A key selling point for “New Law” alternative legal service providers is integrating technology with human skill for greater outcomes than one or the other could achieve alone. “AI or machine learning are fantastic technologies, but you have to go into them with open eyes,” said Elevate managing director of contract consulting Craig Conte to LTN in June. “AI is not magic. It's best to think of AI as machine learning and not some magic supercomputer.”

It's that marriage of people and technology that has driven law company Elevate to its newest acquisition: legal technology and consulting firm LexPredict. The acquisition, Elevate said, will allow it to marry its comprehensive service offerings with LexPredict's data science and artificial intelligence technology to create “more sophisticated technology-enabled solutions for law departments and law firms.”

Elevate and LexPredict have already worked together for a year, focusing on leveraging AI in M&A, due diligence and contract analysis for Cisco, the press release announcing the deal said. From here, the combined companies plan to focus on, among other things, adding AI-enabled intake, assessment and workflow to contract repositories; combining AI technology with managed services for use in regulatory work; leveraging AI for outside counsel billing guideline compliance; and litigation and transactional predictive modeling.

LexPredict was founded in 2013 by Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito as Quantitative Legal Solutions before rebranding to LexPredict in 2014, with a goal of predicting legal outcomes such as U.S. Supreme Court cases and congressional bills. Since then, the company has expanded into various products, services and advisory arms, including four product and investment subsidiaries.

Katz, now a Chicago-Kent College of Law professor, is a frequent legal tech analyst and speaker at industry events. At the NetDocuments ndElevate conference last week, he highlighted, in a keynote speech, the influence of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), saying of the traditional legal structure, “the incumbents are under attack from a number of different directions,” including ALSPs among the Big Four accounting firms, legal technology, and even clients themselves.

In the press release announcing the deal, he added, “The most comprehensive solutions often require the integration of multiple disciplines. Joining forces with Elevate is the most effective way to bring those solutions to market more quickly.”

From the Elevate standpoint, vice president of innovation Pratik Patel noted, “We're merging our businesses to increase the pace at which we are integrating AI into our enterprise legal management suite, Cael ELM, and collaborating on solutions that are 'AI + HI'—artificial intelligence plus human intelligence.”

This mirrors Katz's vision of AI as being a piece of a puzzle. He explained at the ndElevate conference, “There's a lot more to this legal innovation conversation than robot lawyers. I've never met a robot lawyer; I'm sure there's one somewhere.”

The deal reflects a legal technology marketplace where the marriage of human intelligence and artificial intelligence is becoming the norm. Riverview Law, for instance, entered a 10-year contract with legal automation company Kim Technologies in August with a similar goal. UnitedLex, meanwhile, pointed to technology development as a positive outcome of its deal with European private equity firm CVC Capital Partners in September.