An established office systems vendor has just purchased the UK’s most successful legal artificial intelligence (AI), prompting observations that AI in the legal system is quickly becoming mainstream.

US-based iManage, a leading privately held supplier of document management systems, bought RAVN last month for an undisclosed sum. According to Ron Friedmann and Joshua Fireman of consultancy Fireman & Company, the purchase ‘validates both emerging and maturing trends’.

The AI boasts an advanced system that can discover, summarize, and organize relevant information from vast quantities of documents and other miscellaneous data, like emails. It was founded in 2010 and includes users on an international scale, such as the Serious Fraud Office and Berwin Leighton Paisner.

Introducing RAVN’s technology will give the users of iManage over 3,000 fresh ways of incorporating valuable data, according to the European general manager of iManage, Geoff Hornsby. This also gives the AI the ability to expand itself quickly in a very fast-moving industry.

RAVN chief executive David Lumsden stated that ‘RAVN will give iManage users unprecedented opportunities to make their content aware’. He continued to comment that clients who do not have any use for the system will still be able to access its database as a standalone service.

This groundbreaking sale calls for a dramatic change in the competitive AI industry as other technology giants prepare to take advantage of AI developments and how they can be made use of in other areas. Businesses already in positions of such products are in positions of strength. One example of this is Canadian firm Kira Systems, which can extract information from contracts; the firm is expanding its clients rapidly and is not interested in buyers. Another example is UK company Luminance, which can classify and analyze unstructured data (such as emails), which has already received money from magic circle firm Slaughter and May and the technology fund Invoke Capital, owned by Dr Mike Lynch.