Articles Posted in Technology

The European dairy farms cooperative Royal FrieslandCampina has selected Contract Manager 2.0 from Dolphin Software for its contract management needs. This news comes from the November Technology Insider. “The system, which runs on SharePoint, will initially be rolled out in the company’s procurement department, but will ultimately also be used in the legal and quality assurance departments, by a total of 600 users. Last year the cooperative had sales of 8.2 billion €uros.”

That terse announcement packs several important points that might be overlooked.

Note the huge role of procurement, since it will be the department that first implements the software. Then heed the staggering number of people involved with contracts. If 600 people in the cooperative (out of 20,000) negotiate, administer, draft, check on, or interpret contracts, contracts touch far and wide.

Advances in virtualization, where portions of computers or servers are cordoned off for specific purposes, may lead to a welcome flexibility for in-house lawyers. According to the Economist, Nov. 20, 2010 at 75, “Companies can install a secure virtual heart on private machines, doing away with the need for a separate corporate device.” That means a lawyer could attach a familiar machine to the corporate network, one that includes a secure partition, and not be forced for security reasons to use a company-issued laptop or desktop.

In fact, companies such as Citrix and Kraft Foods dole out stipends to their employees, inviting them to buy any PC they want – even an Apple Mac. In-house lawyers and staff would be much more comfortable with their own model, so this would be a welcome advance. Who knows, but BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) may spread to software. With that partitioned area on the personal computer, members of the legal department could experiment with and run whatever software they chose.

Hard on my post about a contract approval matrix (See my post of Nov. 8, 2010: approval matrix and templates.), someone pointed out to me even more planets orbiting the contract sun. They particularly noted other kinds of software that improve the whole contracting process.

Contract intake systems are like an online request for legal services, with terms and background for the contract that help control requests for lawyers to work on contracts.

Contract assembly software might draw on quoting software’s facts. That is to say, when salespeople propose terms they may use software compiles the quote. When a lawyer works those terms into a contract, the software of the lawyer can draw on the sales person’s software.

You don’t have to design, host and maintain your own extranets. Service providers will let you contract to user their extranet capabilities – also known as e-rooms, but there may be a difference in definitions – and make the step easier to take.

One legal department I know enters into one-year agreements with a provider. Under the terms, the department can quickly set up an e-room, load documents into it, and give passwords to law firms and others for access. When the investigation, discovery effort, or due diligence ends, the department can shut down the online shared-access site and get back its documents burned to a CD. If it is a smaller document repository, the provider will email them back.

The cost depends on such factors as the number of documents, number of users, and length of time the site is open, but my source estimated that each e-room should be less than $100,000. The savings in time, effort and money can be significant (See my post of April 8, 2008: extranets with 13 references; and July 15, 2010: more on extranets with 7 references.).

Many software companies send me notices of their products, nearly all of which I set aside since there is nothing specific to legal departments or no legal department identified. I broke my own rule, however, when up popped an invitation to a webinar about software so specialized I was amazed. It customizes documents in the PDF format specified by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

“With pdfDocs creating a USPTO-compliant PDF document is a simple print to PDF. No need for the IT department to tinker with PDF conversion settings; or download and install a “job.options” file from the USPTO …; and no need to select the USPTO conversion setting when generating the PDF document…. that complies with USPTO requirements (fonts, layers, size, page size, filename etc).”

Who would have thought it! Many legal departments file applications and registrations with the USPTO so I contravened my own rule to mention this hyper-specialized, niche application.

Based on a recent consulting project, I realized there are as many as four levels of people who can help in-house lawyers and others best use their software applications. The first responders are the admins who among themselves can solve many questions. Next to be called in are power users. Power users spend lots of time with an application and perhaps have taken a course on it. Whoever is in charge of the matter management system should be a power uer. Or the resident SharePoint expert.

Third, the administrative group may have an IT person or two who can solve more significant problems – login problems or printer defaults – and decide when to go to the fourth level: dedicated IT support.

Each level triages for the next level. Somewhere the vendor of the software may even pitch in as might a user group.

Am. Legal Tech. Insider (#24) July 2010 passed on some research commissioned by Recommind. They found that the disconnect between legal and IT departments has deteriorated over the past 12 months. Last year, 67 percent of respondents described the relationship between the two departments as “good” but in 2010 that number fell to 54 percent. In 2009, 37 percent of respondents said IT and legal were working more closely together than the year before but that number dropped to 27 percent in 2010.

Third, the two staff functions don’t meet together much. Some 72 percent of respondents said their IT and legal teams met once a quarter or less; 52 percent once a year or less, and 23 percent never met at all.

I can’t make much sense out of this data or the conclusion about a widening gap between lawyers and technologists. Maybe the tumultuous strains of e-discovery have caused conflict. Maybe tight budgets on both sides have chilled dealings. Maybe the pace of technology for legal departments has slowed so there is less need for closeness with IT. Perhaps higher priorities in companies have shunted legal departments even further off the main line of IT concern and support. Perhaps the wording or methodology of the Recommind survey created factoids without foundation. I welcome clarification from readers (See my post of June 16, 2009: Information Technology staff group with 23 references and 1 metapost.).

Met. Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 9, has two quotes that twisted my mind from an interview of the CEO of Datacert. Bear in mind that the speaker leads a company that has just announced a “platform” with patented software that integrates and makes easier development of software. “One of the main requirements that the corporate legal department[s] and law firms gave us is that they did not want to hire armies of C++, Java, or Web application programmers to make changes to the software.” I am flummoxed because not one in a thousand law departments even consider having programmers write software (See my post of June 3, 2009: bespoke, customized software written for legal departments with 12 references.).

Some may happen at the interface of accounts payable and a matter management system but the quote seems to exaggerate significantly for legal departments.

Now the other quote with a sharp turn. “[W]e know legal departments that use over a hundred systems just to support their department.” I wish that James Tallman had named one of those departments with more than 100 pieces of software and explained how they count the packages.