BTI Consulting Group reported the results of asking more than 200 corporate counsel this question: “If you could create the ideal technology solution, what capabilities would you most like to have?” As reported in Law Practice, Vol. 32, April/May 2006 at 13, those respondents most wanted technology solutions to be…
1. Send the vendor a summary of your relevant facts. Ask them whether they need to know more facts to do a good presentation and try to supply them. 2. Tell the vendor what you want emphasized in the demonstration, rather than let them trot around their accustomed bases. For…
A law department that wants to choose a matter management system can look to ASPs – software hosted by the vendor on its servers – or at self-hosted packages on the corporation’s servers (See my post of March 26, 2006 about IT departments and ASP’s in terms of support.). Into…
One of the conclusions of a study of legal technology in law departments of North West England is that in-house practices are “generally better equipped with hardware, software and systems than Private Practices of a similar size.” Gill Hague, “Factors Affecting the Use of Information and Communications Technology by In-House…
One of the attractions for general counsel that application service providers (ASPs) have is that they do not demand much, if anything, from corporate information services. The law department can license and use software without need for internal help. As noted by Legal IT, June 16, 2005 (John Rogers), most…
At LegalTech in New York City, I was struck by how many litigation-support software vendors referred to their patents on software, “technology,” or algorithms. I noted Attenex (“suppression and de-duping technology”), Dolphin Search (“neural network technology”), Discovery Mining (“cluster computing technology”) and MetaLINCS (“algorithms for culling, de-duping and indexing”), and…
On Jan. 25th, ALM’s Law Technology News announced the law department winner in its third annual Law Technology News Awards program. Libby Throughton, Legal IT Manager for Home Depot, won the “Most Innovative Use of Technology by an In-House Legal Department” award. Her legal IT team developed a secure “TeamConnect”…
Because off-the-shelf software didn’t take into consideration all the costs of developing and protecting a patent for RIB-X, a small biotech company, its chief patent counsel and a financial analyst developed an Excel program. The program “can predict costs based on just about every conceivable variable that might impact the…
During a recent consulting project, we inventoried a surprising number of software packages used by the law department’s Corporate Secretary. Serving a modest-sized company, it has software that administers stock options; that maintains original Board minutes and executed transaction documents (Extempore); that helps manage subsidiaries (Transcentive); that completes Form 16s;…
Recent posts discussed sources online for legal research (See my post of Oct. 31, 2005 about Casemaker and Thecorporatecounsel.net.) and lawyers using search engines for an hour a day or more (See my post of Jan. 10, 2005 about Google.) Dozens of posts would not be enough to chronicle the…