I like the no-holds-barred mandate of a guideline for outside counsel, obligingly shared with me by the general counsel of JDS Uniphase, regarding software and hardware. “We must use technology to reduce expenses. Our team relies heavily on e-rooms, SharePoint, ftp sites, etc.”
Note the three technologies mentioned. E-rooms are cousins of extranets (See my post of April 8, 2008: extranets with 13 references.).
SharePoint is an application from Microsoft that enables online, multi-person collaboration. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a communications protocol governing the transfer of files from one computer to another over a network. I don’t know what an “ftp site” is but possibly it enables the protocol. I will add all these to my collected references to law department software (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: law-department software applications with 59 references.).
This guideline not only crams a crowd of sophisticated tools into one sentence. It also says directly to its retained firms that what is important is technology that increases productivity, reduces costs, or both so that the expenses of the law department – internal or external — decline. Without bang for the buck, whiz bang doesn’t rate.