Vendors tout the benefits of their software, including its return on investment, but none of them can offer objective, comparative and empirical support. A recent white paper on contract management software directs us to this point. The conclusion states that “contract automation and management can save time, cut costs and…
When someone refers to “licensed” software it excludes software that it bought outright. That probably doesn’t happen much with law departments, but the term “commercial software” has broader, and more accurate coverage. In pursuit of clearer terminology, it may be more precise to refer to “home-grown software” rather than “customized.”…
A respectable view holds that in-house lawyers should draft and interpret contracts, possibly negotiate them, but not administer them. The term “contract management” means different things to different people, but is roughly coterminous with “contract administration.” Exari tried in a recent survey to gather some data about practices in this…
Surprisingly, of the law departments that completed the ALM benchmarking inquiry about recording lawyer time, 9 of them said they track it and 41 said they did not. However, if we assume that the 32 non-replies were also denials of time tracking, then overall about one out of nine law…
Respondents to last year’s ALM metrics survey ranked seven possible internal obstacles for law firms to fully implementing alternative pricing strategies. The leading reason was “Law firms are more comfortable with the billable hour” (2.2 average ranking where 1 is most important). Next was “Absent better metrics and data, it…
One of your law firms might volunteer to analyze the bills you have paid and bring to bear more talent than you have available. KMWorld, Feb. 2012, at 11, brought the possibility to mind as it describes how Byran Cave has a Practice Economics Group. The firm created the Group…
At some point of departmental size or maturity, general counsel often have a stake in several kinds of legal software. They and their managers confront whether to license “point solutions” that provide specific capabilities or to license fewer solutions that combine capabilities. Some departments favor a single vendor whose offerings…
Law departments like law firms that innovate to meet the department’s needs. As an example, KMWorld, Feb. 2012, at 10-11, describes one client that uses Littler Mendelson to mediate, settle and defend EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) complaints. The client’s law department wanted a nationwide fixed price for that work.…
The more ideas and possible mixes and matches a law department manager has available to choose from, the more … We know intuitively that as the number of choices increase, the number of possible combinations of those choices increases even faster. The mathematics that makes explicit how those combinations increase…
Wormhole as Best in Show at LegalTechNY? Here is a technology flash from Charles Christian’s American Legal Technology Insider (#43) February 2012, at 5. I quote his note in full. “The most interesting product we encountered at LTNY 2012 was a system not on public show but merely in the…