If a law department participates in a project to collect and organize the contracts of a company, one of the headaches can be to translate historical contracts into a similar format. Legacy contract conversion presents a challenge for a law department to the degree people had stored contracts and forms…
Every now and then I run across unusual software packages that help law departments. Here are five of them that showed up during consulting projects or reading. (1) Fidelity offers a package that handles equity compensation awards and tracking. (2) ComputerShare has software that specializes in the arcane machinations of…
Many people have criticized PowerPoint for its rigidity, its format restrictions, riot of animation, endless slides. The overuse and abuse of the ubiquitous program has become a staple of cartoons. A chapter in Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) at 34-33 rehearses the usual criticisms.…
An e-mail arrived from Thomas G. Oakes Associates about their services and software to support trial presentations. Oakes’ spiel is that trial presentation technology can help the judge and jury visualize and understand your story. It lets you compare items, such as documents, photographs, or videos. You can retrieve and…
A post in Portuguese on the FDJUR group of LinkedIn, which is for in-house lawyers in Brazil, asked members to respond with the software they are using. [ Qual o software que sua empresa ou escritório utiliza?] I have written about one of them, from Tedesco (See my post of…
One of the speakers at the SuperConference mentioned that his seven-lawyer department uses SharePoint as an internal blog. Inside lawyers and others can collaborate with that tool. Also at the SuperConference, a speaker from Hewlett-Packard’s law department mentioned that they have created a SharePoint application where, among many things, they…
A white paper from Kiersted/Systems discusses whether a law department should replace or restore its matter management system. After a page or two on the total costs incurred by a law department when it replaces its current MMS, the white paper makes a controversial claim: “You will save up to…
I saw a presentation the other day that looked at matter management systems and deconstructed their reports into eight levels of increasing sophistication and value. What they called “standard reports” are the canned choices that come with system implementation. Quite a few law departments rarely need to go beyond their…
Representatives from Mosaic Consulting attended Mitratech’s Interact 2011 Conference. Some of their material referred to the category of “Business Intelligence” software. I asked about it and the Mosaic folks, Chris Wilson in particular, told me that he believes Business Objects has the most presence. He pointed out that both TeamConnect…
Some people, myself included, think of software for legal departments mostly in terms of features and functions. What the software can do and how well it does it dominates. But if a law department has several packages to choose from and those packages have converged on a fairly similar array…