Information giant Thomson Reuters Corp (NYSE:TRI) has teamed-up with Legal Geek to help advance innovation and collaboration within the LawTech startup community.
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.
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.
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.