Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which notify blogophiles about new posts to their favorite blogs, could allow law departments, I suspect, to know immediately whenever a law firm timekeeper enters time to one of the law departments’ matters. That a law department would want to have such up-to-the-second raw data, I…
Does this sound right (from a recent mailing of Lexmark a document management system vendor)? “Although the typical paper document gets copied 19 times, up to 7.5 percent of all documents are lost and 3 percent of the remainder are misfiled.” The Lexmark promotional material cites its source as “Coopers…
You do have a matter management system, right? Put a matter into it when (1) it is likely to generate a legal fee paid to a law firm or vendor, (2) the matter could be political or sensitive, (3) work done on the matter might be usable by someone else…
Inspired by a piece on the website of Sugarcrest about practice management systems in law firms, I extrapolated to law department matter management systems (MMS) Myth #1. MMS’s are about technology. No, the platform – software and servers – means less than the understanding that should come from analyzing its…
One session at the ACC 2004 Annual Meeting (805) offered some pointers for what law departments should normally expect from law firms regarding extranets. The first expectation caught my eye. ”Launch of a new extranet in minutes upon your request for as little as $500/month, often paid by the firm.”…
Corporate Counsel’s 2005 survey of Fortune 500 law departments obtained responses from 139 companies, and more specifically “the person in charge of legal technology.” An article summarizing the results (May 2005 at pg. 82) stated that on “average there was one IT professional for every 24 lawyers.” (I read that…
For years, I have thought that voice recognition software, like Dragon Software, would be a boon for lawyers who are keyboard challenged. I have used that software for several years, and it saves me time on bulk dictation, especially longer quotes. The errors, unfortunately, still crop up too frequently, and…
Scott Gawlicki quoted me in his Corporate Legal Times article in August (pg. 14): “[f]or a legal department using seven to 10 law firms and spending $1.5 million a year, e-billing is not worth it.” The article cited some vendors who say it’s the number of invoices, not the amount…
E-billing systems ring out the huzzahs for their systems’ ability to track the routing of invoices. Certainly, some bills involve review by more than one lawyer, because the work falls within multiple lawyers’ expertise. Here, routing capabilities might make some sense. What I can’t imagine is that it is very…
My benchmark book has data to the effect that in 2001, a set of law departments reported spending an average something like $4,000 per lawyer on “technology.” What, more precisely, falls inside that portmanteau word? First, software licensing, maintenance and staff costs fall in, where the software is designed primarily…