Articles Posted in Technology

Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which notify blogophiles about new posts to their favorite blogs, could allow law departments, I suspect, to know immediately whenever a law firm timekeeper enters time to one of the law departments’ matters.

That a law department would want to have such up-to-the-second raw data, I doubt. Perhaps something meatier, like a weekly or fortnightly total of time, or data that compares the actual time to the budget, would be palatable. Another possible use of RSS feeds would be on a major document discovery effort; where the feed could tell how many documents were processed. More generally, RSS could transform law department management where there is any kind of information that needs to be rapidly updated.

Does this sound right (from a recent mailing of Lexmark a document management system vendor)?

“Although the typical paper document gets copied 19 times, up to 7.5 percent of all documents are lost and 3 percent of the remainder are misfiled.” The Lexmark promotional material cites its source as “Coopers & Lybrand.” Later, the material says “an average document will be converted from paper to digital or digital to paper 19 times during the course of its life” and sources that restatement as “AIIM” (American Institute for Information Management?).

If a law department a “typical paper document” is a memo or a letter, there’s no way it’s copied 19 times, but it could be scanned for faxing and it certainly could be printed many times. Everyone who receives an email with the document attached might print it, for example. The loss rate has some plausibility

You do have a matter management system, right?

Put a matter into it when (1) it is likely to generate a legal fee paid to a law firm or vendor, (2) the matter could be political or sensitive, (3) work done on the matter might be usable by someone else in the law department on a later matter, (4) any service of process is involved, or (5) more than ten hours of inside lawyer time are likely to be spent on it.

Inspired by a piece on the website of Sugarcrest about practice management systems in law firms, I extrapolated to law department matter management systems (MMS)

Myth #1. MMS’s are about technology. No, the platform – software and servers – means less than the understanding that should come from analyzing its data. Technology is a means to an end.

Myth #2. MMS’s are only for litigators. No, all areas of the law department (and compliance, corporate secretary, IP, claims….) can track information and mine it.

One session at the ACC 2004 Annual Meeting (805) offered some pointers for what law departments should normally expect from law firms regarding extranets. The first expectation caught my eye. ”Launch of a new extranet in minutes upon your request for as little as $500/month, often paid by the firm.” This makes extranets a commodity.

The other three attributes law departments deserve with their extranets are “extremely useable and intuitive interfaces,” “robust, feature-level security,” and “integration with existing systems (such as billing).” If these four expectations are truly matters-of-right, why are there not more extranets? I don’t hear about them in my consulting projects, only from vendors of extranets and a few law firms (See my post of February 20, 2005 on technology as it affects ordinary in-house lawyers.)

Corporate Counsel’s 2005 survey of Fortune 500 law departments obtained responses from 139 companies, and more specifically “the person in charge of legal technology.”

An article summarizing the results (May 2005 at pg. 82) stated that on “average there was one IT professional for every 24 lawyers.” (I read that as IT staff of the law department, but the sentence is ambiguous.) Going on, the article acknowledge that a few law departments, like Microsoft’s and DuPont’s, have their own large IT staff; several others have no departmental IT support since they rely on corporate IT.

Skeptical, I question the usefulness of the cited average. Foremost, a median would have given a more realistic number. But also, only those departments who had sufficient interest in a technology survey responded – and perhaps a technology support manager to boot, which likely skews the results upward. And, these are big companies, with large law departments able to support dedicated technologists. Put it all together and I would not be surprised that the internal IT support ratio across a broad spectrum of US law departments is much higher than 1:24 lawyers.

For years, I have thought that voice recognition software, like Dragon Software, would be a boon for lawyers who are keyboard challenged. I have used that software for several years, and it saves me time on bulk dictation, especially longer quotes.

The errors, unfortunately, still crop up too frequently, and I find I must have the document cleaned up by my admin. (See my post of May 24, 2005 on analysis software.) For the adventurous lawyers in-house who have tried dictation softwear, my heats of two them (dictated by not red).

Scott Gawlicki quoted me in his Corporate Legal Times article in August (pg. 14): “[f]or a legal department using seven to 10 law firms and spending $1.5 million a year, e-billing is not worth it.”

The article cited some vendors who say it’s the number of invoices, not the amount spent on outside counsel, that makes e-billing worthwhile. Point taken.

But later the article profiles how Quest Diagnostics’ law department uses TrialNet’s “matter-management and e-billing system for nearly four years,” to process approximately 1,500 invoices a year on professional liability cases. Another example, the Convex Group, uses a Tymetrix product for both electronic invoicing and managing matters. On this point, the vendors were trying to say that e-billing benefits even small law departments.

E-billing systems ring out the huzzahs for their systems’ ability to track the routing of invoices. Certainly, some bills involve review by more than one lawyer, because the work falls within multiple lawyers’ expertise. Here, routing capabilities might make some sense.

What I can’t imagine is that it is very common for a bill to be so large as to require sign-off approval by more than one lawyer. Most bills are modest, under $10,000, and most lawyers who are responsible for outside counsel probably have the sufficient authorization to approve them. Only an exceptional bill would require more than one signature. For this reason, I suspect the e-billing companies have hyped a need. (See my posts of May 14, 2003 on e-billing savings and July 30, 2005 on the focus of e-billing software.)

My benchmark book has data to the effect that in 2001, a set of law departments reported spending an average something like $4,000 per lawyer on “technology.” What, more precisely, falls inside that portmanteau word?

First, software licensing, maintenance and staff costs fall in, where the software is designed primarily for law departments, notably for matter management, patent or trademark databases, corporate secretary, and litigation support. Next, I think of generic word processing, e-mail, and calendar software, where the law department would have to allocate some portion of corporate IT charges. Based on my own sense of “technology,” I include costs of the hardware used by the lawyers: desktops or laptops, PDA’s, printers, fax machines, cell phones, video conferencing equipment. Farther out on my rings of technology come the rental, purchase and maintenance costs – probably allocated to law by IT – of servers, LANs and WANs, routers, spam filters and other hardware and software infrastructure. Technology spending should include costs of training the law department to use these tools, and costs of supporting them.

Our industry deserves a common understanding of this frequently-used term, “technology.”