Articles Posted in Technology

This speculation comes from the Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 18, Jan. 2010 at 18. “Often legal departments remain with the billable hour because their billing systems and supervisory arrangements are not positioned to deal with the perceived complexities of alternative fee arrangements.”

I don’t buy that. A matter management system or an electronic invoice system (e-billing) ought to serve the department, not block its progress. Any fee arrangement results in a bill, somewhere and in some detail, so the department can track the information in its extant system. I am simplifying, to be sure, but let’s not have the software tail wag the cost-saving dog.

If “supervisory arrangements” is code for “we can’t figure them out and if we can we can’t oversee the bills that result,” then shame on lazy legal department managers! If it means that internal disagreement about means and ends (do alternative fees work), then the general counsel needs to set the march and get on with it.

An excellent support group for legal department personnel who deal with technology is the Corporate/Government Practice Group of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). It has close to 250 members, I believe, and it has produced some very useful ideas and research commented on by this blog. One post introduced the officers of the Group (See my post of Feb. 17, 2008: describes the practice group.). I compiled my other references (See my post of Nov. 17, 2006: multiple e-billing systems; Feb. 19, 2007: litigation support software; Feb. 12, 2006: client-specific extranets; Dec. 12, 2007: Pfizer and its data warehouse; March 26, 2008: Liberty Mutual and invoice processing; and March 26, 2008: Cisco and knowledge management.).

A recent cluster of posts drew extensively from ILTA’s survey of technology in legal departments (See my post of Feb. 13, 2009: document comparison tools; Feb. 13, 2009: protection of attorney-client privilege; Feb. 13, 2009: technology-support roles; Feb. 13, 2009: document management; Feb. 13, 2009 #2: ethics/crisis hotlines; Feb. 15, 2009: matter management systems and report writers; Feb. 15, 2009: ebilling software and numbers of users; Feb. 15, 2009: entity management, ethics, and IP management tools; and Feb. 16, 2009: Board of Directors’ packages.).

A global mapping system for trademarks, available to clients of Reed Smith, appears to be an innovative way to assist decision analysis. The software uses global mapping to portray the international complexities of an IT strategy. As reported in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, Dec. 2009 at 41, the software locates a company’s trademarks around the globe in a graphical form.

Another portion of the article mentions the legal department at Pitney Bowes, which uses Thomson CompuMark and CT Corsearch to monitor possible trademark infringements. These are called “watch services.” Similarly, the legal department at Kenneth Cole Productions “uses a web site called Boliven.com which has “searchable information on patents, trademarks, publications, legal proceedings, and even some more specialized areas like clinical trials, much of which is currently free.”

For a long-term client of mine, I have been issued a laptop because of the company’s stringent security efforts. To log onto the laptop I must not only enter my username and password but also pass a fingerprint test.

It works wonderfully and amazes me. I swipe my index finger down a small reader that scans my fingerprint and approves me. Someday, retinal images! Other methods of protecting information and objects in legal departments have shown up on this blog (See my post of Feb. 7, 2009: laptop security; March 25, 2009: corporate-wide security measures for hardware and software; June 6, 2006: biometric fingerprint identification; Sept. 4, 2006: security methods; and May 24, 2007 #1: keystroke timing and click rates.).

I Twitter infrequently although I see steadily increasing traffic here from Twitter. When people retweet one of my items or write their own with a link, readers click through. Today I noticed that my tweets are on three “lists.” Here is the information about them.

@IntegreonEDD/legal following 56 Twitter members and followed by 7; @DukeLukeM/legal-it-top following 27; and @jkubicki/legal-transformation following 13.

Someone in a legal department could set up a list or follow a list and let that serve as a partial filter for the outpouring of messages (See my post of April 28, 2009: Twitter and 6 references.).

If you visit the website of Mitratech, one of the leading providers of software for legal departments, you may notice the coterie of consultants who have been trained on how to help develop, plan and implement the TeamConnect software. Nine are listed.

Acolyst

Baker Robbins

“It usually takes five to seven years for IT investments to produce substantial returns because it typically takes that long for companies to make the organisational changes needed to capitalise on the new technology,” opines the Economist, Oct. 24, 2009 at 74. For software investments by legal departments to materially improve costs or efficiency may similarly take years.

Employees require time to absorb a new resource, sometime considerable amounts of time, and almost always longer than champions and vendors predict. For software that helps an in-house legal team, the best you can do is choose wisely, spread the word effectively, and train efficiently (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: costs of training when software is installed; April 12, 2006: percentages spent in UK legal departments on IT training; April 13, 2006: law firms offering IT training; June 26, 2006: one reason why tech projects flounder; and July 14, 2006: best methods to train corporate counsel on software; Oct. 6, 2006 on under-investment in training despite 5:1 payoff; July 9, 2007: lunch & learns as tutorials for technology; Aug. 5, 2007: drip-drip or by the bucket; Nov. 18, 2007: vendor training and support; April 27, 2008: Kraft and its training program; Dec. 31, 2008: before licensing software, ask about training; Jan. 2, 2009: CapGemini launched post-and-tag without training; July 15, 2009: surprising emphasis on IT training in survey; and Oct. 28, 2009: open source software and training.).

On a lark, I ran a Google search for the combination of “law” and “matter management system.”

In the sponsored links at the top, first came LexisNexis’ CounselLink, followed at number four by Bridgeway’s eCounsel, and number six EAG’s CaseTrack. The other top links were not for matter management software for law departments (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.).

Rerunning the search with the term “legal” found Mitratech’s TeamConnect.

By guest author Steven Levy of Lexician.

Recently the Association of Corporate Counsel hosted a session titled “”Inexpensive/Free Applications for Your Law Department.” The speakers extolled the virtues of open source software as “free applications.”

Every parent understands that there is no such thing as a free puppy.

Guest author Steven Levy reports on a new development:

WhichDraft.com is a new and interesting free online contract site run by two experienced attorneys. This appears to be both a simple and reasonably powerful document assembly tool. It has a large number of pre-drafted contracts for individual users looking to go transactional pro se (after you click through the disclaimer, of course), but I think it has a place in law departments in stimulating thinking about document assembly, whether you ever offer a WhichDraft contract or not.

[C]onsider it a very inexpensive and even elegant way to explore document assembly. If it helps document assembly find a niche use in your department, then compare it to the higher-end products and decide; it will have cost you only an hour of time.