New York firm Davis Polk & Wardwell is emulating its transatlantic rivals Linklaters and Clifford Chance (CC) by building a virtual law capacity.
Spurred on by Linklaters' Blue Flag and CC's NextLaw online legal advice services, the firm has bought Jnana Technologies' Web-based knowledge system.
The Jnana system was previously used by in-house lawyers at General Electric to build a virtual patent adviser for its engineers, and more recently by technology and aerospace giant Rockwell's in-house lawyers to build a virtual invention disclosure adviser.
But the Davis Polk purchase is the first time the system has been introduced by a US law firm.
Michael Mills, director of professional services and systems at Davis Polk, said while his firm was still a long way from offering the level of advice seen in Linklaters' Blue Flag system, it was building systems for use by specific clients.
Mills said: "While we have developed some virtual systems, we have not focused them in the same way Blue Flag has done. I don't believe any US firm has and I think it is a year or two away, but it is a business model that intrigues me."
Davis Polk has developed a Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) adviser for use by its clients doing mergers and acquisitions work. The client follows a decision tree that determines whether an HSR application needs to be filed – when a merger has potential anti-trust implications – or whether face-to-face legal advice is needed. It automatically e-mails any results to the law firm.
Mills, an ex-Mayer Brown & Platt partner and leading light in the US legal technology community, said he was an "astute judge" of where the legal market was going. He said he believed Blue Flag-type systems would figure heavily in future in the US.
Mills said Jnana was an "extraordinary" application because lawyers building virtual advisers would not need programming skills, but could instead use simple drag and drop techniques to build the systems.
According to Mills, his firm's application of Jnana was more likely to spot issues than provide answers. "The system will come back and say 'the following 20 points need to be addressed'," he said.
Jnana project manager Ron Friedmann said: "Even when a Jnana application cannot answer the question definitively, the benefits are significant. Jnana performs an intelligent interview that collects all or most of the information a real lawyer would use to make the decision."
Friedmann said while he would "love" to see more US law firms developing virtual advice services, it was still far more likely for corporate law departments to embark on these initiatives. "The large UK firms are more committed to knowledge management than the large US firms," he said.
LA-headquartered Latham & Watkins – which has 750 lawyers working from eight other US offices as well as in London, Tokyo and Moscow – did develop a subscription-based virtual adviser for environmental information on international regulatory work.
But, according to business development director Jolene Overbeck, her firm dropped the application after finding it "didn't expand our market share".
"I don't think it was very effective as a practice tool, and maintenance took up valuable resources," Overbeck said. She added her firm is now developing a similar system for its health care practice. "It caters for the more routine parts of the process that clients have to go through. So far it has gone very well."