Articles Posted in Technology

As I read in CFO, Nov. 2010 at 41 about apps, I conjured up a cornucopia of them for matter management software. The article said that “people increasingly prefer that information and communications capabilities be available at the touch of a button rather than at the end of the Web search.” If providers of matter management systems and e-billing systems make available their application program interfaces (API), at least to my uninformed mind it would be possible for third parties to develop useful and inexpensive (or even free) apps. This might drive information technology staff crazy but it could greatly improve the ability of such software to make a real difference to lawyers in their everyday work.

User groups or collectives of departments might fund the development of apps or law departments might create their own in a variation on customized software. Whether law departments will harness the full power of such program-dependent, proprietary nuggets of functionality is very much an open question.

Various genre of specialized software help patent lawyers, agents and support staff handle their work. I collected what I could find from my previous posts and organized them in four categories.

Patent databases (See my post of May 1, 2005: integrating matter- and IP-management databases; May 1, 2005: Master Data Center, Dennemeyer and Computer Patent Annuities; Nov. 30, 2005: Computer Patent Annuities and its services; Oct. 10, 2006: Avery Dennison’s database; Aug. 20, 2009: Baker Botts extranet for patents; and July 7, 2010: lawsuit against CPi and some users.).

Patent mapping (See my post of Oct. 11, 2008: GE’s software for patent landscapes; April 28, 2009: maps in the patent world; and Dec. 8, 2009: Reed Smith and innovative mapping software for patents.).

WIBGI as an acronym for “wouldn’t it be great if ….” appears in stimulating article by Nathan Myhrvold in the Harvard Bus. Rev., March 2010 at 47. The acronym set me to thinking that its application could power some productive improvements in law departments.

Rather than pre-define potential software investments in terms of recognizable packages – matter management, corporate secretary, word processing, knowledge databases – a department might give rein to some lawyers to sit back and dream. “Wouldn’t it be great if …” context-specific search offered me examples of drafting while I write without any effort on my part. “Wouldn’t it be great if …” I could speak to my laptop to generate checklists and guidelines as I draft, and have them attach to the document as a comment automatically. “Wouldn’t it be great if … “ invoices came to me with a bio and picture of the lawyers who charge time and an evaluation of the firm from various online rating groups. It’s a fun and easy game to play yet the real-world benefits are palpable.

Analytical discovery software determines the relevance of documents in a collection based on the contents of the documents rather than on the presence in them of specific words or phrase. According to discovery consultant Conor Crowley in Met. Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 15, three different capabilities are offered are on the market. Some software gathers similar documents into clusters, some make binary relevance determinations, and some rank the documents they find according to an algorithm for relevance.

According to Crowley, the newer generations of analytical software use sampling and iterative learning. The software becomes more accurate as human beings outline what it should evaluate and then repeatedly assess what it finds and refine the filters, rankings, terms and other elements of the software’s functions. Once tested and taught, the software applies that learning to cull relevant documents from the entire set.

An example of such software appears in the following article, by Randall Burrows of Xerox Litigation Services. He explains that CategoriX embeds learning from linguists and statisticians to most efficiently find the right documents from the training set. The result of improving the software over repeated runs – fine-tuning what it will seek in the larger documents set – is a “ranked value of where all those documents stand relative to that original training set.”

At the recent Consero 2010 Corporate Counsel Forum,a slide by a consulting firm arranged 17 software applications used by law departments. The arrangement presented a core group of four applications: matter management, document management, records management, and corporate secretary. Arrayed around them were nine more that primarily serve the internal legal staff: discovery management, intellectual property management, legal portals, risk assessment, collaboration tools, electronic billing, document assembly, and transcript management.

The outermost ring had four company-wide applications that find much use in legal departments but are not unusual to them: accounts payable, corporate intranet, Microsoft Office applications, and e-mail/calendaring. This three-level schema makes sense to me.

Many in-house lawyers spend hours every day typing. Keyboards rule. All that motion and position, however, can be painful for your hands, arms and shoulders. The proper ergonomics of keyboarding, therefore, make a huge difference.

A recent article explains healthy keyboard placement. “Hands should rest easily an inch or so above the lap, with wrists and elbows properly supported.” Sometimes people use drop-down keyboard holders, adjustable chairs, and various wrist supports to solve this. But the article points out that wireless keyboards let you put yours in the most comfortable position. It cites the Microsoft Arc.

A fancier keyboard from Smartfish Ergomotion “captures your typing habits and then gradually changes its keyboard angle to match your hand and wrist position. No kidding.” Hard to believe, but this protean board is only $150.

Mark Poag, the General Counsel of DataCert mark.poag@datacert.com, speaks about Passport in the Met.Corp.Counsel, Nov. 2010 at 44. He explains that Passport is a “platform” for law department software that knits together so-called “point” applications,” their somewhat disparaging term for single-purpose applications. He mentions that Qwest Communications and Carillion have already selected Passport along with a dozen other departments out of the 400-plus users of legal systems implemented by DataCert.

The concept of Passport intrigues me. Its benefits are several, according to Poag. Passport provides core components “such as business intelligence, security, and database.” I think that business intelligence has to do with a reporting function. It provides tools to let clients configure the system, integrate their other applications in the law department and in the wider enterprise, and even build new applications. Not that the software consists solely of modules and tools, it can come pre-configured with legal infrastructure such as roles, a data model for matters, and legal-specific fields.

It is not clear to me how a platform differs from a portal, but the way Passport is described, it allows users to do more than simply warehouse, enjoy a common interface, and report on data from multiple databases (See my post of June 27, 2006: portals with 4 references and Aug. 16, 2006: what does the term portal convey.).

Within a week or two, Thomson Reuters purchased both Serengeti and Pangea3. The former has one of the best positions as a provider of e-billing and matter management systems to law departments. Upwards of 400 legal departments use its Tracker software. For years Serengeti has also hosted a survey of management practices in law departments (See my post of May 29, 2009: survey data from Serengeti with 24 references.).

Pangea3 works with both law departments and law firms and has been among the most prominent LPO providers for years. It was one of the earliest offshoring groups to achieve widespread name recognition.

With both companies, Thomson Reuters has acquired well-known, respected companies. With its additional capital, resources, and related offerings (such as HildebrandtBakerRobbins), the TR group is amassing an array of capabilities for general counsel.