26, at a special lunch session during the 2018 Futures Conference, held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the College of Law Practice Management.

More About the Winning Entries

LawGeex

Key Team Members: Noory Bechor, Ilan Admon, Gil Rosenblum, Shmuli Goldberg, Jonathan Marciano and Professor Yonatan Aumann 

In a major study picked up by media across the world, LawGeex, an Artificial Intelligence contract review automation company, revealed that its AI bested top US lawyers for the first time in accurately spotting risks in everyday business contracts. The study, carried out in collaboration with top academics at leading universities, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an accuracy of 94 percent, while the lawyers achieved an average of 85 percent. It took 92 minutes for the lawyer participants to complete all five NDAs compared to only 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI.

The study pitted the LawGeex AI solution against 20 elite US-trained top corporate lawyers with decades of experience, specifically in reviewing NDAs. The participants’ legal and contract expertise spanned experience at companies including Goldman Sachs and Cisco, and global law firms including Alston & Bird and K&L Gates.

Leading legal academics and veteran US corporate lawyers who collaborated in the study included Professor Erika J.S. Buell, Duke University School of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California, Bruce Mann and Professor Yonatan Aumann, Professor in the Department of Computer Science, at Bar Ilan University. LawGeex produced a 40 page report detailing the methodology and findings, which revealed the magnitude by which LawGeex’ AI platform bested the performance of the lawyers. https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/

NetApp, Inc.

Key Team Members: Connie Brenton, Emily Teuben, Ginger Dolgow, Irina Grinshteyn, Abhay Salukhe, Safi Sadiq, Ritesh Singh and Virendra Dahiya

NetApp Legal are beta testers of new technology. Three months ago, the IT innovation team approached Legal to beta test a “Bot,” leveraging RPA (Robotic Process Automation). The first time they watched the Bot sign in to four separate technologies, performing a rules-based process in a tenth of the time, the NetApp Legal was sold. Twelve weeks later NetApp Legal welcomed its first Bot, which they named Bot-ticelli, to Legal, enabling a transformation into a next-generation digital workforce.

Bot-ticelli simplifies a high-volume, contract management process by logging into multiple applications, accessing email attachments, extracting pertinent information related to partnership agreements, and uploading information into NetApp Legal’s database. Prior to Bot-ticelli, two people managed 80 agreements/week at a rate of 10-15 minutes per agreement. Since the advent of the Bot, minimal human intervention is required, and they achieved a 600% faster upload speed.

Bot-ticelli benefits:

1. Time-Savings – Migrating to RPA increased upload speed by 600% compared to the manual process.
2. Improved Accuracy – The Bot follows rules-based logic and is less prone to error than the manual process.
3. Increased Bandwidth of Skilled Legal Resources – The Bot frees up team members to do more complex work. The Bot relieves up to one-half FTE per day.
4. Reduction in Email Traffic – The new no/low-touch environment reduces 'noise' in email.
5. Improved Governance and Reporting – The Bot generates an output log, facilitating seamless reporting.