Articles Posted in Technology

At Legal Tech New York, a partner from Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe described a global corporate secretarial service the firm developed in tandem with Cisco’s legal department. To comply with a raft of national requirements for the hundreds of companies Cisco maintains in more than a hundred countries, in 2007 the firm and the company licensed a hosted software package and the law firm heavily customized it. Orrick ended up taking over management of the constellation of corporate entities for an annual fixed fee, which “saved [Cisco] 15 percent the first year and 10 percent the second year.”

Based on the prototype with Cisco, the beta site so to speak, Orrick now markets its package of services and adds about four clients a year – a total of a dozen now. Orrick owns the customizations to the software and nothing was said about Cisco’s legal department retaining any rights. Perhaps the tradeoff was low-cost development swapped for letting Orrick retain marketing rights.

Picture this. The lawyers in a legal department have small cameras attached to their monitors. Their clients or primary outside partners also have cameras. Those unblinking eyes let each of them see the other while they talk, if someone chooses to turn on the cameras. Relatively inexpensive, fairly easy to set up, cameras help people get much more out of a conversation than when they can only speak by telephone. A webcam is worth a thousand words.

Even so, I have yet to hear of a legal department with video cameras in individual offices.

An exhibitor at LegalTech New York, TrialNet,certainly has impressive literature to describe its software. A person at the booth said that among the company’s users are the legal departments of Georgia Pacific, Pro Assurance, and Health Corporation of America (HCA).

The brochures emphasize the flexible reporting of the system as well as its electronic billing and collaboration capabilities – “web-based integration of client & counsel” is their motto. I have not seen a demo of the software but it is part of this blog’s contribution, I believe, to mention specifics about vendors to legal departments who may not be as well known as some others.

An article about human cognitive limitations mentions that software can help us cope. Unable to make sense of a swamp of output from, say, a matter management systems, managers can enlist visual analytics. “Defined as the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces, VA combines computer science with cognitive and perceptual sciences to generate interactive applications for knowledge work.” The quote comes from Info. Mgt., Jan./Feb. 2010 at 24. VA could help general counsel of large law departments make sense of mountains of data.

Allow me to fantasize. With VA, someone could see onscreen and play with the relationship between amounts of invoices and sizes of law firms. The screen would show a complicated scattergram. From there, it would be possible to “filter” for US firms only or for matters just involving acquisitions. Each filtered view would list in a sidebar the outliers, those whose metrics were well above or below average. Another sidebar would translate the data (drawing on notions like trend lines in Excel) into a formula: “the larger the office of the firm – as distinct from the total size of the firm – the slower the billing. Every 25 additional lawyers adds 2.3 days to the invoice time.”

Still another click of the button would display by color the invoices of the department’s preferred law firms and the software would display the difference between their average speed of invoicing and the speed of all other firms. A sidebar would calculate the analysis of variance (ANOVA) so that the user would see at once whether the difference was statistically significant. Graphs, calculations, and interpretations would follow each twist of the dial.

Two points struck me from findings in ILTA’s 2009 Technology Survey, at 42 of law firms: one about the shared challenges of providing technology to lawyers – inside or outside – and the other about overhead support for IT that legal departments often enjoy free of charge.

The law firms that responded to the ILTA survey chose from a list of the “top 3 biggest technology issues or annoyances within your firm.” Issues ranked three through five frustrate managers in-house, I suspect, as much as they do managers of technology support in law firms: “High software maintenance costs” (cited by about a third of the respondents), “User acceptance to change” (27%), and “Managing expectations (users and management)” (27%). Likewise, issues eight and nine, out of a total of 21, also afflict both sides: “Meeting needs for and/or getting participating in training” and “High cost of technology.”

The top annoyance, by far, was “E-mail management,” selected by slightly more than half of the law firm respondents. The fifth ranked was “Keeping up with storage needs” and the next was “Keeping up with new versions of software.” Rarely do general counsel have to concern themselves with these afflictions since corporate IT handles them.

As more legal departments bring inside the software and expertise to handle e-discovery, general counsel and their IT colleagues may want to consider work-flow management software designed for that task. KM World, Feb. 2010 at 15, mentions three offerings: iFramework from i-Framework, Atlas Suite from PSS Systems, and Fusion from Exterro all offer e-discovery project-management capabilities.

With the enormity, cost and importance of finding and producing relevant documents, electronic as well as traditional, legal departments may find such software a key tool for control (See my post of May 3, 2008: internal discovery teams with 8 references.).

Having just written about groups for in-house lawyers interested in operations, I ran across the UK-based Legal IT Innovators Group. Among its 40-50 members listed on the website are at least five companies.

The site explains: “We meet for a full day once a quarter in members’ offices to network, share and discuss current issues and give and receive presentations on issues affecting members. “Key Issue Teams” often form to further work issues of particular importance. These teams may go on to consult widely and publish standards or guidance papers to benefit all law firms and their clients.” As a recent example of thought leadership, in conjunction with the Knowledge Management and IT in-house Group (KMIT), the Group (LITIG) has proposed a common standard for the exchange of electronic transaction deal bibles (closing volumes) between law firms and clients.

It is rare to find public information about costs and savings from e-billing, so I read with interest in Canadian Lawyer, Jan. 2010 at 24, about Kruger Products (formerly Scott Paper Co.). In an interview, “the company’s legal counsel and director of human resources” gave some background on what preceded the licensing of Serengeti’s services.

My first observation, therefore, is that it appears that Kruger has a one-lawyer department, yet that solo found e-billing worthwhile. The smallest legal departments can benefit from such as system.

Second, the lawyer explained that “his cost per year for the service: about $2,000 [presumably Canadian dollars].” My observation, therefore, is that a full-fledged ASP system for e-billing hardly breaks the bank. It is not clear what the initial license fee and start-up costs were, but ongoing maintenance at least is certainly modest.

The European Lawyer, Issue 91, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 21, reports on a survey of the IT departments of the top 250 UK law firms. The article includes sidebars on nine large law firms throughout Europe. What dumbfounded me was that eight of the nine firms responded “none” to the question that asked them to identify “specific technology requested by clients.” The one exception was an Italian firm that said that at least one client requested “firms database online, Web-lex, the ability to check agenda alerts/and or to share documents.” Cryptic, I know.

The troubling point is that legal departments that have turned to these firms have not pushed the technology envelope. They have not pressed the large firms serving them to develop more efficient and innovative software. What a missed opportunity!

The European Lawyer, Issue 91, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 21, reports on a survey of the information technology (IT) departments of the top 250 UK law firms. “The overall average spend was 4.3% of their revenue expended on IT.” For legal departments, corresponding data is spotty (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: spending of $4,000 per lawyer.). If that figure in the United States of five years ago compares to about $1,000,000 per lawyer in total legal spending – a number that corresponds to law firm revenue, that would have been four percent (4%). The match today in the UK could well be quite similar.

The survey also found that the UK firms overall employ one person in the IT department for every 30 users. About a third of those support staff are devoted to help desk activities of user support. On the legal department side, some benchmark data exists regarding IT support levels (See my post of Aug. 27, 2005: one IT support person for every 24 people in the legal department; and Dec. 23, 2005: less than one for every 35 people.). Again, a fairly close match.

I would hardly say that the book is closed on this comparison between in-house and out-house IT funding and staffing, but these fragments suggest less of a gap than I would have thought. We must, however, bear in mind that the company provides much of the infrastructure for its legal department and quite surely not all corporate IT costs or personnel needs seep into the legal budget and headcount.