A solid matter management system, and I include e-billing systems in that general category, should be able to tell you who changed what information and when. Such an “audit trail” is important if you need to see when a user modified a field – such as a billing rate field…
An earlier post mentioned the variety of litigation-support software a law department might need if it handles significant amounts of discovery within its walls (See my post of May 15, 2009: nine packages at one law department.). This blog has metaposts on e-discovery, internal discovery groups, and search software, but…
Gary Weiner, a consulting lawyer with Liquid Litigation Management, brings to the attention of readers two recent studies (Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009 at 42). One is George J. Socha, “Bringing e-Discovery in-house: risks and rewards” (Feb. 2009) and the other Brian Babineau,”Getting Control of Electronic Discovery“, Enterprise…
Three disparate pieces of information came together for me and point to a highly competitive, and relatively balanced, market for high-end e-billing/matter management systems. Three companies, in alphabetical order below, dominate this market and I comment on the number of departments that use their systems. CT TyMetrix. The speaker biography…
Another Web 2.0 application that might be tried by an internal legal team can be added to the nine already identified (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: 9 applications; and March 16, 2008: Web 2.0 applications.). The tenth is an online prediction market (See my post of Feb. 16,…
A speaker at a recent conference told the attendees that “at about $5 million in spend on outside counsel, law departments start wanting some technology, like matter management and e-billing.” To be sure, the speaker was hardly disinterested, being an executive from a legal technology company, but the point he…
In-house lawyers dislike one-way information flows. That is the reason why timely data entry into matter management systems often goes AWOL; lawyers charged with plugging in data perceive that the data only goes one way, up, and returns no benefit to that lawyer. They already know their own information. The…
Law Technology News honored Vulcan Materials with its 2008 “Most Innovative Use of Technology by an In-House Legal Department.” Vulcan Materials, an S&P 500 company with revenues above $3 billion, is the nation’s largest producer of construction aggregates. The company used to receive 4,000 paper legal invoices each year from…
According to surveys by the General Counsel Roundtable among its member legal departments, “use of electronic billing technology” rose from 2001 (25%) to 2006 (41%). Therefore, during the five years, the adoption of e-billing posted a cumulative annual growth rate of 10.4 percent (See my post of Nov. 26, 2006:…
Nelda Young, the Contracts and Litigation Manager at Celerity, Inc., recently posted a comment on my LinkedIn group, Law Department Management. It deserves wider circulation. “I’ve created a true “tool” for my Legal Department. It is a customized Microsoft Access database that combines the working data and documents for all…