Longtime legal publisher ALM is moving beyond publication and data, revealing on Tuesday one of its first automated solutions.

Legal Radar is an automated news feed that scrapes from federal case database PACER. Users select what news they would like to see from a list of relevant industries, practice areas, law firms, companies, and states/global regions. The newsfeed then provides automated summaries (usually between 50-80 words) of key details about cases, and also pulls in ALM content that could be applicable to those categories.

The tool is intended as a mobile-centric solution: Created as a progressive web app, the home screen for Legal Radar scrolls similar to a mobile app whether on browser or phone. ALM is also offering Legal Radar as an RSS feed to be integrated into other organization-wide information solutions, and plans to offer customized APIs for the service in coming days.

Legal Radar is behind a registration wall, but is otherwise free with a professional email address. Those without a wider Law.com subscription will hit a paywall if they attempt to access more than three articles per month.

Here is where I put a litany of disclosures: Legaltech News is an ALM brand, and I'm an ALM employee. Selected Legaltech News stories will be part of what is pulled into Legal Radar. And Vanessa Blum, ALM's director of newsroom innovation and the head of the project, is a colleague I've worked with for years.

Still, the product intrigued me from a legal tech perspective: Legal Radar on its face is a journalistic tool intended to go head-to-head with the newly launched Law Street Media service from Fastcase or Law360's offerings. But to a certain extent, its automated nature also fits into the wider legal research technology sphere, sitting as a jumping off point for litigators and other attorneys to develop ideas before moving into further research platforms from Bloomberg Law, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and others.

Speaking with me yesterday, Blum noted that while the tool may be seen as going up against research giants, the ultimate goal isn't for Legal Radar to be an analysis tool, but rather an extension of the company's journalistic goals to provide greater awareness of news and trends.

"If you think of informational needs on a spectrum, Legal Radar sits at the early alerting end—as a discovery or awareness tool for learning what just happened," Blum said. "ALM's legal publications connect the dots to deliver context and insight and point to trends in the profession. And finally our research/analysis tools offer strategic intelligence for business planning and forecasting."

With that in mind, Blum said the current solution is primarily intended as a tool for litigators and legal professionals to keep up with industry trends and clients, as well as business development and communications teams supporting them. ALM does plan to add transactional content later in 2020, however, which Blum believes "will greatly expand the core audience."

The automated system begins by ingesting the raw PACER data, then on the back-end identifies key info within the filing (parties, jurisdiction, involved firms, etc.) and standardizes that data. Natural language generation technology licensed from Automated Insights is then used to create case summaries, which highlight the parties in a case, the law firms involved, and more. The summary is then sorted into a bucket to describe the type of news.

For example, I set up my newsfeed to include a number of large technology companies, including Google. As I'm writing this, the first case in my radar feed is labeled "Who Got the Work" and reads:

Attorneys A. John P. Mancini, Vera Ripnick-O'Farrell, and Sara A. Slavin of Mayer Brown have stepped in as defense counsel to Google in a pending copyright lawsuit. The case was filed December 18 in New York Southern District Court by Gora LLC on behalf of Pro Music Rights. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Gregory H Woods, is 1:19-cv-11613, Pro Music Rights LLC v. Google LLC.

The system isn't entirely automated, however. Blum noted that human editors come into the process not only to review automated content for accuracy and completeness, but also to develop the automated templates themselves. She explained that the system was "designed with journalistic principles embedded in the code," with more than a dozen different editor-driven fact patterns embedded into the automated summaries. Ben Hancock, a coder-journalist and longtime reporter for ALM publication The Recorder, is also a leader on the project.

Ultimately, as in much of legal technology, the goal is a blend of speed and accuracy: The market demands more data at a quicker pace, because law firms and legal departments alike are continuously looking for a new edge in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It's a trend that LTN has chronicled in a number of different areas of legal tech, from e-discovery to transactional analysis to legal research. To me, it's an extension of the same trend, just closer to home being in legal news.

"We recognize our readers are busier than ever, move at a pace that's faster, consume news on mobile devices and on-the-go, and need to understand their clients' businesses and industry sectors more deeply than ever to be relevant advisers and partners," Blum said. "The innovative approach we've taken with Legal Radar is designed to provide these lawyers with the information they need to succeed in a way that responds to these realities."