The world’s first open industry platform for lawyers launched

Lupl is a first-in-kind partnership between major global companies and law firms

The platform has commenced private beta testing under lockdown conditions and promises to transform the ways in which lawyers work.

All corporate legal departments and law firms worldwide can use Lupl; any technology provider can integrate with it via open APIs.

13 May 2020: A group of leading law firms and corporations have come together to support the development of Lupl, the world’s first open industry platform for legal matters. The venture represents more than 12 months of work with in-house and private practice lawyers and industry experts to solve shared frustrations relating to the handling of legal matters.

Together, the group represents 10,000+ lawyers in 100+ jurisdictions. Lupl has been formed as an independent corporation to develop, own and operate the open industry technology platform.

It is being incubated through its development by a trio of international law firms, CMS, Cooley and Rajah & Tann Asia, working with input from an advisory board of 16 leading in-house lawyers from blue chip multinationals through to the world’s fastest growing tech companies. The wider law firm testing group includes Slaughter and May, Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Australia, Khaitan & Co in India and One Essex Court, a leading barristers’ chambers in London.

Together, they are supporting the development of Lupl with the goal of synchronizing everything that goes into a legal matter – including people, documents, information, communications and technology applications – in a single secure space, empowering lawyers and legal departments to work together on complex, high-stakes legal matters in a better and more efficient way.

Michelle Fang, Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Turo and Corporate Counsel’s General Counsel of the Year, said: “Lawyers today have a critical role to play at the front lines of business. But technology tools for lawyers often seem to hold them back rather than empower them. Lupl’s open industry platform has the potential to enhance transparency and collaboration and deliver better, more modern ways of working within our department, with other business functions, and with law firms.”

An open approach means any legal department and law firm will be able to use Lupl, and any technology provider will be able to integrate with it via open APIs.

Matt Pollins, Chief Commercial Officer of Lupl, added: “When we began work on Lupl, our goal was to give lawyers real-time, 360 visibility across their matters, whether they’re at their desk, at home, or on the go. We knew the demand for a tool like this was coming because of the shift towards distributed teams and mobile working but the crisis has accelerated that shift far quicker than we could ever have imagined.”

The platform itself is the result of thousands of hours of input from legal professionals at all levels, across sectors as diverse as telecoms, financial services, technology, energy and natural resources, all around the world.

Lupl has been developed with further support and guidance from Heidi Gardner PhD, Faculty Chair and Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School, the author of “Smart Collaboration” and the upcoming “Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams”, who is a world-leading expert on workplace collaboration trends.

Designed for usage by both law firms and legal departments alike, the platform will continue to operate in private beta for several months ahead of a wider public release later in the year or early 2021. In support of the beta version going live, the company has also launched a website to set out its long-term vision and objectives.

Notes to Editors

Further comments also at www.lupl.com/home.

Law Firm Comments

Adam Ruttenberg, Cooley Partner, Chairman of the firm’s Technology Committee and a leading technology transactions lawyer, added: “As a firm committed to superior quality, service and innovation, we believe that a platform like Lupl is what our lawyers need. The impact of changing demographics and technologies, along with the pressures of instant communication across a variety of modes, makes it increasingly difficult to manage workflow effectively and meet clients’ needs. Especially in light of our recent experience with remote working in a COVID world, we think Lupl is the right answer at the right time.”

Duncan Weston, Executive Partner of CMS, commented: “At CMS, we’ve always felt that true change in the industry requires a collective shift in mindset to eliminate proprietary closed systems and a reluctance to work together. By supporting the development of Lupl, we hope to set an example for how to bring together a diverse ecosystem of innovators, in-house and private practice lawyers as well as other professionals to create transformational change in our industry for the decades to come.”

Lee Eng Beng, Senior Counsel, Chairperson of Rajah & Tann Asia, said: “We look forward to that day in the near future when the global legal community will talk and think in terms of pre- and post-Lupl.”

Legal Department Comments

Alex Peeke, Head of Legal, Landsec: “I’m excited by the potential of this open industry platform to improve ways of working at the intersection of legal departments, law firms and business teams.”
Lizette Pérez-Deisboek, General Counsel, Battery Ventures: “One of the issues we have to navigate on large transactions is the sheer volume of unstructured communications. The idea of having a tool to bring all of that together is very exciting.”

Industry Partner Comments

Neil Araujo, Chief Executive Officer, iManage Inc, one of several technology partners working with Lupl’s open industry platform, said: “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Lupl to enable a seamless integration of iManage Work into Lupl’s open industry platform. We’re excited about the opportunities that this will create for our users. This integration showcases how iManage can be leveraged with other applications in a seamless fashion to meet end user needs and enhance the experience of managing and collaborating on documents.”

Andy Sparkes, Director of Legal Markets, LexisNexis UK, a leading provider of legal products and solutions, said: “We’re excited to be working with the community of firms and legal departments behind Lupl to explore how we can embed LexisNexis’ legal knowledge solutions into the workflow on this new open industry platform, as part of our mission to help lawyers save time, increase productivity and minimise risk, wherever they are.”

Alvin Tedjamulia, co-founder and CTO of NetDocuments, added: “NetDocuments supports Lupl’s open industry platform vision. We look forward to integrating our open, cloud-based document management system to Lupl while enabling users of ndThread, our collaboration solution, to seamlessly connect and communicate with colleagues and clients.”

About Lupl

Lupl is an open industry platform for legal matters being developed by a group of legal departments and law firms from around the world. Its matter management software brings together all of the people, conversations, documents and data for legal matters in one place.

For further information, please contact us here.

About CMS

Founded in 1999, CMS is a full-service top 10 international law firm, based on the number of lawyers (Am Law 2018 Global 100). With 70+ offices in 40+ countries across the world, employing over 4,500 lawyers, CMS has longstanding expertise both at advising in its local jurisdictions and across borders. CMS acts for a large number of Fortune 500 companies and the FT European 500 and for the majority of the DAX 30. Revenues totalled EUR 1.36bn in 2018.

About Cooley LLP

Clients partner with Cooley on transformative deals, complex IP and regulatory matters, and high-stakes litigation, where innovation meets the law. Cooley has 1,100+ lawyers across 16 offices in the United States, Asia and Europe.

About Rajah & Tann Asia

Rajah & Tann Asia brings together leading law firms and lawyers in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, with each offering the highest standards of service to locally-based clients while collectively having the capability to handle the most complex regional and cross-border transactions and to provide excellent legal counsel seamlessly across the region. With over 750 fee earners, all working towards one shared goal, we are lawyers who know Asia and who give our clients home advantage.
Lupl mockup features on mobile.