The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) published its 2006 Technology Survey, dated Aug. 2006. The survey received 491 responses from law firms around the world (an average of 90 lawyers each), with 90 percent of them from the US. One question (at page 12) asked the survey respondents to identify what litigation support tools their firm uses; it allowed respondents to choose multiple packages.
In declining order of mentions, here are the 18 named vendors: Summation (69% mentioned), CaseMap (49%), TimeMap (47%), LiveNote (41%), Trial Director (39%), Concordance (35%), MS Access (27%), Sanction II (24%), iCONECT (13%), Doculex and Real Time (7% each), DB Textworks and DTSearch (6% each), casecentral.com and Litigators Notebook (5% each), and FolioViews, Introspect, and Ringtail (4% each). Many law firms use multiple packages, for the reason that partners have individual preferences. No wonder there is turmoil in the litigation support software market (See my post of Feb. 9, 2006 on those vendors at the 2006 NYC LegalTech conference.)!
Is it appropriate for a law department to choose a preferred package or two and require their litigation firms to use it (See my posts of June 15, 2006 about meddling in firm management; and July 5, 2006 with several forms of such intervention.)?