Results from the tenth annual ACC/Serengeti survey on managing outside counsel give some insight into the incidence of three kinds of software that helps collect spend data about outside counsel. According to the ACC Docket summary, Sept. 2011 at 18, of the responding “hundreds of ACC member law departments,” 64.6…
Selection of a matter management system seems daunting; configuring or customizing the one you chose, installing it, converting historical data to it, and then training staff on its functions and the changes it requires in processes seems even more intimidating. Even then you have to keep it running and bringing…
Corporate Legal Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1988 by three attorneys to provide matter management software geared toward corporate legal departments. From its history on the company’s website, the first product, Legal Management System, was DOS-based. It shaped the basic principles of design for what became Case&Point. Case&Point was introduced…
In various posts I have tried to get a handle on the number of matter management systems commonly available for law departments and even the numbers of their users. It’s hard. Part of the difficulty is that other kinds of software relate to matter management or overlap with some of…
How many law department matter management packages are available and installed in more than a couple of departments in the United States? Somewhere in the range of 20 to 40. No one knows for sure, but my recent posts have referred to some of the choices (See my post of…
Founded in 1995 by Gary Levine, the former general counsel of Pilot Software, Two Step Software offers Corporate Focus. As explained by the Needham, MA company on its website, Corporate Focus provides law departments with “a single, consolidated online system for entity management, ownership administration, equity accounting, and corporate compliance.”…
“A mobile ‘app’ is a piece of software linked to a smartphone [such as a Droid or iPhone that has computer capabilities] that allows its user to perform any number of functions,” write the authors of an article about the legal issues associated with mobile apps (Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept.…
As the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey collects increasingly fuller data about law departments and the matter management systems they use, I decided to bring up to date my posts on that software. Previously I collected three dozen posts (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with…
General Counsel Metrics asked on its benchmark survey “What matter management system do you use?” Of the 190 other law departments so far that indicated either “none” or “n/a,” it seems that a “none” means what it says, however, “n/a” could mean there is a package but the person does…
For those of you who think that a law department needs to have some minimum number of lawyers to justify licensing a matter management system, you are right! But the number is one lawyer. I looked at 125 law departments in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey that have licensed…