Articles Posted in Technology

A piece on Gerry Kenney, the general counsel of NEC Corp. of America, explains how his law department handles litigation holds (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: litigation hold notices with 6 references.). Once they identify custodians who control data that must be preserved, the legal department sends them an e-mail with an embedded template that explains the obligation. “The e-mail includes two buttons at the bottom for response. One indicates the individual may have documents to be reviewed; the other indicates they don’t.” Custodians must respond and the legal department monitors responses.

Kenny adds, in CounseltoCounsel, Spring 2010 at 7, that his department uses its matter management system to launch the emails but Outlook could also do it and track respondents. It sounds like a down-to-earth, reliable method to spread the word and track that people understand their obligation to preserve relevant litigation files.

Roaming the aisles at LegalTech West, I noticed a new participant, Codean. It says that its software, Visualizer, “automatically analyzes legal documents for defined terms without user intervention to generate a live, hyperlinked version of the document.” The software finds, portrays, and analyzes defined terms.

It would help lawyers quickly gain an overview of the terms and how they link together in an agreement. Further, you can change those terms and see how the change radiates through the contract. Visualizer claims to do other things and will be available in beta on an invitation-only basis from July 2010. Legal departments, especially those who churn out commercial contracts, might want to see if this tool is useful.

My friend Roy Russell, a principal of Ascertus,a leading legal-technology consultant based in the UK, passed on to me some details about a matter management system and two corporate secretarial packages. I am not personally familiar with the software on offer but some readers will appreciate knowing about them.

Effacts B.V. is a case management provider based in The Netherlands. The contact is Harm Bavinck.

The UK-based Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA) offers Blueprint, “one of the leading corporate secretarial systems in the world,” according to Roy, They are prominent in the UK market as well as other countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Malaysia, Mauritius, and South Africa. A contact for Blueprint is Mike Evans, Managing Director.

A comment by a consultant in InsideCounsel, June 2010 at 56, brought home a truth about matter management and e-billing systems: “The cost to change systems is extraordinary.”

The cost to license a new system represents only a part of the investment. If the pain were only pennies, even lots of them, decisions would be much easier to make. But a systems selection process can take months and months and suck up time of the legal department, the finance or procurement department, and the IT department. Then, too, the effort to train users on the new system and alter accustomed ways of working reverberate for months more. On top of this, conversion of historical data from the legacy system to the new system can cause anguish. The decision to change systems has significant consequences, costs, and consternations.

I was glad to have an opportunity at the SuperConference to collect information from three providers of software: Contract Express, Emptoris, and Selectica. At a high level I came to appreciate better that contract management should mean much more than a database where employees can locate copies of executed contracts and track renewal dates. Management of contracts also implicates much more than the scope of responsibilities of a general counsel (See my post of March 2, 2010: contract administrators and managers with 9 references.).

https://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/patent-agents-instead-of-patent-lawyers-and-other-instances-of-para-professional-substitutions/

Effective contract management drives sales, enables knowledge management, increases productivity and quality, and represents one important face of the company to customers. A goodly number of posts here have addressed contract management software (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: contract management software with 11 references.).

“The biggest impact of technology is not on information management, it’s on people management, it’s on relationship management, it’s on process management, it’s on systems management” (emphasis in original).

The speaker is Michael Schrage, of the MIT Center for Digital Business, in an interview by MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2010 at 58. He passionately argues that software should be a tool to create value and as such it should reinforce all of the complementary “managements.”

His statement set me to thinking about the relationships and systems that general counsel need to nurture. If we view a legal department as a web of relationships, internal and external, we develop certain corollaries. For example, the frequency and quality of communications become more important. The strength and number of connections between people counts for much. Longevity and familiarity facilitate actions and decisions (See my post of Nov. 6, 2006: organizational network analysis; March 9, 2007 #3: organizational network analysis; Jan. 25, 2009: value of speaking to a person over querying a database; and Jan. 25, 2009: decision analysis and network analysis.).

An article lists 20 “companies using document assembly tools: Amazon, BBC, Cadence, Catlin Group, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Dow Jones, EADS, Ford, GE, Johnson & Johnson, McAfee, Microsoft, Munich Re, Nissan, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered Bank, Telstra, Wespac (and no doubt others).” Aside from the size of these companies, their internationalism stands out. The article, by Michael Mills in Law Tech. News, April 2010 at 24, does not specifically say that the legal departments of those companies use document assembly, but that is certainly the clear implication.

Mills also mentions a new entrant in the field of legal document assembly: Brightleaf. He quotes a lawyer who says that the Brightleaf software offers capabilities far beyond traditional compilation of documents based on questions asked and answered. To that claim, the website proclaims the company’s product to be a “legal process automation platform.”

Mills also cites kiiac, software developed by Kingsley Martin that helps create document templates efficiently “with a statistical engine that analyzes and compares the structure and content of documents.” Much is happening in the now-venerable field of document assembly (See my post of March 23, 2010: document assembly with 8 references and one metapost; and Feb. 26, 2008: document assembly with 16 references.).

One of the speakers at Mitratech’s upcoming Interact Conference,is Libby Troughton, Senior Manager, Legal IT, at The Home Depot. Since the conference doesn’t take place until May 16-19, my observations are based on Troughton’s bio in the program materials.

A “Troughton directed a multi-year, multi-million dollar project for the custom development and deployment of web-based matter management solution for the legal and compliance departments and 110+ outside counsel law firms; including interfaces to electronic billing, third party claims administrator system, litigation support and content management.” For a legal department of that size and both the scale and complexity of its software solutions, it takes a skilled person, dedicated to the projects, to implement them successfully. To spend several million dollars on such a program is not unheard of.

B. “As a result, The Home Depot legal department better collaborates and communicates with outside counsel and has been able to reduce litigation costs by 10.3%.” Since Home Depot is approximately a $70 billion company, assume its total legal spend is a half percent of that, which is $350 million. If roughly 60 percent of that went to outside counsel ($210MM) and half of that amount went to litigation ($110MM), its litigation cost savings from the new technology would be in the vicinity of $10 million a year. If all my assumptions hold up and you can measure and attribute savings to the technology, not a bad return on investment in people and software!

An interesting tool for legal departments came to my attention on Charles Christian’s online American Legal Technology Insider, March 2010.

“Baseline Solutions has launched a new legal document review tool called Baseline. Through a series of customizable ‘Playbooks,’ the system automatically inserts omitted language and deletes undesirable text from 3rd party documents. Baseline marks the document in Microsoft Word using track changes and hyperlinks clauses to a knowledge-base of expert commentary and best practices.”

Christian adds that Baseline costs from $139 per user per month (a free trial is available) and it particularly helps with routine documents such as Non-Disclosure Agreements, Service Level Agreements and software license agreements.

A good example of converting formerly bespoke and expensive drafting into a document assembly-type process appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Feb. 2010 at 7. General counsel should take note of this general approach. Latham & Watkins has developed a program called Capture to assist with massive outsourcing contracts and RFPs, “based on the kind of functionality that has only recently become available in Acrobat PDFs.”

The author, Alexander Hamilton states several times that the software allows Latham to give clients a fixed fee “for at least that part of the transaction that is very competitive.” Capture also cuts the drafting time in half for even the most complex deals and frees inside and outside counsel to spend more time working through the important issues rather than bogging down in minutia. His group is adapting Capture to handle transitional services agreements in M&A deals and plans to keep extending it to cover other sophisticated, large-scale deal agreements.

Here, then, is a fine example of several points. Fixed fees can apply to portions of a case or matter (See my post of Nov. 15, 2005: gives example for discovery; and Jan. 25, 2006: examples from American Express.).