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TechnoLawyer Top Products Awards of 2021
January 10, 2022
Welcome to the TechnoLawyer Top Products Awards of 2021 — selected by the subscribers of TechnoLawyer. Learn about the 10 hottest products in legal technology and add those of interest to your law firm's shopping list. This year's winners span 6 categories. One company took home two awards. Congratulations to all!
Attention TechnoLawyer subscribers — please drink the last of your champagne at the open bar and take your seat. It's time to announce the 10 winners the TechnoLawyer Top Products Awards of 2021. This marks the 11th year of our awards — the longest running legal technology awards and most prestigious thanks to you.
The TechnoLawyer Top Products Awards reflect the needs of lawyers and legal professionals in the trenches because it's these folks, including you, who passively vote for the winners. In each issue of TechnoLawyer, we report on a hot new product. When you and your fellow TechnoLawyer subscribers click to visit that product's home page, you cast a vote. Unlike other awards chosen by industry insiders, TechnoLawyer Top Product Award winners represent organic, grassroots support.
Break It Down Again
As is our tradition, let's dive into this year's data before we unveil the winners. You can see the breakdown by product category in the chart below. Additional items of interest:
Automation and ediscovery products made a strong showing, accounting for 40% of the awards.
Both winners in the legal research category make extensive use of artificial intelligence.
The two practice management products — both from the same company — reflect increasing specialization in a category that historically caters to a broad audience.
Document management, perenially the most popular product category among TechnoLawyer subscribers, makes its perennial appearance in the winner's circle.
Client Intake is the sleeper here as law firms realize it's an entire category of software and related marketing services, not just a few custom fields in their practice management system.
Two products are for midsize and large law firms, eight are for firms of all sizes, four are for litigators, and six are for all practice areas.
The TechnoLawyer Top Products Awards of 2021 spans six product categories (click to enlarge).
Congratulations to All the Winners!
Below you'll find a summary of each award winner, including links to each product's home page and the TechnoLawyer article that resulted in the victory.
1. iMazing
We've worked hard to offer accurate and court-compliant printouts of iPhone messages and WhatsApp chats whilst retaining iMazing's trademark ease of use and affordable pricing. The whole team here is proud and delighted to see those efforts recognized by TechnoLawyer's 2021 Top Products Award! — Gregorio Zanon, CEO, DigiDNA. Congratulations to iMazing!
If you're like most lawyers, you use an iPhone. Which means you probably use Apple's Messages. If you log into your iCloud account on the web, you'll notice something interesting — no Messages app. You'll see all the others — Calendar, Mail, Reminders, etc. — but not Messages. This absence from the web exists because of the device-level encryption Apple provides for Messages. Meta's WhatsApp chat app offers similar security and likewise has no web version. This means you cannot use standard ediscovery software to collect messages from these two services.
Enter iMazing — Mac and Windows software that defensibly exports data from iPhones, including Messages and WhatsApp. The settings let you choose specific messages or entire conversations. iMazing includes the original date and timestamps, the full contact information of participants, and the iPhone serial number. It even preserves emoji. The metadata enables you to authenticate the evidence in court if challenged. iMazing also does double duty as backup software for your iPhone. Perhaps most amazing about iMazing is its low price compared to most ediscovery software.
Document automation involves three separate functions — the document type, the data sources, and the creation of the document. Many products focus only on one or two of these but veroDocs provides all three. It starts with template management within Microsoft Word for consistent letters, motions, trusts, and other document types. veroDocs also connects to multiple sources of data to eliminate as much manual data entry as possible. Finally, it can assemble documents from its own clause library.
Originally Verowave, veroDocs was renamed after being acquired by DocsCorp in 2020. In 2021, DocsCorp itself was acquired by Litera, which offers a similar product called Forte. For now, Litera supports both products.
The founders of Autologyx noticed something curious and wasteful. Law firms would encounter a problem or identify a need and then buy a new product. This results in a larger and larger portfolio of products, which increases expenses and requires more staff training. Autologyx limits this product creep by connecting the software products you already use to enhance their functionality. It's like Microsoft Power Automate, IFTT, and Zapier on steroids because unlike those products it works with all software and offers more customization.
Most cloud products have an API, which Autologyx can use to connect products to each other. For example, you could connect your e-signature software to your document management system without the need for an official integration by the companies that make those two products. In the absence of an API, Autologyx has a technology called WebCheck that can connect two applications. Either way, Autologyx uses a no-code visual sequencer to create these integrations, eliminating the need for costly software development.
We're proud to see WebPreserver receive the TechnoLawyer Top Product Award of 2021. With a few clicks of a button, legal professionals and investigators can save hours of manual evidence collection work. Everything is collected, including all comments — and this content can then be reproduced in high-fidelity and fully-searchable PDFs for easy review. — Michael Riedijk, CEO, Pagefreezer. Congratulations to WebPreserver!
If smoking guns exist, you're more likely to find them on social media than during a deposition. People have a habit of oversharing and under thinking when posting. These admissions can prove damaging and thus valuable in litigation. However, the party or witness may come to their senses and delete their posts. Furthermore, even if you manage to take screenshots, a court may disallow them for insufficient authentication.
WebPreserver from Pagefreezer addresses this challenge by including a Collection Report with each capture that contains metadata and hash values to prove its authenticity. WebPreserver can capture entire feeds and timelines with a few mouse clicks, including comments, images, and videos. It has special tools for the big five — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Trellis is honored to be selected by TechnoLawyer as a winner in the TechnoLawyer Top Product Awards of 2021. This recognition is a testament to our mission in providing our customers a cutting-edge state trial court legal research and analytics platform with strategic insights on: judges, verdicts, opposing counsel, motions, dockets, and legal issues. — Nicole Clark, Co-Founder & CEO, Trellis. Congratulations to Trellis!
Companies still exist that will send someone to a local courthouse to fetch a docket and related documents. This seems odd 25 years after Netscape ushered in the commercialization of the web. Business litigation and labor and employment attorney Nicole Clark and serial entrepreneur and technologist Alon Shwartz created Trellis to bring this information online since many states don't see to be in a hurry.
Thanks to a combination of shoe leather and artificial intelligence, Trellis makes a growing number of state trial court dockets searchable — think Google for state courts. Trellis also transforms historical docket data into charts so that you can analyze judges, verdicts, motions, dockets, opposing counsel, and parties to predict future behavior and inform your case strategy. For example, you can see the composition of a judge's caseload and the judge's grant percentage for summary judgment and other motions by case type and in comparison to other judges.
We are delighted to be given this prestigious award for the fourth time in our history. In the past year DocMoto has seen continued growth and development which serves to cement further our position as a key mover within the Document and Email management space. Now part of the larger North American based Pluribus Group; we are in an even better position to drive forward change and deliver new and exciting products and services to our customers. Finally a special thank you to the TechnoLawyer team for continuing to promote and publicize technical innovation within the legal sector. — Neil Cameron, Managing Director, CHL Software (A Pluribus Company). Congratulations to DocMoto!
DocMoto launched in 2011 as a Mac-based document management system to differentiate itself from the giants in the industry (read our 2018 interview of founder Neil Cameron for the backstory). This specialized focus paid off in several ways. Not only did DocMoto develop a loyal following but the company gained expertise creating native applications capable of deeply integrating with an operating system.
Today, DocMoto supports Windows too, including integrations with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook. The ability to make DocMoto a drive in Windows Explorer exemplifies the depth of these integrations. In Outlook, you can access DocMoto for documents you need to send and also file attachments you receive into DocMoto. The use of native clients doesn't mean everything is local. You can host your documents in the cloud and even access DocMoto from within cloud-based software such as Clio and Gmail.
AbacusNext is honored to earn an industry award that echoes what we hear from our customers, namely that partnering with us to run their practice has helped them weather a challenging time and emerge ready to thrive. Successful legal technology is more than features and functionality, it is a mutual understanding between firm and vendor of the best tools and methods to achieve complete practice management. Thank you, TechnoLawyer, for this Top Product Award and your recognition of our unwavering goal to drive law firm growth. — Tomas Suros, Global Product Marketing Director, AbacusNext. Congratulations to AbacusLaw! This is the first of two awards for AbacusNext.
After pioneering the practice management software category and then spearheading desktop cloud hosting via Abacus Private Cloud, AbacusLaw recently turned its focus to the needs of specific practice areas. Its Practice Area Essentials enable law firms to implement AbacusLaw more quickly as there's less of a need for the extensive upfront customization often required with generic products.
AbacusLaw has also leveraged its corporate siblings HotDocs and Abacus Payment Exchange. HotDocs integrates with AbacusLaw for document automation and also powers the forms in the Practice Area Essentials packages. Abacus Payment Exchange lets your clients pay by ACH or credit card without any costs other than transaction fees.
We're thrilled to win the TechnoLawyer Top Product Award of 2021. We are grateful to the TechnoLawyer staff and its readers for honoring our team's commitment to our clients! — Maz Ghorban, EVP, Alert Communications. Congratulations to Alert Communications!
You're going to hear more about client intake in the coming years as more law firms realize it requires more than adding a few custom fields to Outlook or a practice management system. Several dedicated applications now exist for client intake but what about communicating with prospects who contact your firm? A recent Learnpaper contains research showing that the faster law firms respond to inquiries the more likely a prospect will retain them.
Alert Communications started as a law firm answering service but has embraced this research to become more like a department in your firm. In addition to answering calls to your firm 24/7, Alert Communications can also handle email, text message, and web chat inquiries, schedule callbacks with a lawyer, enter prospect data into your client intake or practice management software, and even qualify prospects and obtain signed retainers.
Quick Check Judicial being named a TechnoLawyer Top Product Award of 2021 is an absolute honor. When we set out to create Quick Check Judicial, we were solving the pain points of our customers — the judiciary and attorneys alike — by ensuring that they were not missing anything important and providing them a holistic view of the matters before them. Introduced during the pandemic, Quick Check Judicial has exceeded expectations, helping customers work more effectively and save valuable time as workflows and court proceedings have been impacted. — Carol Jo Lechtenberg, Senior Director, Westlaw Product Management, Thomson Reuters. Congratulations to Quick Check Judicial!
Everyone has at least one "wow" experience with software. Video games aside, this often involves a task such as spellchecking that transpires faster by orders of magnitude than we could do it manually. Recent advances in artificial intelligence like those found in Quick Check Judicial enable lawyers to perform tasks that would otherwise prove impossible within the time constraints of a litigation.
Quick Check Judicial generates a report based on 2-6 briefs that you upload, 1-3 from each party. The report gives you a judge's vantage point, which explains the name of the service. For example, you will see citations in common and recommended citations omitted by one or both parties. Quick Check Judicial also finds errors such as incorrect quotations and cases from the briefs explicitly or implicitly overruled. The report is interactive, providing contextual excerpts from and direct links to the underlying sources.
Thank you, TechnoLawyer, for this Top Product Award and your recognition of our unwavering goal to drive law firm growth. — Tomas Suros, Global Product Marketing Director, AbacusNext. Congratulations to Amicus Cloud! This is the second of two awards for AbacusNext.
From the beginning, Amicus Cloud has offered desktop-like functionality that seems impossible in browser-based cloud software such as an email client and document automation tools. This stems from a product design and development team based in Toronto with decades of experience.
More recently, Amicus Cloud has added artificial intelligence to the mix. For example, it can auto summarize and tag imported documents and file them in the correct folder based on client, matter, and document type. This speeds up document retrieval, especially useful in today's world of on-camera Zoom calls. Amicus Cloud also recently added support for scheduled client payments using Abacus Payment Exchange.
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
