Robert Ambrogi Blog
It was major news this week when law practice management company Clio announced its acquisition of legal research and AI company vLex for $1 billion.
But Ken Crutchfield, who has been an executive at LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and most recently Wolters Kluwer, where he was vice president and general manager of legal markets for Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., says he has seen this movie before — the one where legal companies sought to bundle practice management and research.
“Throughout my career, I’ve observed instances where attempts have been made to integrate content and software, with most of them resulting in limited success,” Crutchfield writes in a guest post for LawNext.
Why is that? Crutchfield — who is now principal of Spring Forward Consulting —says that a major challenge for integrating research into a practice management workflow is that “conducting research is by definition an interruption of a workflow.”
That said, Crutchfield recognizes that there is a major new factor at play in the Clio-vLex deal — generative AI. “Generative AI blurs the lines between research, workflow, and work product,” he writes.
So what does Clio need to do to make this deal a success?
To find out, read Crutchfield’s full article here.