Articles Posted in Technology

At ILTA 2009, a partner from Mallesons showed what they call “Mallesons Connect.” It is an extranet system for one of their largest clients. Its purpose is to provide transparency to the client about the services on their behalf provided by the law firm.

On a dashboard, the members of the legal department of that key client can see the budget for a matter and the percentage of the budget consumed; the core lawyers working on their matters along with their picture and full contact information; schedules and availability of the core lawyers; as well as pie and bar charts of fees by matter, unpaid fees by matter. There may be more on the site, but my notes covered this information.

Such an extranet would be a powerful addition to a fixed fee engagement that has many matters in it and extends for several years (See my post of April 8, 2008: extranets with 13 references.).

At ILTA 2009, John Alber, a partner at Bryan Cave, described a system his firm developed to give advice on certain export and import questions that many companies encounter. For an annual fee of “a couple of $100,000,” subscribers can query the system and find many of the answers they seek. Presumably if the system does not answer the question, the firm stands ready to deal with those unusual issues.

It seems to me that a handful of legal departments that face with some frequency questions in a certain area of law might band together and retain a technologically savvy firm to develop such an expertise system. The software is available; the need is apparent; law firms ought to be receptive. Specialized legal knowledge embedded in the software would be codified, more widely available day or night, cost less (perhaps), and grow in robustness with use. Of course, such an endeavor challenges the business model of law firms and the job security of inside legal specialist.

One of the ten disruptive technologies presented by Richard Susskind at ILTA 2009 was online dispute resolution. He specifically mentioned SquareTrade and CyberSettle.

In his remarks, Susskind explained the double-blind method where two parties can come to terms without disclosing their ultimate position to the other side. One side submits to the online system the maximum that they would be willing to pay to resolve a claim and the other side submits the minimum they would accept. The system tells them when they are within a predetermined range, so they know they are close to a compromise settlement.

It makes me wonder whether competitive bids for fixed fees might adopt a similar procedure. A law department could upload the maximum it would pay while the bidding firms upload the minimum they would accept. An online system would find the strike point.

A post by Andrew Davis on the Exari blog added several ideas to my post about the four issues can actually benefit from document assembly (See my post of Oct. 7, 2009: contract management’s four key concerns.). His main point is that document assembly addresses and at least partially solves each concern. In what follows I have quoted selectively from his much longer discussion.

1. Contract drafting. “Business users hate MS Word templates. Their eyes glaze over when they see square brackets and verbose user instructions.” “Further, PDF output ensures that the business user can’t modify the document post-production.”

2. Contract review. ”For legal departments with contract review policies in place, document assembly systems can enforce those policies by embedding them into the system as rules. “

Fred Smith, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing of Trademarkia, wrote me about his startup, Trademarkia.com that launched in September 2009.

Smith explained that “Trademarkia has built the first and largest library of 5.7 million logos, names, and slogans anywhere on the Internet by leveraging public information. [Rees Morrison: The website says that it covers all US trademarks filed since 1870.] People who are looking to create a new business name, slogan, or logo now have a unique new way to get creative ideas and inspiration for new marks. Trademarkia has also created a unique way to automate and simplify state and federal trademark registrations and monitoring.”

The site looks impressive, although I did not poke around much or verify Smith’s claims. In-house trademark counsel might find it useful (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009: trademarks with 33 references.).

From guest author Steven Levy,slightly abridged, here are seven key “go-do’s” for successful Legal-IT projects. They’re based on but somewhat different from CIO Magazine’s tips, and they take into account a few ways in which “Legal is different.”

1. Require an honest business case. ROI, ROI, ROI. I can’t repeat this enough. Return on Investment. Understand — and require proof of — the value of the project. Then follow through (see item 7).

2. Define “Done” as the first thing you do. “Done” is a clear statement of the two or three things the law department must achieve for the project to be successful. That sounds like scope, but it isn’t. Scope is what+how; “Done” is what+why. It’s also good to align on roles and responsibilities early, but first, understand what success looks like. That’s the surest inoculation against scope creep — and it allows deferring the how until you understand more about the actual project.

I use the term “project management” to mean a set of disciplines for keeping a complicated set of tasks on time and efficiently run (See my post of April 28, 2009: project management skills at SABIC Innovative Plastics; and June 24, 2007: project management with 5 references.)

Others use the term “project management” more broadly, such as for organizational software that helps you collaborate and communicate within the department and with outside counsel, which includes such functions as sharing documents, to do lists and calendars. LTN – Law Technology News, Vol. 16, Sept. 2009 at 29, has a good piece by David Newdorf about three inexpensive but capable packages that provide this kind of manage-this-project support. He recommends Basecamp which starts at $24 a month. Newdorf also commends ProjectPier, a free, open source program that does almost everything Basecamp does. A third offering is activeCollab, which you can host on your own server.

I know nothing first hand about this genre of software but it appears able to help in-house counsel keep on top of large projects (See my post of July 8, 2009: iFramework for litigation management.).

This blog can help readers by naming legal departments that have licensed specialized software. If you tell me about those instances, as end-user or as consultant or as software provider, I will periodically summarize the information without attribution. Other legal departments, pondering software selection, will find the information useful and all of us will develop a better picture of software usage by in-house teams.

To start this service rolling, I noticed in LTN – Law Technology News, Vol. 16, Sept. 2009 at 10, that Oracle purchased EnCase eDiscovery from Guidance Software. Two pages later we learn that Chevron Phillips Chemical’s legal department bought NeedleFinder 3.5 from Equivalent Data.

Amidst the large number of specialty packages (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: law-department software applications with 59 references.), it is important for managers in legal departments not to lose sight of the basic software choices. It will make much more difference to their legal teams if everyone understands the contributions, capabilities, costs, and complexities of these eight. I have listed them in what I believe to be declining order of both importance and frequency.

Matter Management (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.).

Electronic billing (See my post of June 4, 2009: ebilling rules with 6 references; Dec. 14, 2008: e-billing with 45 references; Nov. 26, 2008: Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard with 9 references; and May 20, 2009: electronic bills with 9 references and 1 metapost.)

While building another post, I realized I had not assembled in one place my various comments on software for corporate secretarial functions. Not one to dally around, here are the eleven posts (See my post of July 19, 2006: corporate secretarial web portals; Aug. 9, 2006: merger of corporate secretary and matter management software; Oct. 1, 2006: service of process software; Oct. 29, 2006: software for corporate secretaries; Jan. 24, 2006: ten packages in one department; Jan. 25, 2007: board portal software; Feb. 14, 2007: corporate secretary packages; March 9, 2007 #1: more on software to assist boards; March 11, 2007: online guides at Kraft for subsidiary management; April 22, 2007: compliance software for corporate secretaries; and Oct. 24, 2008: Six Sigma project to design corporate entity application.).

If you know of leading vendors or other candidates for a follow-on to this post, please drop me a line.