An e-mail correspondent alerted me to a vendor I had not heard of, Lecorpio. I looked at the company’s website. It listed a number of distringuished clients, including Autodesk, Analog Devices, IDT, LexMark, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Palm, Symantec, Thoratec, and Tyco International. It also listed three software applications that I have…
The blog of Lecorpio has post on Jan. 1, 2011 that talks about the hidden costs of software, those costs a law department incurs over and above the license fee. As backup they refer to but do not cite to a government study. “The U.S. Department of Commerce study shows…
Nero AG’s law department, headquartered in Germany and with legal offices in the US and Asia, set up a wiki three years ago. As Frank Fletcher, the General Counsel of Nero, explains in ACC Docket, April 2011 at 16,, “a wiki is software that allows you to make a site…
A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, April 2011 at 13, brought to my awareness a new consideration: matter management systems that allow law firms to access them directly. Most typically, law firms log on to upload their invoices. Mark Poag of Datacert warns that “Although collaboration is imperative, it should…
A law department I know has adopted a remarkable range of software for its specialized corporate needs. It uses EDGARizer (EDGARfilings, part of Thomson Reuters) and EDGARlink (SEC) for Edgar filings and EMMA (MSRB – Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board) for 529 filings. It has also licensed BlueWin (Bank of New…
A case study prepared by Bridgeway describes the past five years of Rockwell Automation’s implementation of matter management systems. In addition to a chronology of a successful project, the study offers a few specific points I would like to emphasize. If you would like to see the seven-page paper, write…
The March 2011 Issues & Insights from Corporation Service Company discusses contract management systems. One of the capabilities of a good one, and presumably part of what CSC’s software offers, is the automatic integration of e-mails to the contract in the system the e-mail refers to. This must entail a…
In the 50 law departments of companies with the most revenue that have responded to the 2011 General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, 36 of them report a matter management system. It dismays me that 14 of them (28%) did not report a system, but that may be because the person…
I wonder about the ratio of spend on software for matter management to spend on external counsel. Call that MMS-spend-to-total legal spend, such as $100,000 per year for the software and $10 million on average paid outside vendors, a ratio of 0.1 percent. Similarly, what is the ratio between what…
One of the questions asked by the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey was for respondents to “rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.” Coming in near the bottom, 7th out of 10, was “Stay abreast of law department technology.” With only 15 total points, very few…