Law.com and Legaltech News are proud to announce this year's winners for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards, celebrating the achievements of law firms, legal departments and vendors leading the legal profession into the future through technology and innovation.

On Monday night, ALM kicked off Legalweek 2023 by hosting an awards ceremony to celebrate the third annual Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. These awards recognize the most innovative achievements of the past year from in-house legal departments, law firms, and the tech provider and service partner community in 35 different categories.

This year's submissions told stories of laudable achievement and innovation, the effects of which will be felt on the legal industry for years to come. All our nominees, finalists and winners should be proud of their accomplishments and commended for the hard work they've devoted to pushing the legal industry into the future. 

We also thank our external judging panel, as well as the hard work of countless people behind the scenes who helped to make this year's awards possible.

We're proud to present the 2023 winners of the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards below. In the coming weeks, you'll have the opportunity to read more about each of our winners in a series of Q&As.

We look forward to hosting these awards again next year alongside ALM at Legalweek 2024, being held from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1 in New York. More information about nominations for those awards will be forthcoming later this year, and you can stay up-to-date with notifications via this link. If you have any questions or suggestions for a category we should include, drop us a line at [email protected].

Law Firms

Tech-Enabled Corp Department of the Year

Winner: McDermott Will & Emery

McDermott Will & Emery's Knowledge Management Team created a proprietary AI search system called Form Finder to help analyze purchase and credit agreements, compare them instantly to every similar agreement the firm has ever done and, based on a similarity score, determine whether the firm has ever prepared comments or fully negotiated the same form of agreement before.

Finalist:

  • Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Enabling Start-Up Success

Winner: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati developed Neuron, proprietary, enterprise-grade software to streamline, automate, and digitize the typical legal processes along a startup's journey—from formation to exit—to give its clients a holistic platform to collaborate with their legal team and access their legal information and documentation at any time.

Finalists:

    • Davis Polk
    • Foley & Lardner
    • NEXT by Shulman Rogers

Innovators of the Year—Law Firm (Individual)

Winner: Timothy Cooke, Reed Smith

Timothy Cooke conceived, developed and coded a new Arbitration Pricing Calculator app to quickly help practitioners calculate expected maximum administrative and tribunal costs of arbitration in more than 20 currencies and for 42 international arbitral institutions.

Finalists:

    • Daniel Farris, Norton Rose Fulbright
    • Charina Garcia, WR Immigration
    • Christopher K. Larus, Robins Kaplan
    • Kate Wegrzyn, Foley & Lardner

Innovations in Pro Bono

Winner: Davis Wright Tremaine

Davis Wright Tremaine looked beyond its own internal pro bono efforts and developed "Gateway to Good," a first-of-its-kind platform that connects in-house counsels with curated pro bono opportunities, measurable achievements, early access to CLE events, and step-by-step guides for developing world-class in-house pro bono programs.

Finalists:

    • Morgan Lewis & Bockius
    • Munger Tolles & Olson
    • Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

Innovations in Diversity and Inclusion

Winner: Nixon Peabody

In collaboration with Diversity Lab, Nixon Peabody designed the "Mansfield Rule for Workflow" (MRW), a "bias interrupter" to help the firm's leaders create a more inclusive culture related to staffing teams and furthering associates' career development. 

Finalists:

    • Eversheds Sutherland and Konexo US
    • Goodwin
    • Winston & Strawn

Innovations in Knowledge Management

Winner: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius implemented KM ConnX, a sophisticated data reconciliation and integration tool that empowers the firm to optimize use of its third-party data resources to enrich the matter experience data available to attorneys, resulting in increased information, enabling the firm to respond to clients more quickly, reliably staff matters and strategize on specialized legal issues.

Finalists:

  • Munger Tolles & Olson
  • Ogletree Deakins
  • Shearman & Sterling
  • WilmerHale

ESG Enablement Through Technology

Winner: Munger, Tolles & Olson

Munger, Tolles & Olson used the firm's internal Combating Systemic Racism Task Force, facilitated by Relativity technology, to analyze how the firm could help address issues of systemic racism in their community, the legal profession and throughout our nation.

Finalists:

  • DLA Piper
  • Shearman & Sterling

Litigation and E-Discovery

Winner: Cravath, Swaine & Moore

Cravath, Swaine & Moore's e-discovery team uses AI to identify documents for production without comprehensive human review, employing the AI search tool Reveal-Brainspace to adapt "sentiment analysis" to evaluate documents for their emotional tenor. They also employ a next-generation NLP tool called AllSearch to search for documents that contain phrases with a particular meaning, even if there is no overlap in the specific articulation. 

Finalists:

  • Arnold & Porter eData Group
  • Morgan, Lewis & Bockius
  • Reed Smith

Emerging Technology

Winner: DLA Piper

DLA Piper developed an asset tokenization platform for use internally and by clients. Named TOKO, the platform uses distributed ledger technology to solve the inefficiencies that plague today's capital markets, from expensive and unpredictable fees to slow transaction speeds.

Finalists:

    • Fox Rothschild
    • Reed Smith
    • Ropes & Gray

Regulatory Technology

Winner: Porzio, Bromberg & Newman

Porzio, Bromberg & Newman spent nearly two decades building out a technology-oriented subsidiary business dedicated to keeping pharmaceutical companies informed about the ever-changing regulatory landscape. Porzio Life Sciences represented approximately 30% of the firm's overall revenue in 2022, when it became the first U.S. law firm to sell its legal technology business to a private equity portfolio company.

Finalists:

    • Reed Smith
    • Buckley

Tech-Enabled Hybrid Work Environment

Winner: Thompson Hine

Thompson Hine created their own internal software tool to facilitate assignments between employees in various locations and different time zones, streamlining the staffing process, reducing partner administrative time, improving inclusion/equity of staffing assignments, and improving morale, engagement, growth, and retention of associates.

Finalist:

  • Morgan Lewis & Bockius

Lifetime Achievement

Winner: Chris Boyd, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Chris Boyd first worked at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati as a corporate associate from 1993 to 1997, and later rejoined as an administrative leader in 2001, leading the firm's nascent knowledge management and professional development programs. Eventually, he was promoted to chief operating officer in 2020. Today, that once-junior associate now leads attorney recruiting and retention, marketing and business development, diversity, equity and inclusion, human resources, knowledge management and practice management, to name just a few of his roles.

Winner: Jack Nelson, Reed Smith

Jack Nelson has maintained a successful commercial and class action defense practice for more than 30 years, and has been a leader in Big Law since 1998. In 2002, he co-led what was then a major merger between Reed Smith and its legacy California firm. He went on to hold numerous leadership positions throughout the firm's international offices before transitioning into management full-time in 2016. He served as firm CLO from 2016-2022, and today is Reed Smith's Senior Director of Legal Operations, where he works with the management team on the next generation of high-level special projects.

Law Departments

Most Innovative Legal Department of the Year

Winner: Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.

Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.'s winning transformation initiative involved nearly 100 people to build on existing processes to operate more innovatively, efficiently, and effectively, creating greater value for its law department and the organization as a whole, and effectively overhauling operations in nine strategic areas.

Finalist:

  • NEXT powered by Shulman Rogers

Most Innovative Legal Operations Team of the Year

Winner: OpenText Legal Operations Team

The OpenText Legal Operations Team stood up a legal operations function within six months, to drive transformation in a 35-year-old legal department, bringing quantitative and qualitative value to the business, increasing the pace of work, realizing cost savings, and instilling a growth mindset.

Innovators of the Year—Law Department (Individual)

Winner: Farrah Pepper, Marsh McLennan

Farrah Pepper designed her own role when she joined Marsh McLennan in 2018, leading the company's Legal Innovation & Technology team. Her mission is to leverage the trifecta of people, smart processes and technology to drive efficiencies, quality, savings, risk reduction and—not least of all, in her own words—spark joy among her colleagues.

Finalists:

    • Henry Tang, Meta
    • Jessica Vander Ploeg,OpenText
    • Christina Wojcik, Citi Global Legal

Innovations in Knowledge Management

Winner: Alesya Nasimova, Fundbox

Alesya Nasimova of Fundbox oversaw consistent collaboration with product managers and engineering teams to data map and set out policy, process, and procedures for the company internally and externally, thereby achieving GDPR compliance for international expansion in a short three months. 

ESG Enablement Through Technology

Winner: The Diversity Dividends Collective

The Diversity Dividends Collective is a first-of-its-kind collective amongst more than 40 legal departments to propel the inclusion, equity, and diversity of legal departments' outside counsel teams—broadening the scope of underrepresented lawyers at law firms who have access to high-quality work, regularly interact with in-house counsel, and receive credit for originating client work.

Finalist:

  • Reed Smith

Contract Lifecycle Management

Winner: Mphasis

Mphasis implemented an AI-powered CLM tool that enabled clients on CLM across all geographies, in the process expontentially boosting CLM adoption, revenue and user numbers while reducing legal cost.

Finalist:

  • Joerns Healthcare

Litigation and E-Discovery

Winner: Cisco

Cisco saw the benefits of bringing e-discovery technology in-house, and invested in two litigation support technologies: Legal hold application, used to manage custodians and matters, and eDiscovery ingestion & Review, used to manage litigation data for culling and review.

Finalists:

  • American Airlines, Inc.

Vendors

New Law Company of the Year

Winner: Priori (Scout)

Last year, Priori, an existing player in the legal tech industry, released a new SaaS product called Scout to enhance in-house legal departments' knowledge of their valued outside counsel relationships, identify the right staffing for projects, track attorney performance over time and accomplish a wide range of diversity goals.

Finalists:

    • LateralHub
    • Lawtrades
    • Syntheia

Emerging Technology

Winner: Everlaw

Everlaw released a new tool last year called Clustering, which uses AI to group documents based on conceptual similarity. It employs unsupervised machine learning to support up to 25 million documents on a single screen, which are presented in a visually appealing format that is unique to the data.

Finalists:

  • Ironclad AI
  • Lexis APIs
  • Syntheia

Tech-Enabled Hybrid Work Environment

Winner: Blue J Legal 

Blue J Legal set out to develop tools to enable the hybrid work environment by providing attorneys the ability to collaborate with each other in real time, in a secure way, on complex visual structures. The intelligent diagramming and visual collaboration project successfully launched in July 2022.

Finalists:

    • Lawtrades,
    • Elizabeth "Liz" Lugones, COO & Senior Advisor, UpLevel Ops
    • Maptician

Data Privacy & CyberSecurity

Winner: TerraTrue

Last year, TerraTrue announced a privacy initiative called Shift Left to help companies everywhere modernize privacy programs by working with product development from the beginning—rather than taking a siloed, reactive approach to product development.

Finalists:

    • HaystackID Global Advisory
    • NetDocuments

Legal Operations

Winner: EY

EY developed a modular management and monitoring platform that not only allows its clients to accelerate digital transformation of their legal, ethics and compliance program, but scales and adapts in response to events or as business needs grow.

Finalists:

    • Epiq Legal Business Advisory
    • Priori
    • Shearman & Sterling
    • UpLevel Ops/Confluent

E-Discovery Technology

Winner: Reveal

Reveal launched a new offering that seamlessly integrated industry-leading AI-Powered technology and unrivaled data visualization in a single eDiscovery platform, Reveal 11.

Finalists:

  • FTI Technology – Emerging Data Sources
  • HaystackID Core
  • UnitedLex & Red Wolf Energy

Litigation Technology

Winner: Clearbrief

Clearbrief has revolutionized the way litigators approach briefs, by adding an Add Fact Cite button into Word. This bridged the gap between e-discovery and the writing process by allowing users to upload the universe of factual documents they are likely to reference in a given pleading, and quickly and easily cite to the relevant portions of them.

Finalists:

  • Everlaw
  • Fact & Issue Finder on Lexis+

Deal Technology

Winner: Syntheia

Syntheia worked with two AmLaw 50 firms to create a product that would use novel AI and natural language processing models to disassemble any contract, and compare any two or more documents simultaneously, enabling lawyers to identify differences and variances between documents in ways traditional redlines cannot.

Knowledge Management

Winner: UnitedLex CDaaS

UnitedLex created a legal industry first in CDaaS, a means of combining technology, data science, and expert review to convert complex contract legalese into structured data that provides insights to inform business decisions, ensure compliance, reduce risk, and increase profitability.

Finalists:

    • Trellis
    • UnitedLex Vantage Intelligence Repository
    • Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. – VitalLaw

Practice Management

Winner: NetDocuments

NetDocuments acquired a standalone, no-code automation toolkit, brought it into its own document management platform, and provided a full native integration that was ready to launch in just nine months. In 2022 they launched PatternBuilder, a no-code solution that gives lawyers and legal teams an easy way to build automation based on their own expertise and processes.

Finalists:

    • Clio
    • MyCase

Regulatory Technology

Winner: Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.–VitalLaw

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. created VitalLaw, a new dashboard that includes comprehensive federal and state laws and regulations for all 50 states, including the dates when future laws and regulations will become effective and redlining to quickly assess what is changing.

Finalists:

  • LexisNexis State Net
  • Luminance

Contract Lifecycle Management

Winner: LinkSquares

LinkSquares' platform was onboarded to accelerate and automate the work of a global legal team of 10 commercial negotiators responsible for drafting, negotiating, and executing every contract generated by their 1,000+ member sales team. The project was delivered on time, getting the team fully up and running within three months and on budget. 

Finalists:

    • AXDRAFT
    • Ironclad
    • Luminance

Justice Technology

Winner: LexisNexis U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center

LexisNexis launched the U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center, a free website offering public access to over 40,000 federal and state election and voting laws, including changes to laws over time, as part of an ongoing effort to advance transparency of the law, in line with the mission of their non-profit LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation.

Finalist:

  • Immediation 

Championing Diversity in Tech (Individual)

Winner: Raad Ahmed, Lawtrades

Raad Ahmed shattered industry standards in increasing the diversity of the community on the Lawtrades platform, with 37% identifying as a racial or ethnic minority, and more than half identifying as female. By connecting companies with a diverse set of legal talent, Lawtrades helps to increase DEI in the world's top companies.

Finalists:

  • Abeer Abu Judeh, LexDock
  • Mirra Levitt, Priori

Innovators of the Year (Individual)

Winner: Dan Rabinowitz, Pre/Dicta

Dan Rabinowitz launched Pre/Dicta in 2022, an entirely new company and product that uses data science to learn the decisional patterns of every federal district court judge, and to predict, with 86% accuracy, rulings on motions to dismiss in commercial cases.

Finalists:

    • David Carter, Calloquy
    • Stephanie Corey, UpLevel Ops
    • Mirra Levitt, Priori
    • Albert Tawil, Lateral Hub

Lifetime Achievement

Winner: Sirisha Gummaregula, QuisLex

Sirisha Gummaregula started her career as an M&A lawyer specializing in hostile deals. After nine years, she became AGC & Corporate Secretary at Quest Diagnostics, before deciding to take a risk on a new way of delivering legal work. In 2006, she had the foresight to form what we now commonly call an ALSP. That company, QuisLex, is still independently owned today, and is one of the world's longest-operating legal process outsourcing companies. Gummaregula is still deeply involved in serving clients, leading teams that deliver their work, and, as she puts it, "breaking processes so that we may fix them."

Winner: Eyal Iffergan, Epiq

Eyal Iffergan has had a distinguished 25-year career focused on advising the legal business community. In those 25 years, he has been recognized for his drive to deliver operational expertise and innovation to Global 1000 corporations and AmLaw 200 law firms, helping clients execute legal transformation programs. In 2009, Iffergan founded Hyperion Global Partners with a clear vision of a modern legal department that transforms legal operations into a business function.