Interview with CEO Ed Watts on InfoTrack Intelligence

Welcome to LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out of the legal tech industry. This is Bob Ambrogi and on each sponsored episode of LawNext PR, I interview a legal tech company about its latest news and developments. Today I'm joined by Ed Watts, CEO of InfoTrack, to discuss its launch of InfoTrack Intelligence, the first AI powered court filing solution for US law firms. Ed, welcome to the show. Fantastic, thanks Bob, great to be here.

It's good to see you. Before we start to talk about InfoTrack intelligence, I always like to step back and talk a little bit about InfoTrack just for the benefit of any viewers and listeners who aren't familiar with you and what you do. So why don't we start there? Why don't you walk us through a little bit about InfoTrack and what you do. Yeah, absolutely.

So InfoTrack's a legal tech company and we've been providing core litigation support tasks to legal professionals such as court filing, service of process, docket syncing and more. We do that with a view to make those services incredibly efficient and streamlined. So our objective is to take the pain out of that tedious work, helping law firms work, generally smarter and not harder.

We've always had the mantra since day one that our solutions are designed to allow legal professionals to do what they were taught to do, which is practicing law and helping clients. And so we've had that mission part of our core in our hearts since day one.

So you've just announced the launch of this InfoTrack Intelligence describing it as an intelligent e-filing. tell us generally about it and we'll drill down into it a little bit more. But what is InfoTrack Intelligence? Yeah, so InfoTrack Intelligence is what we're naming the engine that is powering our workflows. So in court filing, the engine is providing the link between the documents being uploaded and the form being completed and submitted to the courts.

What we've observed these courts are generally quite complicated, Bob. And generally we feel that court filing has got more complicated over time than less complicated. We've seen the advent of electronic filing, so no longer do you have to go to the courthouse and deliver the documents over the counter. But that's been replaced with complexity in a workflow that requires the filers to input a huge amount of data into these forms in order to submit their filing.

And increasingly, with that amount of data that they have to enter, if they get that incorrect, if they make mistakes, it generally leads to a filing rejection, which is incredibly problematic law firms. And InfoTrack Intelligence is the tool and mechanism that we've delivered to solve those problems.

So it sounds like you're saying there's really two problems here. One is just the time consuming part of having to enter this data and get this all filled out and ready to file. The other part is the propensity for error in performing that data filling task and the fact that that can then lead to redundancies and rejections and other inefficiencies. Absolutely. We have a tremendous amount of sympathy and empathy with the filers going through these forms and workflows.

They require a huge amount of cognitive load thinking to complete and they take time. We've seen users spend 15 minutes plus on these forms, deliberating over every field, every drop down and then agonizing over if that's right, if it's wrong before they hit that.

Submit button and so InfoTrack Intelligence does all of that in 30 seconds And so not only are we reducing the time that they spend on that form but also improving accuracy of that data and so what we've seen is that populate about 95 % of the fields on that form and We have 99 % accuracy which has led to a 50 % reduction in rejection rates. And so as you alluded to, rejections are very significant for the law firms.

There's a downstream client that's impacted with whatever they're trying to get over the line, as well as the impact on the law firm and their reputational, potentially impact for rejected filing.

So in terms of the workflow, mean, how does this change how I would have used InfoTrack previously? I'm filing a complaint or some other pleading through an e-filing system. What's it look like? What's the process? How does it work? Yeah, so as I mentioned before, InfoTrack has always been about supporting law firms and legal professionals in one of those litigation support tasks.

And predominantly, we've done that by connecting to practice management systems and extracting data from a variety of different sources to automatically populate that form. That's very similar. Today, we still work with a variety of vendors and tools that law firms use to extract data. However, now we're using the document as a prime of the documents that are being inputted as a primary source of information.

And so we're pulling all the data from those forms and fields that are inputted in order to fill out the form in an automated manner. And so really how it looks now, Bob, is you upload your documents, the form's filled out, and you hit submit. And so that's the difference that we're providing for law firms today.

You said earlier that this can be now get the process done in 30 seconds or something like that. How does that compare to before? I how much time savings is that? Yes, so we've seen many firms spend 15 minutes plus on a filing. And again, you know, these forms have got increasingly complex as time has progressed. The courts have required more data to be inputted to streamline their own internal processes. And if you were to navigate these forms yourself, they're confusing.

They're not designed with users necessarily in mind. and there's lots of complicated permutations. So you pick one value from one drop down, it changes the form and the data that needs to be inputted after that. And so we've seen a massive reduction in time that users are spending on this form from 15 minutes down to 30 seconds just to give it a cursory review and submit.

And I know that different courts have different requirements in terms of filing. How InfoTrack Intelligence accommodate for those differences in local court requirements? good question. So the input track intelligence is built using kind of three core pillars that we consider. One is the documents that are being inputted or generally the input data. And so we're really smart OCR optical character recognition technology to extract the information from those documents.

The second component is core policy, which is the fields and data that needs to be inputted for a variety of different jurisdictions. And the third component is civil procedure. And so almost in every state, civil procedure, which dictates how things should be filed and through which path. And so we have taken civil procedure and some local rules as well to understand the rules of these courts. And so we take all those three things together.

coupled with really smart people, internally both attorneys, our users and all of our staff to marry them together to make an automated process that starts with the documents being uploaded and finishes with the form being fully populated and ready to submit.

Yeah. Legal professionals remain very concerned about the propensity of AI to commit errors or hallucinations, as we often talk about it. You say this is 99 percent accurate. What kind of assurances can you provide users that, you know, that this will be? Yeah, so to answer that, think I've got to go back to where I started with said that InfoTrack has always been about solving the problems that our users face.

As technologists, we have tools in our toolkit and we look at which tool to use for what job. AI is another tool in our toolkit. And so we've looked at our entire workflow and we've realized there's a component in this process that is very readily solvable by recent developments in AI technology. And that's exactly how we've used it as part of a workflow. So it's really on Rails, a component in this process. And the user can see the results of that. We show them the form populated as we see fit.

they can review that and correct anything that they feel is inaccurate. and you know, lot of the feeling from legal professionals about AI, think is justified in many manners and, you generally their responsibility is to scrutinize and they're not ultimately responsible for the actions. I think that This is a fantastic use of AI that enables and enhances the task and increases the efficiencies of the users. We're simultaneously minimizing risk.

I think that because it's on Rails and prescribed in a very specific use case, that allows us to put a lot of safeguards, testing, validation around it as opposed to perhaps an open-ended legal chat bot, for example, where you don't really know what the user is going to ask and so you don't really know what the answer is going to be spat out of it and so how can you really validate that that was accurate or not?

In this instance, we have hundreds of thousands of parties going through our system every year and we can very confidently validate that the accuracy of these processes is going to yield a strong result and reduce rejection rate.

What states is this available in at this point? So we're currently live in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, and Nevada. California and Illinois are coming soon.

And so does this. Is this something that you sell as an additional product? Is this something that's just built into the product you already have? mean, how does that work in terms of people? Yeah. Yeah. is what we do. We work as best we can to improve these efficiencies. And so this is all part of the existing application. We don't see this as a value add or something to pay more for. This is just part of the service that we offer. InfoTrack is all transactional fee based.

No subscriptions, no sign up fees, no training costs. You pay for what you use. And generally that means that that fee can be passed on to the downstream client. The law firm doesn't pay for it, their client generally does. And so that's incredibly valuable when we save the law firm an incredible amount of time and risk aversion as well. So reducing the chance of mistakes in this process.

Yeah, is it it in any way key to is the benefit of this product in any way key to kind of the frequency by which a particular law firm is is actually performing a filing? really good question. We thought a lot about this. I think it's for everyone. And so it doesn't matter if you're, you you always file in the same jurisdiction, you're an absolute wizard, you can fly through these forms and you're doing it hundreds of times a day.

There's something for that person, it saves them, it's on rails, they don't have to think. Or if you're someone who files once a month. I don't think it matters because somebody who's coming once a month, they're not familiar with the forms, they have to refresh themselves, they're more likely probably to make a mistake. Again, this automates that process and would significantly reduce the chance of errors for an infrequent filer just as much as it would a frequent filer.

That's all the questions I have. Is there anything else that you'd like to point out to listeners or viewers about InfraTrack Intelligence?

Yeah, I'd just like to thank all the people who have contributed to this. We really listen to our customers and understand their pain points and they've helped shape this product and allowed us to deliver it. And it's no real secret that listening to your customer base is a great way to get ideas and feedback and shape the direction of what to build. And in this case, they've absolutely done that. And so very appreciative and thankful for the amazing community that's driven this innovation.

And we'd love for people to go to our website and read about it, look at it, and give it a go. I think it's revolutionary and groundbreaking, and it solves a very real problem for filers. And so please go to infotrack.com forward slash. intelligence to see more. Ed, thanks for coming on the show to tell us about this today. Fantastic, thanks Bob, appreciate it. Yeah, it sounds good. And as Ed said, go go check it out if you're at all curious. That's it for today's episode.

If you enjoyed it, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. You can also find us on YouTube. Just search for LawNext there. You can also find all the episodes on my site on lawnext.com and in the law next legal tech directory under the resources tab. This is Bob Ambrogi. Thanks for joining us today.