LT Online, the provider of the Lawtrac matter management system (MMS), announces in Law Tech News, Dec. 2008 at 9, that Lawtrac can now download directly from CT Corp.’s Universal Service of Process Interface. As I thought about this database combination I gazed into a future of other databases feeding into MMS’s (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.).
For example, when a lawyer is listed on a MMS, why not draw on LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp or other professional network profiles to supplement information about the lawyer (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: social/professional networks with 7 references.).
Or, why not pull in information about the law firm from Martindale-Hubble? Or mash-up data from a benchmarking survey, such as on comparable hourly billing rates? Why not link automatically to a judicial database or perhaps to Thomson-Reuter’s Litigation Monitor?
If the information in those complementary databases had metatags (See my post of Feb. 24, 2008: information architecture and tags; June 4, 2008: TagIt from IBM; and Dec. 14, 2008: XML tags *4.), and the proprietary data (“dark” to an web search engine) were available, the MMS would assemble related information for users.