We have had law firm and corporate users doing real deals with the assistance of our contract review software for quite some time. They regularly give us feedback that the DiligenceEngine system is “tremendously helpful” and the like. But we generally avoided having anyone write on us until recently. We think our system is now ready for more attention and are happy that a few people have already chosen to cover us. In case you have not otherwise come across them, here are a few recent items where outsiders have discussed DiligenceEngine:
- Tweets from my presentation at ReInvent Law NYC. It was a lot of fun to speak in front of such a big and good crowd at this really enjoyable event! This compilation doesn’t have all the tweets from my presentation, but it has most I’ve seen.
- Check Out DiligenceEngine — Ken Adams. As a longtime reader of Ken’s terrific “Adams on Contract Drafting” blog, was really nice to get covered by him. If you’re unfamiliar with Ken, Canadian periodical The Lawyers Weekly said of him “In the world of contract drafting, Ken Adams is the guru.” I strongly recommend following him if you care about how contracts are drafted.
- Legal Analytics, Machine Learning + Comments on the Status of Innovation in the Legal Industry – Professors Daniel Martin Katz & Michael J Bommarito II – Presentation @ The Forum on Legal Evolution – NYC 02.26.14 — Professor Daniel Martin Katz in his presentation slides from there (slides 139–143). While we think our system is a terrific example of how machine learning (plus user interface) can help lawyers do their work better, it was a very nice surprise to be covered by a leader of the legal innovation community at this high-quality-seeming event (see another thorough writeup of the event here). Follow Dan’s good Twitter stream here.
- Diamonds I Missed at LegalTech — David Houlihan. Nice coverage of us and a few other cool companies by a smart analyst who covers enterprise risk management, compliance and policy management, and legal technology. David is also worth following on Twitter.
Why did we wait to publicize what we had built? (1) I was trained to not put work product out until sure it was well done, (2) our system was always getting more impressive, and (3) we were able to source new users without any outside coverage. We have been getting consistently-positive user feedback since spring 2013, we hit a target set of feature milestones (more on our recent adds in a later post), and—from what we’ve seen—there was nothing close on the market for accurately reviewing unfamiliar contracts (though a number of possibilities for reviewing form agreements and clean scans). Were we too cautious with waiting? In retrospect, probably. But here we are.