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    <author>
        <name>PartnerVine</name>
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    <title>PartnerVine Atom feed</title>
    <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/?sRss=1</id>
    <updated>2026-05-13T18:35:59+02:00</updated>
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">UBS offers Swiss regulatory knowledge on PartnerVine</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-offers-swiss-regulatory-knowledge-on-partnervine</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-offers-swiss-regulatory-knowledge-on-partnervine"/>
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                                            UBS and PartnerVine collaboration underscores growing investment in regulatory solutions
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 UBS has partnered with Swiss legal information products marketplace, PartnerVine, to make its regulatory knowledge available on the latter’s platform. 
 The partnership will enable customers to access UBS’s Swiss regulatory expertise on the Financial Services Act (FinSA), Financial Institutions Act (FinIA) and revised Collective Investment Schemes Act (revCISA). 
 According to Jordan Urstadt, CEO of PartnerVine, the availability of the UBS knowledge base in PartnerVine will give Swiss financial firms a “much easier and cost-effective” alternative to developing the knowledge themselves. 
 The UBS knowledge collection comprises more than 630 questions and answers developed for Swiss financial service providers. 
 The collection includes decision trees, glossary, tables, graphics, and cross-references to related topics. 
 While the bank’s regulatory knowledge will be available in English, sample operational documents and client-facing forms will be available in English, German, French and Italian languages. 
 PartnerVine is an online platform that provides educational materials from law firms and service providers on legal topics. 
 UBS is the first bank to provide its knowledge materials on the platform. 
 Regtech firms experience growth, but free resources highly sought after 
 The Swiss bank’s decision to sell its regulatory knowledge on the platform comes amid the growing adoption of regtech by both the financial and non-financial firms as they seek to boost compliance efficiency in a timely and cost-efficient manner. 
 According to Thomson Reuters’&amp;nbsp; fintech, regtech and the role of compliance report 2022 , 49% of respondents are contemplating the use of regtech services, up from 34% in the previous year. 
 Additionally, the&amp;nbsp; annual compliance health check report &amp;nbsp;by SteelEye, a compliance and data analytics platform, also revealed that 44% of respondents are planning to invest in more regtech solutions in the next 12 months. 
 The increasing incorporation of regtech has created opportunities for financial firms and regulatory services providers to deliver technology-based solutions. 
 In March, Dutch investor Main Capital partners&amp;nbsp; combined &amp;nbsp;Swedish SaaS platform Blike and German internal audit software developer, audimex, to launch a governance, risk, and compliance-specialized software entity. 
 In May, US investor Genstar Capital&amp;nbsp; consolidated &amp;nbsp;two GRC advisors ACA Group and Foreside to establish a united company serving 6,300 clients. 
 Private equity firm Hg is also currently in the process of&amp;nbsp; acquiring London-listed regtech Ideagen &amp;nbsp;for £1.1 billion. 
 Banks bolster compliance with technology partnerships 
 Beyond a flow of investor assets into regtech, banks have remained open to the services for the last few years. 
 Spanish bank&amp;nbsp; BBVA &amp;nbsp;has partnered with Wolter Kluwer’s OneSumX for regulatory reporting in the US since 2019. 
 BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Goldman Sachs, and UBS, were among the six banks to adopt Droit Financial technologies’ fully digitised&amp;nbsp; MiFID II trade compliance engine &amp;nbsp;in 2018. 
 In 2021, Barclays upgraded its regulatory capabilities by rolling out an automated policy management and compliance technology from its long-term partner Clausematch. 
 That same year, HSBC&amp;nbsp; partnered &amp;nbsp;with Silent Eight to leverage the latter’s AI-based technology to strengthen the bank’s compliance function. 
 Most recently in June, Swiss bank Basellandschaftliche Kantonalbank&amp;nbsp; selected compatriot NetGuardians &amp;nbsp;to utilise the latter’s fraud mitigation software against payment scam threats. 
 [ The article on Bob&#039;s Guide can be read&amp;nbsp; here . This article is published with a canonical tag so that Artificial Lawyer receives SEO credit for the content it produces.]  
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                            <updated>2022-06-29T09:00:00+02:00</updated>
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        <entry>
            <title type="text">UBS Places Regulatory Know-How Modules on PartnerVine</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-places-regulatory-know-how-modules-on-partnervine</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-places-regulatory-know-how-modules-on-partnervine"/>
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                                            Artificial Lawyer announces the UBS launch on PartnerVine
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                 Investment bank&amp;nbsp; UBS &amp;nbsp;is now providing regulatory know-how modules on&amp;nbsp; PartnerVine , the Swiss-based platform that offers informational products usually from law firms, such as Simmons &amp;amp; Simmons, or the Big Four, such as PwC. 
 It’s a big step for PartnerVine, as UBS is usually a client to law firms rather than providing know-how to the legal and compliance world. Although, the bank noted that they primarily are expecting inhouse legal teams to use this information. That said, one can’t help but assume that law firms that advise on these matters will find the content very useful.&amp;nbsp; 
 In this case, the focus will be on the Swiss Financial Services Act (FinSa), the Financial Institutions Act (FinIA), and the revised Collective Investment Schemes Act (revCISA). 
 ‘The products have been prepared by UBS to provide access to the elements of UBS’ regulatory knowledge and the UBS knowledge collection consists of 630+ questions and answers which have been developed for Swiss financial service providers,’ the company said. 
 ‘With the Q&amp;amp;As as its core element, the know-how collection includes decision trees, glossary, tables, graphics and cross-references to related topics. With access to this know-how, financial service providers in Switzerland can tap into UBS’s knowledge on Swiss regulations. This information is made available in English,’ they added. 
 See an example of what’s on offer below: 
   
  Artificial Lawyer &amp;nbsp;asked UBS some more about this. These are their institutional responses below. 
  –&amp;nbsp;  Why do this? UBS is usually a client&amp;nbsp;of&amp;nbsp;lawyers, not a provider of information&amp;nbsp;to&amp;nbsp;lawyers.  
 ‘This content is tailored for other legal departments, not law firms, as the regulation is applicable to financial service providers (banks, (external) asset managers), and financial institutes like portfolio managers, trustees, managers of collective assets, fund management companies. 
 In addition, the reasons for doing it are innovation, digitization, and simplification: 
 
 highlighting UBS Group Legal as legal experts and an innovative function, which is a plus when retaining and attracting talent 
 knowledge sharing with others who face the same challenges in the interpretation of a new regulation, strengthens the Swiss financial market 
 easy to read and understand legal service through a digital platform for legal, compliance, business risk and client advisors&amp;nbsp;à&amp;nbsp;could be a legal delivery service and legal repository model for others as well. 
 New way of publication of legal know-how: Traditionally you would publishing this know-how as legal commentary in from of a book, prose text in German, through a traditional publisher, today we publish ourselves on PartnerVine Q&amp;amp;As, decision trees and graphs &amp;amp; tables – which is faster and more business friendly 
 
  – What is the extent of the information you will be sharing?  
 Regulatory know-how (legal commentary, but as Q&amp;amp;As, decision trees etc.) regarding three key regulations in the provision of financial services in Switzerland, (see above). 
 These include complex conduct duties where best practices are still developing and the information can serve as a good basis to build on or double-check existing processes. It can also be used as a know-how database for Legal &amp;amp; Compliance, Risk functions and client advisors. Currently, the offer (due to the topic) is limited to Switzerland.’ 
 — 
  Jordan Urstadt , CEO of PartnerVine, added: ‘It is much easier and cost-effective especially for smaller Swiss financial service providers to plug in to UBS’s knowledge than develop it themselves. Because it is the first time that a large company has provided comprehensive access to their legal know-how, it is a major milestone for legal operations globally.’ 
 And,&amp;nbsp; Barbara Koch-Lehmann , Group General Counsel COO at UBS, concluded: ‘PartnerVine’s platform allows us to share our legal know-how on regulatory matters with other Swiss financial service providers helping them to navigate the complex regulatory environment. 
 ‘PartnerVine’s platform offers either full access to the complete package or topic-specific access to separate smaller bundles focused on specific issues like Scope, Client Classification, Information Duties &amp;amp; Communication and Documentation &amp;amp; Delivery of Documents as well as selected subtopics such as e.g. material or personal Scope. 
 ‘The types of forms in the packages include, among others, client classification forms and the client communications that UBS’ Group General Counsel has developed to comply with the requirements of the Swiss regulations. The guidance and forms are delivered as pdfs ‘as is’, i.e. as static documents.’ 
 So, there you go. It’s great to see clients getting involved in information sharing like this. Let’s hope we see more large banks and corporates doing this as well. 
 [The article on Artificial Lawyer is available&amp;nbsp; here . This article is published with a canonical tag so that Artificial Lawyer receives SEO credit for the content it produces.] 
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                            <updated>2022-06-28T10:30:00+02:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">UBS Offers its Compliance Knowledge via a Regtech</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-offers-its-compliance-knowledge-via-a-regtech</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/ubs-offers-its-compliance-knowledge-via-a-regtech"/>
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                                            Finews announces the launch of UBS&#039; compliance materials on PartnerVine
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                 By: York Runne 
  UBS has put a great deal of effort into its compliance guidelines and action models. That accumulated legal knowledge is now being offered to third parties for the first time,&amp;nbsp; finews.com &amp;nbsp;has learned.  
 UBS has compiled its financial market legislation and compliance knowledge in an expansive collection of documents. This know-how in the form of legal commentaries and the interpretation of laws is now being made available to other Swiss financial services providers, according to a statement on Tuesday. 
 The offerings can be accessed via the&amp;nbsp; Partnervine &amp;nbsp;platform, a Zurich-based startup specializing in marketing legal texts and services. The financial guidelines «FidSA» and «FinIA» as well as the revised Collective Investment Schemes Act provide the framework for the action and decision paths developed by the UBS. 
 Regtech in PDF&amp;nbsp; 
 The core element of the knowledge collection is a catalog of over 630 questions and answers that Swiss financial service providers can use for orientation. In addition, the collection contains decision trees, glossaries, tables, graphics, and cross-references to related topics and documents delivered in static pdf format. 
 The documents are offered in English only, but forms are also available in German, French and Italian.&amp;nbsp;Access can be purchased either as a complete package or as topic-specific access to separate, smaller bundles, and come as static PDF files, according to the statement. 
 Target Group 
 «PartnerVine’s platform allows us to share our legal know-how on regulatory matters with other Swiss financial service providers helping them to navigate the complex regulatory environment,» says&amp;nbsp; Barbara Koch-Lehmann , group general counsel COO at UBS. She sees smaller financial institutions or asset managers, as a potential client group. 
 «It is much easier and cost-effective especially for smaller Swiss financial service providers to plug into UBS’s knowledge than develop it themselves. Because it is the first time that a large company has provided comprehensive access to their legal know-how, it is a major milestone for legal operations globally,» says PartnerVine CEO&amp;nbsp; Jordan Urstadt . 
 Urstadt sees foreign banks operating in Switzerland as potential customers for UBS&#039;s product, mainly because the documents are available in English. In Switzerland, the use is limited due to legal constraints. 
 [The article on finews can be read&amp;nbsp; here . This article is published with a canonical tag so that finews.com receives SEO credit for the content it produces.] 
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                            <updated>2022-06-28T09:45:00+02:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">Patent Strategies for Entrepreneurs</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/patent-strategies-for-entrepreneurs</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/patent-strategies-for-entrepreneurs"/>
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                                            PartnerVine Fellow Victor Mwago and PartnerVine&#039;s CEO speak to their experience with patents: think global, pick your fights and file early
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                  PartnerVine Fellow Victor Mwago and PartnerVine&#039;s CEO Jordan Urstadt speak to their experience with patents in an opinion piece for Nairobi Business Monthly.  
 Entrepreneurs are usually short on time or money, or both. What’s the best strategy for an entrepreneur to pursue a patent? As technology entrepreneurs from Kenya and Switzerland, we pooled our experiences and came up with three pieces of business advice for entrepreneurs. We hope it will help entrepreneurs pursuing a patent. 
 Think global 
 Getting a patent in Kenya may safeguard intellectual property in Kenya, but it doesn’t help scale your business against global competition. For industries like software (where we work), the market is global. If your innovation is copied elsewhere and executed at scale, it will be hard to build a successful business in the long term. Economies of scale allow companies to pursue more aggressive pricing strategies, which means companies in larger markets have a natural advantage. 
 To expand protection for your intellectual property internationally, a cost-effective strategy is to follow the coordinated procedure of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”). Kenyan residents are obliged to file their patent first in Kenya. Kenya is a member state of WIPO, and as a result can benefit from WIPO’s coordinated procedure for expanding patent protection to WIPO’s 153 other member states. WIPO’s procedure also includes lower fees for applicants from some countries, including Kenya. Pursuing WIPO’s procedure for patent protection internationally is not cheap, but it is a relatively cost-effective way to expand protection for your intellectual property. 
 Pick your fights 
 As software developers, one concern we had to address was why we would patent software in the first place. Patents protect our intellectual property, which gives us some comfort that other companies will not copy our invention. For a small company, a patent also validates our intellectual property, which helps with marketing and should mean an increase in valuation. However, patent authorities generally favor patents for hardware and restrict patents for software that are deemed abstract or not sufficiently tied to a machine. Particularly in the US, where the most software patents have been awarded, the US Patent and Trademark Office has been increasingly likely to invalidate software patents. Those that argue against patenting software recommend putting the time and money needed to secure a patent into building a brand. Those that argue for software patents note that software patents still make a large portion of the patents awarded each year, and you need to be on the field to play the game. 
 There are many companies that pursue aggressive patent strategies, and it’s worth considering why they do so. Our conclusion is that most entrepreneurs should think twice before following them. 
 When deciding whether to protect your innovation with a patent, you need to make a decision not just on filing for a patent, but in defending it as well. If you’ve got an invention that would be clearly defensible as a patent, you’ll secure an asset with clear value. For most patents though, inventions are the result of expertise in a field, which means there are other experts out there. Those other experts may think your patent isn’t so new or innovative, and some of them may have deep pockets. An entrepreneur needs to consider the cost of defending a patent. The cost of defending a patent depends on the markets where you are active, but can be intimidating. The high cost of litigation in the US can be particularly discouraging. 
 The high cost of litigation has led some large companies to aggressively file for patents as a defensive strategy. Last year, for instance, IBM was awarded more US patents than any other company—9,262 in total. By dint of numbers, IBM filed for a lot of patents that other companies would not have pursued, and they did so to deter others from suing them for patent infringement. If IBM didn’t have the financial resources, they wouldn’t be able to undertake such an expensive patent strategy. For a large company, the cost of an aggressive patent strategy looks more reasonable when compared to the size of its revenue.&amp;nbsp; 
 On the plaintiff’s side, the potential for sizable damage awards has led some companies in the US to aggressively buy patents and sue companies for patent infringement. Sometimes called patent trolls, these companies pursue the flipside of IBM’s aggressive patent strategy. For patent trolls, revenue doesn’t come from the business that’s protected by a patent, but from the litigation itself. That’s a special case that could also be called an aggressive patent strategy, but it doesn’t apply to entrepreneurs using patents to protect their business.&amp;nbsp; 
 For most entrepreneurs, the cost of pursuing marginal patents is formidable, and pursuing and defending a weak patent is a distraction from growing the revenue of your core business. For an entrepreneur pursuing a patent strategy, it’s important to pick your fights. Filing for a weak patent is probably not where you want to invest your time and money. 
 File early 
 Decide on whether you’re going to file a patent early. The earlier you make your decision and file for your patent, the less time there is for someone to publish an article that may make your invention look less innovative. For patents, that’s called ‘prior art’, and it is the background for authorities to consider whether your invention is worthy of protection. Anything published after your filing date won’t be considered prior art. Some of the things you need to do to secure a patent are not favorable for entrepreneurs, but fast decision-making is something entrepreneurs can do well. 
 Protect your investment 
 The award of a patent is not a Nobel prize, but an incentive for promoting investment. Patents don’t memorialize a Eureka moment, but protect the time and money required to realize a new idea. The subjects of most patents don’t sound particularly revolutionary, and innovators that don’t work for companies like IBM often don’t think their inventions are suitable for a patent. If you are uncertain if your innovation is patentable, research it and reach out for good advice sooner rather than later.&amp;nbsp; 
 Patents offer a seat at an elite table where your intellectual property is protected. Pursuing a patent effectively requires not just imagining a seat at that table, but also considering how you are going to stay there. We suggest that entrepreneurs think globally, pick their fights and file early for an effective patent strategy. 
  Victor is a PartnerVine Fellow and founder of legal technology startup&amp;nbsp;   Legal Forms   . He is currently applying for a patent. Jordan is the founder and CEO of legal technology company&amp;nbsp;   PartnerVine   ,  &amp;nbsp;based in Switzerland.&amp;nbsp;  
  [To read this article in Nairobi Business Monthly, click here.]  
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                            <updated>2020-08-06T09:00:00+02:00</updated>
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        <entry>
            <title type="text">PartnerVine and the Last Miler&#039;s Club</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/partnervine-and-the-last-miler-s-club</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/partnervine-and-the-last-miler-s-club"/>
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                                            Bill Henderson explains why PartnerVine is the best way forward for law firms in the digital age
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 &amp;nbsp; 
     
 
 “In hindsight, the new solutions are all going to look obvious” — Paul Lippe, circa 2010 
 
 Sometimes a technical innovation languishes on the innovator’s shelf, despite working perfectly and doing everything the innovator hoped. What’s missing is a business model that can coordinate a fair exchange of value.   
    The graphic above is the “2.0” version of Richard Susskind’s evolution of legal service model as it appears in the second edition of&amp;nbsp;  Tomorrow’s Lawyers  (2017).&amp;nbsp; I call it 2.0 because it’s an update of a very familiar and influential graphic from&amp;nbsp;  The End of Lawyers?  &amp;nbsp;(2008) and the first edition of&amp;nbsp;  Tomorrow’s Lawyers  &amp;nbsp;(2013). 
 The&amp;nbsp; 1.0 version &amp;nbsp;moved from Bespoke to Standardized to Systematized to Packaged to Commoditized. Many lawyers who saw the 1.0 version reacted with disdain, resenting the suggestion that their lifetime of know-how could be reduced to a commodity dispensed over the Internet. Yet, for those who took the time to read Susskind’s analysis, they learned that the space between Systematized and Packaged legal services held out the possibility of “making money while you sleep.”&amp;nbsp;  The End of Lawyers? &amp;nbsp; at 37; see also&amp;nbsp;  Tomorrow’s Lawyers  &amp;nbsp;(1st ed.) at 27.&amp;nbsp; That line captured the attention of quite a few innovator and early adopter lawyers. 
 Nonetheless, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding how Systematized-Packaged offerings will impact the sale of lucrative legal services.&amp;nbsp; Although the end users of legal services (i.e., individuals, businesses, society) stand to benefit enormously from commoditization, Susskind’s evolution cannot occur unless at least a subset of lawyers can reliably turn a profit by going first. 
 Breaking the logjam requires lawyers to think through complex topics such as target markets, sales cycles, the cost of acquiring a customer, and sources of capital. In other writings, I’ve referred to this as the legal profession’s last mile problem — the sole constraint on better-faster-cheaper is the paucity of business models with proven results. See Henderson, “ The Legal Profession’s ‘Last Mile Problem ,&#039;” Law.com, May 26, 2017; see also Mark Cohen, “ New Business Models — Not Technology– Will Transform the Legal Industry ,” Forbes, Nov. 8, 2018. 
 In Susskind’s 2.0 model, this difficult transition period occurs at the dotted “Externalization” line. Getting to the right side of this line requires lawyers and law firms to place some of their very best intellectual property in the public domain with no more protection than a simple paywall.&amp;nbsp; What business model would embolden them to take this step? 
 This post is about a company called&amp;nbsp; Partnervine .&amp;nbsp; In Susskind’s 2.0 model, PartnerVine is in the “Charge Online” box.&amp;nbsp; I’ve studied this model closely and think there is a very good chance that it’s solved the last mile problem for a subset of lawyers serving sophisticated organizational clients. Specifically, PartnerVine is an electronic marketplace that enables elite law firms to sell their&amp;nbsp; Type 0 &amp;nbsp;substantive law innovations in a way that: 
 
 Burnishes their reputation in the market 
 Generates and qualifies leads for premium legal services 
 Creates a completely new revenue stream for online legal products 
 
 Although still in beta mode, PartnerVine’s first content “supplier” was&amp;nbsp; PWC Legal &amp;nbsp;in Switzerland (tagline: “We are building the law firm of the future. Every day.”). The second supplier was&amp;nbsp; Meyerlustenberger Lachenal AG &amp;nbsp;(mll), an elite 100-lawyer Swiss law firm highly ranked by&amp;nbsp; Chambers &amp;nbsp;and the&amp;nbsp; Legal 500 . PartnerVine is now in discussions with several AmLaw 200 firms who are weighing the risks of moving first versus moving second. This is remarkable progress. As such, I hereby induct PartnerVine and its CEO and Founder,&amp;nbsp; Jordan Urstadt , into the Last Miler’s Club. 
    Below is a description of the PartnerVine model and some of the profound market insights that emboldened Jordan Urstadt to build the platform. 
 
  Other members of the Last Miler’s Club include&amp;nbsp; Dwayne Hermes &amp;nbsp;at Hermes Law (process-driven insurance defense model) and&amp;nbsp; Jeff Sharer &amp;nbsp;of Actuate Law (high-quality legal guidance platform that enables a rapid response to multi-jurisdictional data privacy and security breaches). These innovators were referenced in the original Law.com article.&amp;nbsp; See Henderson, “ The Legal Profession’s ‘Last Mile Problem ,&#039;” Law.com, May 26, 2017.&amp;nbsp; The&amp;nbsp; editor &amp;nbsp;is open to additional nominations.  
 
 What is PartnerVine? 
 Completely new technical innovations tend to be very difficult to describe. The difficulty is amped up even more when it comes to new business models. 
 The simplest analogy I can offer for PartnerVine is LegalZoom but with corporate counsel as end users. The analogy to LegalZoom is imperfect, however, because PartnerVine is an electronic marketplace rather than a producer of content.&amp;nbsp; If you go into a Sherwin Williams store, you are shopping for Sherwin Williams paint (a vertically integrated model, which is LegalZoom). In contrast, if you go to Lowes, Ace Hardware, or Home Depot, you have your choice of a large number of companies who produce different grades and quality of paint (an open platform, which is PartnerVine), albeit there are compelling reasons why LegalZoom might use PartnerVine as an additional high-quality sales channel. 
 If you peruse the PartnerVine website, you will see detailed descriptions of legal documents and practice guides for a wide variety of fairly specific and specialized legal activities. Further, each product includes author notes written by a senior practitioner from a brand-name law firm. Here is small sampling: 
 
  Merger between two sister companies &amp;nbsp;(package with merger agreement under Swiss Law and associated documents (both German and English) needed to complete transaction), produced by mll, $549.37 USD 
  Bulk transfer of assets &amp;nbsp;(package of documents under Swiss Law), produced by mll, $507.83 USD 
  Bilateral Confidentiality Agreement &amp;nbsp;(under Swiss Law, including English, French and German versions), produced by mll, $276.99 USD 
  Patent or Trade Mark Assignment &amp;nbsp;(template and guidance under Swiss Law), produced by PWC Legal, $322.24 USD 
  Cost Pooling Agreement &amp;nbsp;(intra-group) (used for pooling and reallocation of costs incurred by multiple entities within a group of companies that are governed under Swiss Law), produced by PWC Legal, $295.46 USD 
  Inter-Company Subordinated Loan Agreement &amp;nbsp;(used to facilitate a loan under Swiss Law between two group companies in a way that achieves tax planning and/or financial stabilization goals), produced by PWC Legal, $202.20 USD 
 
 In most cases, companies that purchase these products are given access to a document-generation interview, usually for a period of 90 days, that enables them to generate an unlimited number of fully populated versions of purchased documents that are ready to execute. Hence PartnerVine’s tagline: “ Where law firms sell their Legal Tech .” 
 This feature, which is offered in conjunction with&amp;nbsp; Exari , an enterprise contract management company, helps in-house lawyers move very quickly on time-sensitive, low-stakes legal work. The speed and confidence of the in-house lawyer is no doubt a function of the brand-name firm that created the underlying form. The 1-minute video below does a great job of conveying the user experience. 
    
 Comparing PartnerVine to Practical Law 
 At least on the surface, PartnerVine appears very similar to Thomson Reuter’s&amp;nbsp; Practical Law , which offers an immense array of forms and practice guides for lawyers serving organizational clients. Their products are typically bundled together with subscription plans designed for specific market segments. See Practical Law for&amp;nbsp; Large Firms ,&amp;nbsp; Small Firms ,&amp;nbsp; Law Departments , and&amp;nbsp; Government Agencies .&amp;nbsp; Increasingly, Practical Law subscribers also get access to a document automation platform that auto-generates documents after the completion of an online questionnaire.&amp;nbsp; See&amp;nbsp; Practical Law Automated Documents . 
 However, one factor that distinguishes PartnerVine from Practical Law is that the PartnerVine documents are created by practicing lawyers for use by their clients. Although Practical Law’s research team is surely working hard to keep their products up to date, practitioners at major law firms are on the front line of changing social, political, economic and technological conditions. Indeed, its their job to create real-time solutions that fit the shifting landscape. If 10-15% of large firms externalized their&amp;nbsp; Type 0 &amp;nbsp;intellectual property on an open platform, this collective group would have a huge advantage over Practical Law, as their inventory is always created in response to actual and specific client need. 
 A second feature that distinguishes PartnerVine is its open ala carte platform. &amp;nbsp;It takes only a few minutes to see if PartnerVine has exactly the precedent or guide you need; and if they do, the price point is likely to be trivial compared to the time-savings.&amp;nbsp; Cf.&amp;nbsp; Post 008 &amp;nbsp;(noting low-stakes trialability as a key driver of innovation adoption). 
 A third distinguishing feature is that the in-house counsel end user can hire the documents’ authors to provide legal advice and handle additional law-related issues. Obviously, Practical Law can’t do that because it’s not a law firm. 
 A fourth distinguishing feature is that PartnerVine is committed to the interoperability of its platform, enabling law firms and legal department systems to share information and build cross-platform workflows through open source APIs. In contrast, Practical Law is a closed universe designed to attract all-in subscribers.&amp;nbsp; Thus, in many respects, PartnerVine is enabling law firms to compete with the big legal publishers on the turf of specialized (and expensive) practice-based content. 
 Will PartnerVine cannibalize lucrative legal services? 
   Jordan Urstadt
 This is an empirical question that every law firm considering PartnerVine can and should ask itself.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Jordan Urstadt , the Founder and CEO of PartnerVine, believes that the middle market is destined to consolidate around legal products sold at volume, with leading firms succeeding at both products and services.&amp;nbsp; Further, he’s backed up his belief by bootstrapping the company with his own funds. If you tour the PartnerVine website and look at quality of the PartnerVine technical and sales team, you’ll realize that this is not a small bet. 
 Jordan Urstadt has a resume that ought to inspire confidence.&amp;nbsp; After attending Dartmouth College, Jordan graduated NYU Law in 1999 and then joined White &amp;amp; Case with a practice that focused on cross-border transactional work.&amp;nbsp; When Jordan’s Swiss fiancee (and later wife) expressed a desire to return to Europe, Jordan took an in-house position with&amp;nbsp; LGT Capital , a large European investment house serving institutional investors.&amp;nbsp; A few years later, he moved on to&amp;nbsp; Capital Dynamics , a Swiss-based global asset management firm focused on private equity, private credit, clean energy infrastructure and energy infrastructure credit. In his role as General Counsel and Managing Director, Jordan had a large legal budget, routinely spending the bulk of it with the “Super Rich 24.” See Johnson, “ Is Your Firm Super Rich? “,&amp;nbsp; American Lawyer , May 1, 2017 (noting that only 24 firms meet the super-stringent profitability criteria). This is because the nature of the work was highly specialized and complex. 
 After meeting Jordan at the&amp;nbsp; 2018 CLOC Institute , I invited him to lecture this summer in my “Innovation Diffusion in the Legal Industry” class at&amp;nbsp; Bucerius Law School . See&amp;nbsp; Legal Operations and Technology Program .&amp;nbsp; To an audience that was 85% junior and mid-career practitioners from Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia, Jordan explained PartnerVine from the perspective of an in-house lawyer. Specifically, Jordan stated that there are four reasons why a corporate legal department would outsource legal work to a law firm. Below is a depiction of what Jordan drew on the whiteboard.    
 
 Bucket 1 deals with resources — lack of time, lack of the right people who can do the work accurately and efficiently 
 Bucket 2 deals with information — lack of access to a high-quality precedent for something new or complex (e.g., an up-to-date Brexit clause) 
 Bucket 3 deals with legal expertise — lack of substantive knowledge where in-house freelancing creates unacceptable risk 
 Bucket 4 deals with insurance — getting the right answer is so important that you’re willing to pay a premium for preventative medicine and the heightened standard of care that applies to legal specialists. 
 
 According to Jordan, PartnerVine is designed to deal with issues in Bucket 2.&amp;nbsp; With high-quality forms and practice tips generated by a leading brand-name firm, Jordan would have, in many instances, been comfortable assuming the risk of doing the work in-house. Yet, how many of his legal spend decisions would be impacted by the PartnerVine offer? According to Jordan, 5-10% in any given year. As a general counsel, Jordan wasn’t dissatisfied with his Super Rich 24 law firms. Rather, he just wanted easier access to their intellectual property so his legal department could efficiently do its own low-stakes legal work. Further, Jordan was willing to pay a fair price for the privilege. 
 Although the cut point for outsourcing [10/90, 20/80, 70/30, 60/40, etc.] is going vary by industry, department size, and the temperment of individual general counsel, the bottomline is that practice aides sold as products can’t and won’t replace expert legal services, particularly when the stakes (and fees) are high.&amp;nbsp; On the other hand, selling your practice aides on PartnerVine could be a profoundly powerful way to signal your market-leading expertise. Obviously, that was the conclusion of first movers PWC Legal and mll when they joined the platform. 
 Finally, it’s worth noting that the “externalization” strategy of “No-Charge Online” [in Susskind’s&amp;nbsp; 2.0 model ] has already been widely adopted by several AmLaw 200 firms.&amp;nbsp; For example, in the venture capital space, several elite firms maintain web portals where entrepreneurs can, at no charge, generate their own formation and deal documents.&amp;nbsp; See, e.g.,&amp;nbsp; Cooley Go ,&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Goodwin’s Founders Workbench ,&amp;nbsp; WilmerHale Launch , and&amp;nbsp; Wilson Sonsini’s Term Sheet Generator .&amp;nbsp; The calculus is that these free online resources generate leads, build good will, and establish the firm as the go-to resource when the start-ups gain market traction and seeks out venture capital funding or related business opportunities. Similarly, PartnerVine is tapping into a market where law firms are anxious to project their national and international practice expertise. The only difference is that PartnerVine customers are willing to pay for more specialized software — i.e., cases where the no-charge model is not economically sustainable for the content producer. 
 Is the money in legal services or legal products? 
 This is another empirical question that the market will have to answer, albeit PartnerVine believes that the answer is both.&amp;nbsp; What is key to that the price that an in-house end user is willing to pay (i.e., its value) is a function of the market cachet of the firm that created it. 
 Arguably, the most compelling reason to join PartnerVine is for a firm to burnish its reputation in the areas where it’s already an established market player. Once on PartnerVine, in-house lawyers making an insourcing versus outsourcing decision are much more likely to come upon the firm’s work product.&amp;nbsp; If the firm’s intellectual property is truly first-rate, one of three possible outcomes is possible: 
 
 A product sale that results in additional marginal revenue for the firm 
 An engagement for legal services, perhaps in conjunction with a product sale 
 No sale (perhaps due to lack of user-product fit) but enhanced awareness of the firm and its core areas of expertise. 
 
 Indeed, it’s worth asking, what happens to the firms that come late this party? 
 On the pure products side, it is not hard to imagine a very big market.&amp;nbsp; For example, in the labor &amp;amp; employment space, three AmLaw 200 law firms (Littler, Ogletree and Jackson Lewis) currently own a combined 10% of a $15B+ national market. See Henderson &amp;amp; Parker, “ Your Firm’s Place in the Legal Market ,”&amp;nbsp; American Lawyer , Dec. 2015 at 102-04.&amp;nbsp; In terms of market share for legal services among large firms, low single digits is currently as good as it gets. Further, to protect their market position with demanding, price-sensitive Fortune 100 clients, the three leading L&amp;amp;E firms are making substantial investments in “systematization” in the form of time-saving self-help tools for in-house lawyers and the business units they serve. If some of these tools were externalized to the market via PartnerVine, the firms could tap into the 90% of the market that lacked Fortune 100 market clout. In addition to creating a large revenue stream of high-margin legal products, the big L&amp;amp;E players could fortify their market position against all the weakling firms who are only able to offer services. 
 A similar play is possible for firms with very strong practices in immigration, intellectual property, and real estate, to name but a few examples. Cf. McLellen, “ Fragomen to Launch Unique Tech Development Center in Pittsburgh ,”&amp;nbsp; Leg. Intelligencer , July 3, 2017 (discussing new tech center of immigration powerhouse Fragomen and quoting Marcie Borgal Shunk, founder of the Tilt Institute, “Every company is going to become a tech company in some capacity. That ultimately is going to be true of professional service firms and law firms as well.”). 
 Legal products ought to be very attractive to law firms that are best-in-class in specific practice areas. This is because it provides a pathway to revenue growth that is not constrained by client conflicts.&amp;nbsp; As a result, “making money while you sleep” is finally within reach. 
 Conclusion 
 In summary, it’s not legal products&amp;nbsp; or &amp;nbsp;legal services.&amp;nbsp; For law firms with superior market-leading position in services, the answer is both.&amp;nbsp; Open platforms like PartnerVine make that possible. 
 That said, the&amp;nbsp;nature of the electronic legal marketplace model is that there probably won’t be room for more than two or three alternative platforms.&amp;nbsp; What distinguishes Partnervine from Practical Law (serving the organizational client market) and LegalZoom (serving PeopleLaw) is that the platform is open is to a wide range of content producers. This creates an excellent sales channel for the superior niche products that law firms are uniquely qualified to produce.&amp;nbsp; Yet, we can take it one step further.&amp;nbsp; Because of the how economics play out over the longer term for vertically integrated platforms like Practical Law and LegalZoom, making a fortune enabling the self-serve lower and middle markets, law firms need an open electronic marketplace like PartnerVine if they want compete in the most specialized (and thus lucrative) niche markets.    
 To Jordan Urstadt, welcome to the Last Miler’s Club. This is a Club that is destined to have only a few members. 
 
 
  [This article is reprinted from Legal Evolution&#039;s website. To read the article on Legal Evolution&#039;s website, click&amp;nbsp;  
 here .] 
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                            <updated>2018-11-11T12:00:00+01:00</updated>
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        <entry>
            <title type="text">Should BigLaw firms worry about increasing competition from the Big Four acco...</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/should-biglaw-firms-worry-about-increasing-competition-from-the-big-four-accounting-firms</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/should-biglaw-firms-worry-about-increasing-competition-from-the-big-four-accounting-firms"/>
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                                            Jason Tashea at the ABA Journal discusses the Big Four&#039;s legal strategy
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                  By Jason Tashea for the ABA Journal  
 Jami McKeon says she’s not worried. 
 Elected chair of Morgan, Lewis &amp;amp; Bockius in 2014, McKeon has been with the legal giant since 1981 and she’s seen plenty of rivals, competitors and existential threats to the legal industry come and go. “The legal market has always been highly competitive,” she says, “so changes we see today are more about the source of competition.” 
 Law firm consultants, however, tell a different story. According to ALM Intelligence and Altman Weil, law firm leaders are already losing business to this latest source of competition that McKeon is speaking about—and many more are concerned that this could be just the tip of the iceberg. 
 The source of competition is the Big Four. 
 Composed of the four largest accounting firms in the world— Deloitte &amp;amp; Touche, Ernst &amp;amp; Young, KPMG and PwC—the Big Four have, over the last decade, regrown their legal services offerings by moving beyond tax law and integrating their legal services into a multidisciplinary approach. While still small by comparison to BigLaw, a recent ALM Intelligence report found that 69 percent of law firms interviewed saw the Big Four as a “major threat.” Altman Weil, meanwhile, found in its 2018&amp;nbsp; Law Firms in Transition &amp;nbsp;survey that nearly two-thirds of law firms with more than 250 lawyers consider the Big Four to be a “potential threat.” 
 
   
 Photo courtesy of Morgan, Lewis &amp;amp; Bockius 
 
 The Big Four have not been shy about encroaching on territory once considered the sole province of law firms. PwC, also known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, has even taken the additional step of launching its own law firm. Opened last September in Washington, D.C., ILC Legal provides non-U.S. legal services to mainly multinational companies through foreign-trained attorneys, according to its website. Its practice areas include entity governance and compliance, labor and employment law, global immigration, mergers and acquisitions, and financial and tax law. 
 “This is market-driven,” Richard Edmundson, managing partner of ILC Legal, told The American Lawyer. “Our clients are increasingly looking for advisers that can provide international coverage on transactions from planning to execution.” 
 The polyglot office has attorneys from Canada, England, Germany, Poland and Spain, all of whom are admitted in their own country but have “special legal consultant” status in the District of Columbia, allowing them to operate with some limitations in the jurisdiction. 
 While not offering U.S. legal advice, Edmundson said he believes that the law office, which is not controlled by the accounting firm, could practice American law with the right attorneys. ILC Legal did not return requests for comment. 
 More recently, Deloitte’s United Kingdom operation entered into an alliance with U.S. immigration law firm Berry Appleman &amp;amp; Leiden. Under the terms of the June agreement, Deloitte will buy BAL’s non-U.S. operations, which include offices in London, Singapore, Brazil, China and South Africa. “With the increased need for cross-border business travel, global organizations are recognizing the value of a firm that can bring a global footprint to help support the challenges of delivery and corporate compliance,” said Kalvinder Dhillon, head of immigration at Deloitte Global, in a statement. 
 For the time being, American lawyers need not worry much. Federal statutes, as well as state bar regulations, will keep the Big Four from offering traditional U.S. legal services. However, the current landscape hasn’t foreclosed the Big Four from growing and offering services in the U.S. and abroad, which has the potential to shake up a stagnant American legal market. Also, large accounting firms have several advantages over their counterparts in law. For clients looking to save money, there are clear financial benefits for going with a one-stop shop to handle both their accounting and legal needs. Due to complementary consulting services, which include technology and process improvement, they have the capacity to make their legal arms more agile than most, if not all, law firms. 
 TAKE TWO 
 This is not the first time the major accounting firms have tried their hand at practicing law. 
 Through the 1990s, the then-Big Five—Arthur Andersen collapsed after the Enron scandal in 2002—were quickly growing their legal services divisions, especially in Europe, wrote David Wilkins, a law professor at Harvard University, and Marie Jose Esteban Ferrer, a law lecturer at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain, in&amp;nbsp; Law &amp;amp; Social Inquiry , an academic publication. 
 Responding to a slowdown in the growth of their auditing portfolios, the Big Five spent the 1990s building law firms in a traditional vein. By 2001, KPMG and PwC were the eighth- and ninth-biggest legal services providers by number of lawyers, respectively, according to the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. 
 By the end of the century, the Big Five were threatening to enter markets they had been restricted from, including the U.S., wrote Ferrer and Wilkins. 
 However, after a series of accounting scandals during the 2001 financial crisis and subsequent regulation, these firms decided to pull back from offering general legal services. 
 At the time of the crash, Cornelius Grossmann, global leader of EY Legal based in Berlin, was working for Ernst and Young in New York City as an attorney at Donahue &amp;amp; Partners, a German law practice in EY’s Dutch network. He says that 2001 marked a turning point for their goals in the legal services market. 
 “In the past, EY tried to establish another global law firm,” he says. “When I started rebuilding the practice in Europe, I made it very clear—and that strategy followed through—that we don’t want to be another law firm.” 
 Grossmann explains that the law firm model was not as holistic as what EY wanted to offer, which he and other members of the Big Four describe as “multidisciplinary solutions,” a combination of legal, financial and consulting services, complemented by technology. Today, EY has 2,100 attorneys practicing in five core disciplines, including employment and mergers and acquisitions, in some 80 countries. 
 Similarly, Piet Hein Meeter, Deloitte Global’s Amsterdam-based managing director of Deloitte Legal, explains that their approach includes legal advice alongside improving document and process management, IT systems, analytics and other technology applications. 
 “That’s almost a consultative type of legal solution, rather than taking a set of facts and analyzing them from a legal perspective,” says Meeter. 
 While each of the Big Four positions itself as different from the others, the service offerings look rather similar. For example, this year at Legaltech, a legal technology conference in New York City, PwC representatives handed out documents that highlighted consulting services to help streamline and improve corporate legal departments. Similarly, KPMG offered services to digitize and improve efficiency of general counsel offices, and Deloitte touted its “legal management consulting.” 
 The Big Four also offer help with e-discovery, computer forensics and regulatory compliance. 
 PwC declined to comment for this story and KPMG did not respond to requests for comment. 
 According to the 2017 ALM report, this multidisciplinary approach has been a financial boon for the accounting firms: “All four have reported double-digit year-on-year revenue growth in recent years.” 
 The aggressive growth has made Big Four legal departments among the top-10 firms by revenue in France, Italy, Russia and Spain. However, the collective $900 million in revenue from the Big Four’s legal departments still pales in comparison to the $275 billion of revenue of all U.S. law firms, according to Thomson Reuters. 
 Nonetheless, this type of growth is a stark contrast to the reality for many BigLaw firms in the U.S., which recovered from the fallout of the Great Recession but have struggled to grow since. 
 According to a report released in January by Georgetown University and Thomson Reuters, demand for law firm services has been flat since 2010. Additionally, a slight uptick in attorney headcount at U.S. firms over the last five years coupled with the aforementioned flat demand means that lawyers throughout the industry are experiencing declining productivity. The study found that, across all sectors, lawyers are billing nearly 13 fewer hours per month than they were before the onset of the Great Recession. 
 Illustrating the decreased demand, Altman Weil’s 2017&amp;nbsp; Chief Legal Officer Survey &amp;nbsp;found that 41 percent surveyed said they had cut their outside counsel budget while 56 percent increased their in-house budget. 
 By comparison, the Big Four have, on average, about 2,200 lawyers apiece, according to ALM. These numbers continue to grow through lateral and new attorney hires. While smaller than the 10 largest global law firms, which have 3,800 lawyers each, the Big Four offer legal services in 72 countries. Those same law firms are, on average, in 29. 
 &amp;nbsp; 
 
   
 Photos by Jpstock/Matusz_Szymanski/Jhvephoto/Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock.com 
 
 NOT SO FAST 
 There are limits to the international growth, however, for the Big Four. 
 When deciding what countries to expand into, Grossmann at EY says the firm is driven by demand and regulatory limitations. India, Portugal and the U.S. are just some of the countries where the Big Four have not offered full-fledged legal services because of such restrictions. 
 In the States, there are two main hurdles keeping the Big Four out of the traditional legal services market. The first is statutory. In 2002, in the wake of the Arthur Andersen scandal and the 2001 recession, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which limited auditing firms from providing legal services to audit clients. 
 The sprawling legal framework covers numerous issues, including the limitation of audit firms to provide certain legal services, which was meant to limit conflicts of interest. 
 Other countries—Canada, India, South Africa and Turkey—passed similar laws. 
 However, these limitations have not stopped auditing firms from offering legal and other services to nonaudit clients, “which they all now aggressively do,” wrote Ferrer and Wilkins for the&amp;nbsp; CLS Blue Sky Blog . They conclude that the Big Four’s legal networks are now larger than they were when Sarbanes-Oxley was passed. 
 They go on to write in&amp;nbsp; Law &amp;amp; Social Inquiry &amp;nbsp;that even after Sarbanes-Oxley, “gaps in auditor independence regulation have allowed the Big Four to rebuild their nonaudit businesses, including legal services, in many countries around the world—even in the United States.” 
 The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created by Sarbanes-Oxley and run under the Securities and Exchange Commission, provides external, independent oversight of audit companies. The board’s spokesperson, Colleen Brennan, says, “Existing independence requirements would preclude an issuer’s auditor, or affiliates of the auditor, from providing legal services to that issuer or any of that issuer’s affiliates.” She adds that “the PCAOB monitors for compliance with that requirement and other independence requirements.” 
 The other major restriction comes from within the legal profession itself. The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which serve as the basis for the ethics rules of most jurisdictions in the U.S., favor a ban on nonlawyer ownership of law firms and a prohibition on fee-sharing of a legal services business. 
 Despite that, the ABA has explored the possibility of new forms of legal services delivery. Predating Sarbanes-Oxley, the ABA created the Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice to study “the manner and extent to which professional service firms operated by nonlawyers were seeking to provide legal services to the public.” 
 With the Big Four’s initial move into legal services as a backdrop, the commission recommended that the House of Delegates reinforce core values of independent professional judgment, client confidentiality and the avoidance of conflicts of interest while not inhibiting “the development of new structures for the more effective delivery of services and better public access to the legal system.” 
 This meant allowing lawyers to deliver legal services through a multidisciplinary practice, in which lawyers and nonlawyers provide legal and nonlegal services. This recommendation came with an endorsement of fee- and governance-sharing between lawyers and nonlawyers within an MDP. 
 The recommendations were debated by the ABA House of Delegates during the annual meeting in Atlanta in 1999. 
 Carolyn Lamm—a member of the commission and supporter of the recommendations who served as 2009-2010 ABA president—reminded those convened that even without an MDP structure there were some 5,000 lawyers already working at the Big Five accounting firms. 
 “They tell us they’re not practicing law; they’re offering environmental or tax services. They’re offering litigation support services and all kinds of other services,” she said at the debate and confirmed by email. “And the bar does not have any means to assure that the lawyers at the Big Five comply with any of the ethics regulations and/or core values” of the profession. 
 To her, the commission’s recommendations would bring licensed attorneys already working in MDPs back into the professional responsibility fold. 
 “It envisions system safeguards that the MDPs would have to pay for,” she concluded. 
 While acknowledging that lawyers already work in something resembling MDPs, lawyers opposing any relaxation of the restrictions on such practices warned that allowing for fee-sharing with nonlawyers would end the independence of the profession, diminish the ethical standards around confidentiality and conflicts of interest, and provide negligible benefit to consumers. 
 In 2000, the House voted against the commission’s recommendations and reaffirmed that fee- and governance-sharing with nonlawyers were not compatible with the rules and values of the profession. The commission was discharged. 
 According to Dennis Rendleman, ethics counsel at the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility, which housed the commission, the center is not currently working on the topic of multidisciplinary practice. Even so, he says, “the issue is one that will never go away.” 
 When asked, Meeter says Deloitte is not lobbying to change current laws and rules limiting its business model from expanding into the United States. Grossmann at EY declined to comment. 
 ACROSS THE SEA 
 While the movement for fee- and governance-sharing stagnated in the U.S., Australia in 2000 and, more aggressively, the U.K. in 2007 moved forward to create alternative business structure schemes that would allow for nonlawyers to be owners and fee-sharers in law firms. 
 Although he is not in direct competition with the Big Four, Simon Goldhill—the founder of Metamorph Law in London, a consolidator of small firms—says the ABS structure allows for significant flexibility that the traditional model did not. 
 “Before its liberalization and opening up to outside influences, the U.K. legal market had remained isolated—indeed insulated—from the development of the 21st-century consumer service culture,” he says. 
 Michelle Peters, principal at the Business Instructor law firm consultancy in London, says the traditional firm model is not a good business model. First, the billable hour limits profitability because the lawyer must work on a matter to make money. Second, firms are often ruled by committee, which makes direction and institutional change challenging. Third, lawyers are not trained in business development yet are expected to run every aspect of a firm, which cuts into their only mode of making money. 
 Goldhill adds that traditional law firm structures meant they could not take capital funds to grow their business. As an ABS, they can. 
 &amp;nbsp; 
 
   
 Carolyn Lamm: “They tell us they’re not practicing law; they’re offering environmental or tax services ... and all kinds of other services.” 
 
 All four of the major accounting firms have secured ABS licenses to practice law in the U.K. 
 PwC was awarded a license in 2014. During this past fiscal year, the firm’s legal operation in the U.K. brought in about $91.8 million, up from $63.6 million in 2015. The most recent revenue numbers put PwC just short of the top-50 U.K. firms by earnings, according to&amp;nbsp; LegalWeek .&amp;nbsp; 
 Jordan Urstadt is the CEO of Partnervine, an online marketplace where firms sell their automated legal documents. He says the Big Four’s increased pressure on the legal market will lead law firms to externalize and “productize” their offerings, which include information, resources and expert advice. 
 Both Grossmann at EY and Meeter at Deloitte make clear that technology in the form of artificial intelligence, automation and information management is a critical component of their offerings. Their development and deployment of technology will be accomplished by a mix of in-house development, acquisition and contracting with outside companies. 
 In one example, PwC teamed up with Partnervine to sell automated legal documents online. By creating this new marketplace, in-house counsels anywhere in the world can assess the offerings and buy the contract they need, saving the lawyer time and creating a passive income stream for PwC. 
 With many merger documents for sale on Partnervine, Urstadt says, “it’s great because it shows what software can do for M&amp;amp;A—a major driver of revenue at law firms and one of the sacred cows of the legal industry.” 
 Similarly, Deloitte has alliances with Kira Systems, HotDocs and Thomson Reuters. PwC has teamed up with Google. And EY is working with LinkedIn and Microsoft. 
 FIRMS ADJUST 
 To remain competitive, Morgan Lewis has expanded internationally, including in China, and has ramped up its eData services, a discovery and data management program that combines legal and tech professionals. 
 “We remained focused on offering elite service and building strong relationships with clients who trust us to know their business and give them legal advice in the broad array of areas where they need us,” Morgan Lewis chair McKeon says. “That has been the approach that has made us successful, and the existence of new and different competitors has not changed that.” 
 Like Morgan Lewis, Simmons &amp;amp; Simmons, a large law firm based in England, has been commoditizing legal information for over a decade. The firm’s navigator product takes regulatory and compliance data from numerous countries, organizes it and provides it as a subscription service for clients to access. 
 “The firm has to adapt and look to service their clients in different ways,” says Charlotte Stalin, a partner at the firm’s London office. Similar to McKeon, she denies that any market entrant has forced them to change. 
 While the firm’s navigator product is a managed service, Stalin says it is more than that because it complements traditional legal advice, which remains their core product. Since the navigator launch in 2007, it has expanded to include derivatives, securities and other subject matter areas. 
 Law firms offering products like this are still the exception. Instead, “most firms have been able to maintain their profitability at acceptable levels through a combination of reductions in headcount, tightening of their equity partner ranks, reductions in expenses, and continuing (albeit modest) rate increases,” states the Georgetown and Thomson Reuters report. 
 Not just a big-firm issue, the Big Four’s push into legal services can affect the totality of the legal market. 
 “I think everyone should be cognizant, regardless of the size of the firm,” argues Chad Burton, a liaison for the ABA’s Commission on the Future of the Legal Profession and CEO of CuroLegal, a legal technology company. 
 Burton says he believes that rules limiting fee- and governance-sharing at law firms will need to be confronted and changed for the profession to evolve, be more competitive and better serve consumers. 
 Meeter at Deloitte agrees, saying that he sees good reasons to have rules that maintain the independence of a lawyer, but that “there is a need to revisit this topic given the development of the marketplace.” He adds: “Clients are increasingly demanding that integrated type of approach.” 
 Peters, who has watched similar changes in the English legal market over the past decade, adds: “The law firms are coming around to the realization that they need to evolve or die.”&amp;nbsp; 
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                            <updated>2018-08-28T17:30:00+02:00</updated>
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        <entry>
            <title type="text">Roundup of Company and Product News from ILTACON, Part 1</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/roundup-of-company-and-product-news-from-iltacon-part-1</id>
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                                            Law Sites by Robert Ambrogi covers PartnerVine at ILTACON 2018
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                  PartnerVine  
 PartnerVine is essentially a marketplace for law firms to sell their legal documents. The focus is on larger firms selling sophisticated legal documents to corporate counsel and smaller firms. It currently operates in beta only in Switzerland, where its biggest suppliers of documents are PricewaterhouseCoopers AG and Meyerlustenberger Lachenal Ltd., but it is seeking supplier deals with U.S. and UK firms that will allow it to expand to those countries. 
 Users can search or browse for documents. Each document page identifies the source of the document and the price of the document. An author&#039;s note describes the document in detail. Some documents are sold individually, others as packages with all the documents needed for a particular transaction (for example, a bulk transfer of assets). Law firms set their own prices for documents and PartnerVine takes a percentage of each sale. Forms can be completed by following questionnaires on the platform, and for multiple-form packages, information need be entered only once. 
 For corporate counsel, the selling point is that they get quality legal documents created by reputable law firms without having to retain outside counsel. If, after reviewing documents purchased through PartnerVine, the customer wants further legal advice, PartnerVine connects the customer to the firm that created the document for a quote. 
 For the supplier firms, they essentially generate passive income from forms they’ve already created, and they have the potential to establish new client relationships with customers who buy their forms and seek further legal advice. 
 [ For the complete article, click here. ] 
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                            <updated>2018-08-27T17:00:00+02:00</updated>
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        <entry>
            <title type="text">Five startups your firm should meet at ILTACON</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/five-startups-your-firm-should-meet-at-iltacon</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/five-startups-your-firm-should-meet-at-iltacon"/>
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                                            Matthew Pennington of Technomancers covers PartnerVine at ILTACON in Washington, DC
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                  PartnerVine  
 PartnerVine is the first platform for law firms to sell their legalTech — providing law firms with a route to market for tech products they have developed in house, from simple template documents through to full blown tech solutions. 
 For example a firm might develop a GDPR compliance tool for a specific client. The return on investment for that tool for the firm would normally be the charges they pass onto the client. 
 What PartnerVine challenges law firms to consider whether the use case for tool they are building is general. Could that same GDPR tool be sold to more parties? 
 If the firm can instead build a version of the tool that can be sold to more parties, it will massively increase the ROI on the tool for the firm. PartnerVine delivers the marketplace, manages transactions, distribution and marketing — leaving the law firm to focus on delivering and iterating their product. 
 Jordan Urstadt, CEO and Founder of recognises that: 
 “ traditionally there has been no way for a law firm to recoup its investment in standardising and automating information, which is the legal industry’s version of the last mile problem”  
 PartnerVine launched in Switzerland in October of last year, and with&amp;nbsp; PwC &amp;nbsp;as the first supplier offered over 40 documents initially through their marketplace. This has now grown to over 120 documents with two firms, with more firms in the pipeline with documents to add. 
 Since launching PartnerVine, Urstadt notes that their business model has expanded to include legal tech developed by innovation teams at law firms. PartnerVine’s initial strategy was to apply LegalZoom’s B2C model to B2B, which is the model it started with at launch. After speaking with innovation teams at law firms, PartnerVine is also providing a venue for innovation teams to sell the legal tech they develop in-house. 
 
 &amp;nbsp; 
   
 
  The PartnerVine Marketplace  
 The strength of PartnerVine’s offering is taking the aspects of selling a product, from listing to closing a sale and collecting payment — away from the law firm. Because their platform will act as an aggregator and legalTech marketplace, PartnerVine believes that their website will gain good traction with respect to SEO (search engine optimisation) with more backlinks and authority than a law firm’s proprietary offer — and making it more likely that buyers will find the product they are looking for. 
 I asked Urstadt how the process works for a firm wanting to sell their legalTech through the PartnerVine platform: 
 “ The law firm needs to have a software provider that is open to selling their software with a limited use license. With that limited use license, third parties can buy the law firm’s product directly on PartnerVine. On purchase, the buyers can link to the law firm’s environment with restricted use.  
 On where he sees the development of legal services online, Urstadt is bullish on the role of law firms developing their own tech: 
 “ The limiting factor in law firms developing legal tech has traditionally been a lawyer’s time — law firms have pulled the plug on projects that reduce their revenues. Many innovation teams at in-house firms are developing process-oriented dashboards because it does not require a lot of lawyer time. With PartnerVine, we’re already starting to see lawyers committing more time to tech as they see it as a source of revenue rather than an expense, and we are excited to see that trend continue. That’s the future and where PartnerVine can provide its value add to law firms. Legal Tech makes economic sense when it is sold at volume.”  
 Visit PartnerVine at&amp;nbsp; Startup Hub 1 &amp;nbsp;or at&amp;nbsp; www.partnervine.com  
 [ For the full article go to the Technomancers blog ] 
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            </content>

                            <updated>2018-08-22T09:00:00+02:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">As Law Firms Stall, Who Will Overtake Them in the Innovation Race?</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/as-law-firms-stall-who-will-overtake-them-in-the-innovation-race</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/as-law-firms-stall-who-will-overtake-them-in-the-innovation-race"/>
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                                            Article by American Lawyer on PwC Switzerland&#039;s strategy with PartnerVine
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                 This month, a legal arm of one of the Big Four accounting firms hired a top executive from Axiom Global Inc. 
 At the end of last year, that same&amp;nbsp;business unit&amp;nbsp;began selling automated contracts directly to clients. And in the future, the accounting firm wants to sign deals to take over the entire in-house legal function for clients. 
 This three-pronged strategy—building proprietary technology, offering an Axiom-like staffing model and outsourcing legal departments—is perhaps the most well-articulated among the Big Four&#039;s plans to alter the legal industry.&amp;nbsp;Yet it is also little-known in the U.S. law firm market. 
 And for a simple reason: Those plans come from PwC Switzerland. 
 Such is the seemingly perpetual state of disruption in the legal market. A lot of things happen on the periphery, just not in the world’s largest legal market. 
 Five years ago, some predicted that by now legal staffing and alternative service provider Axiom, with its lower-cost amalgamation of lawyers and embrace of technology and clients’ demands for efficiency, would be the world’s largest legal services firm. By the end of 2016, the New York-based company had revenue just north of $300 million, a number more than 100 law firms achieved that year. 
 Reasons for the slow pace of change in the legal market are well-known. The billable hour is good work as long as you can get it. Individual clients can only drive so much change within their own providers, while other clients are content to continue their current billing models. And the legal market’s professional regulations—limiting work and ownership of law firms to lawyers—remain unchanged. 
 &quot;That is our current state of the art: A stalemate,&quot; said Kenneth Grady, an adjunct professor at the Michigan State University College of Law who previously worked in a legal innovation role at Seyfarth Shaw. &quot;We’re doing incremental change. ... Small tweaks here and there that slightly shave dollars off the bill.&quot; 
 That sentiment was echoed in a report earlier this month by Georgetown University and Thomson Reuters Corp., which stated that law firms have for the most part failed to respond to a changing market for legal services. Legal consultancy Altman Weil Inc. said in a survey last year that while 94 percent of law firm leaders see an increased need for practice efficiency as a permanent trend, only 49 percent of firms said they had significantly changed their approach to deliver efficient services. The report called this a &quot;frightening disconnect&quot;. 
 &quot;A majority of firms still behave as if the past 10 years really haven’t happened,” said James Jones, a former managing partner of Arnold &amp;amp; Porter now serving as a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. &quot;Sure they’ve adopted things like some technological changes—but they really have not reoriented the way they go about or think about their practices.&quot; 
 Few legal market consultants anticipate a drastic up-ending of the current legal market. But a bevy of new players are making bets that they can encroach on the traditional domain of Big Law. Most prognosticators expect the Big Four to figure prominently in that challenge. For the story of how they will most likely try to do that, and what may limit them, PwC Switzerland is a good place to look. 
 Swiss Incursion 
 In July 2017, Dieter Wirth took over leadership of the tax and legal services arm of PwC Switzerland. Wirth’s goal, he said in an interview, is to become one of the 10 largest law firms in Switzerland by revenue within a few years. 
 The first part of his plan became public in October, when a startup firm called PartnerVine launched by selling a slew of automated corporate contracts drafted by PricewaterhouseCoopers directly to in- house legal departments. 
 Led by CEO and founder Jordan Urstadt, who was previously general counsel at Swiss private equity firm Capital Dynamics, PartnerVine sells automated contracts created by PwC lawyers. A nondisclosure agreement for an M&amp;amp;A deal costs about $100; paperwork to incorporate a business in Switzerland is about $700. 
 To Wirth, automated contracts are part of a broader effort to cut the costs of the legal services that PwC delivers. Helping toward that end, PwC is unencumbered by a legacy law firm business model that views innovation—especially the kind that document automation represents—as a threat to billable hours. 
 PwC also wants to cut costs for its clients by providing a flexible lawyer hiring solution similar to Axiom. In January, PwC Switzerland launched its Flexible Legal Resources business (something similar is available through PwC U.K.) with the addition of Marc Morant from Axiom, where he served for three years as general manager of the company’s business in Switzerland. 
 Ultimately, Wirth sees PwC drawing from these pieces to build out the capability to run entire legal departments through a managed service or outsourcing model. A year ago this month, PwC announced it had hired 600 of General Electric Corp.’s tax professionals in a deal to handle the conglomerate’s international tax compliance work. Wirth said PwC’s legal team has its sights set on similar deals to outsource “on a completely, holistically integrated basis” entire law departments. 
 &quot;We can offer that at a lower cost compared to running those operations inside the company as a cost center,” Wirth said. “That will make the big push. And those are the big volume projects we are going after.” 
 Managed Services Potential 
 PwC would not be the first to take on a large portion of a law department, but outsourcing is a model with the potential to change the economics—or at least the incentives—for delivering legal services. 
 Earlier this year, DXC Technology Corp. hired UnitedLex Corp. to handle the technology services company’s contract management and immigration services over a five-year period. The deal involved “re-badging” a group of former DXC employees, including some lawyers, as UnitedLex employees. 
 UnitedLex CEO Daniel Reed said the company has since secured two similar-sized deals with Fortune 200 companies that are awaiting public announcement later this year. 
 “I think that is evidence that our approach is working and it’s driving massive, massive scale,” said Reed, a former associate at Greenberg Traurig. 
 Reed said the deals change the risk calculation for in-house legal departments by putting the onus for cost control on UnitedLex, which has a profit incentive to drive down costs. In the case of DXC, UnitedLex said it was able to cut costs for the company by 30 percent. 
 One reason that UnitedLex is able to make meaningful investments is that its capital structure differs dramatically from law firms. They have a balance sheet, financed in part by a private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase &amp;amp; Co. 
 “We have a balance sheet to financially guarantee what we do,” Reed said. “So if we scope out something and promise we can deliver a solution, if we’re somehow wrong, maybe we under scope it, we are on the hook for that. The client is not. We bear that risk.” 
 PwC’s Wirth also sees managed services as an important part of changing the legal services delivery model. 
 “To reduce costs without increasing the risk for the client, we need to come up with different legal models than we have seen in the past,” Wirth said. “And I think the combination of those three elements is an answer to these challenges that clients are facing.” 
 Big Four Limitations 
 Even so, there are potential limits to how far a Big Four accounting giant like PwC can go in its efforts to disrupt the legal market. 
 PwC’s legal operation, which now consists of more than 3,300 lawyers across 90 countries, is housed within its much-larger global tax business, comprised of more than 41,000 tax professionals. The firm’s tax and legal business last year had revenue of about $9.5 billion. Making up a quarter of PwC’s gross revenue, tax/legal is the smallest of the firm’s three main business lines—assurance, advisory and tax/legal. 
 Within this vast network, PwC Switzerland’s tax and legal department is an even smaller slice, bringing in revenue from tax work of about $180 million, said Wirth, head of tax and legal at PwC Switzerland. Wirth estimates PwC’s share of the market for tax services in Switzerland at about 40 percent. 
 But he said it’s unlikely that PwC Switzerland could achieve that kind of market share for legal services. Rules requiring audit firms being independent would limit PwC’s reach into legal services. Wirth said cornering just 10 percent of Switzerland’s legal market would be a success. 
 “I think 10 percent is the goal, and we are far away from that,” Wirth said. 
 Of course, PwC faces even bigger restrictions in the United States, which remains the world’s largest legal market. Last year it launched a stateside law firm, ILC Legal, to handle international legal issues. Wirth said the United States is an important part of PwC’s plans to outsource legal departments, but he declined to comment further on how it would seek to provide U.S. legal services. 
 PwC’s approach to legal services, through automated contracts on PartnerVine or via an outsourcing model, is in many ways designed to sell efficiency directly to in- house legal departments. 
 Jordan Furlong, a consultant to law firms, called that general approach a “no-brainer.” But he noted that law firms are still limited by the billable hour and traditional compensation structures from offering similar services. 
 &quot;If you’re not committed to preserving lawyer hours the way law firms are,” Furlong said, “then you have a lot more options than law firms do.” 
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            </content>

                            <updated>2018-01-30T17:00:00+01:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">PwC Österreich startet die Legal Tech-Offensive</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/pwc-oesterreich-startet-die-legal-tech-offensive</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/pwc-oesterreich-startet-die-legal-tech-offensive"/>
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                                            Article by Extrajournal.Net on PwC Legal Austria joining PartnerVine. In German. 
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                  Wien.&amp;nbsp; Beratungsriese PwC startet mehrere neue Legal-Tech-Angebote in Österreich: Das Dokumentenportal „PartnerVine“ und das Beratungstool „Luminance“ sollen einen Vorsprung im Rennen um die beste Anwalts-AI bringen, so Partner Christian Oehner.&amp;nbsp;   
 Der erwartete Vormarsch einer neuen Generation von mit Künstlicher Intelligenz (AI) ausgestatteter Anwendungen ist in der Rechtsbranche in aller Munde. Der Big Four-Beratungsmulti PwC will nun Fakten schaffen: Eine Reihe neuer Angebote soll ihm frühzeitig eine starke Stellung bringen. 
 Dabei ist der Grundgedanke einfach, sagt Christian Oehner, Partner und Head of Legal bei PwC Legal Österreich, im Interview mit&amp;nbsp; Extrajournal.Net : Intelligente Software soll den Juristen Routinetätigkeiten abnehmen und Kosten sparen. „Mich als Anwalt interessiert schließlich die rechtliche Analyse, die Vertragsverhandlungen usw. – aber nicht Routinearbeiten“, so Oehner. 
  [Click here to read the entire article on Extrajournal.Net&#039;s website.]  
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            </content>

                            <updated>2018-01-24T17:00:00+01:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">Top Swiss Firm MLL Joins PwC to Sell Automated Contracts</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/top-swiss-firm-mll-joins-pwc-to-sell-automated-contracts</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/top-swiss-firm-mll-joins-pwc-to-sell-automated-contracts"/>
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                                            Article by Artificial Lawyer on MLL joining PartnerVine
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                  Leading Swiss law firm&amp;nbsp;   Meyerlustenberger Lachenal (MLL)   &amp;nbsp;has joined global professional services giant&amp;nbsp;   PwC   &amp;nbsp;in selling automated contract templates via&amp;nbsp;   PartnerVine  &amp;nbsp; in a move that shows the ‘industrialisation’ of the legal sector is now truly speeding up.  
  Last month &amp;nbsp;   Artificial Lawyer    &amp;nbsp;revealed&amp;nbsp;   the news   &amp;nbsp;about PwC Switzerland becoming the first legal business to sell automated contract templates on PartnerVine, an online market place where companies, or other law firms, can buy quality legal templates that have been partially automated using the&amp;nbsp;   Exari   &amp;nbsp;system.  
  Now, MLL, which is one of Switzerland’s leading law firms, has also joined the market place, becoming the first traditional law firm to do so. So far it has added a variety of automated templates, covering a wide range of corporate and commercial needs,&amp;nbsp; including merger agreements.   
  [Click here to read the entire article on Artificial Lawyer&#039;s website]  
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            </content>

                            <updated>2017-12-15T17:00:00+01:00</updated>
                    </entry>

    
    
        <entry>
            <title type="text">Le cabinet d’avocats MLL vendra des documents juridiques automatisés sur la p...</title>
            <id>https://www.partnervine.com/press/le-cabinet-d-avocats-mll-vendra-des-documents-juridiques-automatises-sur-la-plateforme-partnervine</id>
            <link href="https://www.partnervine.com/press/le-cabinet-d-avocats-mll-vendra-des-documents-juridiques-automatises-sur-la-plateforme-partnervine"/>
            <summary type="html">
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                                            Article by ICT Journal on MLL joining PartnerVine. In French. 
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                  L’Etude d’avocats Meyerlustenberger Lachenal (MLL) rejoint la plateforme zurichoise PartnerVine, qui commercialise des documents juridiques de fusion et acquisition automatisés et prêts à l’emploi. D’ici la fin de l’année, une quarantaine de modèles juridiques seront disponibles en trois langues.  
  L’Etude d’avocats Meyerlustenberger Lachenal (MLL) met en vente des documents juridiques de fusion et acquisition automatisés. Ces derniers seront disponibles en trois langues, à savoir l&#039;anglais, l&#039;allemand et le français d’ici la fin de l’année. La création des documents automatisée a pour but de permettre de rationaliser les flux de travail internes et de vendre des documents juridiques prêts à l’emploi, explique le cabinet d’avocats qui possède des bureaux à Genève, Lausanne, Zurich, Zoug et Bruxelles. MLL se prépare ainsi la digitalisation progressive du secteur juridique. «À une époque où l’on prédit la fin du métier de juriste tel qu’on le connaît, MLL prend des mesures concrètes pour ouvrir la voie à l’expansion de son modèle d’affaires», a commenté Lukas Bühlmann, associé Digital, Data Privacy &amp;amp; E-Commerce de MLL.  
   [To read the entire article in ICT Journal, click here.]   
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            </content>

                            <updated>2017-12-13T17:00:00+01:00</updated>
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