Thomson Reuters has teamed-up with Legal Geek to help advance innovation and collaboration within the LawTech startup community. The move follows Thomson Reuters support for the Legal Geek startup map and the inaugural and highly successful Legal Geek conference held in London’s Brick Lane last year.
Rapid technological innovation continues to shake up the legal services industry, and LawTech startups have the potential to compete with, as well as to enhance, existing legal services offerings.
Many startups aren’t innovating in isolation and value partnerships and collaboration with well-established companies, including law firms and legal information and technology businesses such as Thomson Reuters. However, knowing where to even begin when looking for support, advice or collaboration with established companies can be daunting for startups.
The collaboration between Thomson Reuters and Legal Geek is intended to ensure startups have a clear point of entry to engage with the legal industry It includes a number of initiatives and events such as meet-ups focused on disruptive technology, a reverse-pitch event and will culminate in the October 17 Legal Geek conference, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, and now expected to draw a crowd of more than 1,000 attendees.
“Legal Geek is a community with over 4,000 members, and we have a track record of creating startup events which are fun and informative. We create structure around the emerging LawTech startup ecosystem which allows the legal profession to plug into the latest innovations,” said Jimmy Vestbirk, founder of Legal Geek. “Our community consists of anyone with the right ‘legal geek’ mindset and they can come from law firms, academia, and the wider business and investment community. Thomson Reuters has helped Legal Geek engage and activate these diverse players in a way that can be meaningful to everyone.”
“As a business partner, Thomson Reuters can provide a range of ways in which to approach customers together, removing some of the risk for all parties and finding a scenario that’s good for the startup, good for Thomson Reuters and good for the mutual customer,” said Jim Leason, VP market development and strategy for the UK & Ireland Legal business at Thomson Reuters. “We’ve opened the doors to startups in cities around the world where we’ve been building and supporting innovation hot spots, including right here in London. Working with Legal Geek is an exciting development for us and we’re looking forward to the prospect of engaging more widely with the startup community.”
Legal Geek hosted the first conference for Legal start-ups in London in 2016. It focused on the disruptive forces shaping today’s legal services industry and brought together tech start-ups, supporters, investors and early adopters with the aim of making London the next global legal tech hub.
Thomson Reuters has created Labs™ around the world in order to collaborate with customers to solve real-world problems and rapidly prototype and validate solutions using advanced data analytics, machine intelligence, and natural language processing. Working with external partners, Thomson Reuters Labs are active members of regional innovation ecosystems, delivering world-class solutions for customers.
Thomson Reuters Labs is seeking start-up partners in FinTech, RegTech and LegalTech markets. The Labs support capabilities across the many disciplines that constitute data science, including data exploration tools, dashboards, visualizations and proof-of-concept application. Learn more at: Thomson Reuters Labs
To see an example of how Thomson Reuters has partnered with startups in the legal industry, read about its engagement with Toronto-based startup, Blue J Legal.
For more information about Legal Geek, visit: www.legalgeek.co
