In December 2005, Marc Lauritsen and his colleagues assembled the document assembly engines that they then knew about. Just over a year later, these references may help law departments that would like to try out the genre of software. All that follows is quoted, but I have shortened some entries.…
Every manner of software is used by some law department, somewhere. Much of that software has company-wide application, such as word processing, document management, spreadsheets and e-mail, not to mention all the operating system and network products, and offers nothing unique to law departments. A handful of applications, however, run…
In document search, some software locates documents based on concepts whereas some uses linguistic analysis. I am not competent to evaluate the two approaches against each other, but I will give my understanding of the basic difference. Semantic-search software takes significant words in a set of documents and looks at…
By contributing author Brad Blickstein, Blickstein Group, on legal service providers: Consolidation in the electronic discovery industry has been a foregone conclusion for a long time, although a walk through the LegalTech show last month would contradict the theory. We all think it’s bound to happen as corporations take more…
By contributing author Brad Blickstein, Blickstein Group, on legal service providers: It seems that legal service providers, especially in process-heavy areas like e-discovery, come from three different schools of technology selection. There’s the “agnostic” school: “We may have our favorites, but we can work with anything.” There’s the “build it”…
As a consultant to legal service providers, I am frequently asked to help them enunciate their product’s or service’s return-on-investment. Sometimes this is a formal project, where we create sophisticated ROI calculators; sometimes it’s just helping them to better talk about their value proposition. Almost always, part of the return…
Along with the requirements definition phase (See my post of July 15, 2006.), the traditional next step of IT staff and consultants when they choose software is to extrude a request for proposal. The RFP outlines the presumed requirements of the department for the software. It is more detailed than…
Heresy it may be, but I question the galvanic twitch to start every software selection with a requirements definition. If your department wants to choose software, this step sucks up much time and money in interviews or focus groups. Yet many in-house counsel do not even know what their requirements…
The most effective training for lawyers is one-on-one right at the time they bump into a problem. For example, if a lawyer wants to customize a report in a matter management system, how better than to walk the lawyer through the steps in hands-on training? Immediacy, relevance, and personalization best…
An appositive follows the noun it defines. (1) The lease provision stalled the negotiations as both sides considered how to allocate the income from signage rights. The provision was one-sidedly in favor of the landlord. (2) The lease provision, which was one-sidedly in favor of the landlord, stalled the negotiations…