A survey asked chief legal officers, half of them from departments of five lawyers or less, about seven types of software – plus “other” – that their law departments had implemented, “which has created significant cost/time efficiencies for your department.” Of the 848 respondents to the survey, ACC’s Seventh Annual…
Marketing material from Business Integrity distributed at the recent LegalTech Conference tells an impressive tale about how three law departments have worked with the company’s DealBuilder software to automate chunks of three contract processes. For example, Rosemary Martin, global general counsel at Reuters, explains how her legal department deploys the…
This blog has planted a long row of posts on processes (See my posts of April 27, 2006 which defines processes; May 1, 2006 about the breadth of the term; June 28, 2006 on their importance; and Aug. 13, 2006 on components of processes; Oct. 16, 2006 on processes in…
Some corporate lawyers who write frequently should find voice recognition software to their liking (See my post of Aug. 26, 2005 on Dragon NaturallySpeaking.). I create the first draft of many of my posts by breathing fire into Nuance’s Dragon® Naturally Speaking® and have just upgraded to Version 9.0. The…
I have always thought that a PDF file bars the reader from copying or changing the content of the PDF document. I learned differently at the recent Legal Tech conference. For example, ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional claims that it lets members of a law department convert PDF files into fully-formatted…
The most recent LegalTech conference included several vendors who offer digital transcription services. What follows is not a technology review but my impression of how the software might help a law department. In essence, a corporate lawyer can dictate into an inexpensive machine, which produces a standardized digital file. The…
In the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 8, 2007 at 8, there is a profile of Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase Corp. Fawcett describes how his time is distributed: “25% is devoted to management, 20% to corporate matters, 15% to intellectual property, 15% commercial concerns, another 15%…
All processes can produce data (See my posts of April 27, May 1, and Oct. 16, 2006 generally on law department processes.). Since processes happens repeatedly, someone can count input, elapsed time, participants, output or all of these. The contract review process comes to mind as an example. Any law…
According to a piece in MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 11, if you perceive a product or service as a commodity you will stunt your creativity about it. In the author’s words, “the fatal lure of the commodity ideology is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”…
Researchers distinguish task conflict from relationship conflict, and the difference can be seen in law departments. According to MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 5, disagreements among law department members related to a specific task, such as what step to take next in an acquisition, are task…