Articles Posted in Technology

During a recent consulting project, I learned that the Environmental Health and Safety function of a company maintains an elaborate database of information about environmental remediation sites. The environmental lawyers of the company can access that information.

In a similar way, employment lawyers can extract information from the databases kept by Human Resources. Real estate lawyers find useful information on the facilities function databases. Intellectual property lawyers might supplement their patent or trademark tracking software with information the marketing function maintains.

You get the point. A matter management system is essential for departments of much size, but there are other corporate databases that can bolster what limited information they store, and without data entry worries. Portal technology offers a way to integrate the various pools of information on corporate law-related databases.

At ACC Europe’s recent annual meeting, as reported in Legal Week (July 23, 2005), one of the speakers was Wubbo de Boer, President of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market. He spoke about the European Community Trademark and boasted that “since the Community Trademark was set up in April 1996, its reach has extended to 450 million people in 25 countries.”

De Boer predicted that trademark registrations and renewals will see increasing use of technology. In fact, “In five years time, 80% of business applications would be processed through the internet.” Law departments that use foreign associates extensively to file, prosecute and defend trademarks ought to jump on this development as a way to increase productivity and decrease transaction costs.

I have wondered why law departments do not share intranet material. [See my post on April 5, 2005 referring to law firms contributing material.] Hildebrandt research recently found no interest in that seeming no-brainer, swapping material for intranets.

There have been reported, however, some collaborative technology efforts between legal departments. In late 2002, Ford and British American Tobacco created a shared site, called Anaqua, for patent and trademark work. According to a piece by Chrissy Burns in November 2003, the site is “used by clients and firms to retrieve documents and send and receive email” as well as to provide an “asset management tool, conflict tool, knowledge management facility and facility for early dispute resolution.”

Burns adds that the law departments of nine investment banks in the UK formed a working group to define a set of shared requirements for certain software.

If there were some way to state numerically the power of computers as used by a skilled lawyer in, say, word processing, searching databases, and e-mailing; and if we could find a representative sample of corporate counsel and test their actual use of their laptops and desktops against that potential power, the results would be woeful.  Perhaps 20% of the capabilities are used?

Lawyers barely scratch the surface of what accomplished users – not experts, just lawyers who have learned how to make the most out of a program such as Word, Excel, or Outlook – can perform.  Powerful ways of working languish (think of macros, search and replace, and pivot tables); productivity-boosting tricks and approaches remain undiscovered or unused (think of tables of contents, grammar checkers, and graphs); computer firepower that is expensive to train and maintain, protect from hackers and spam, and troll through for discoverable material, gathers dust.

Law departments maintain F-16s for the bi-weekly crop dusting of Mom’s tomatoes

One of the most effective ways to encourage participation at a large meeting, such as a Town Hall or a retreat, is to use electronic voting pads and software.  With it, those who attend can vote anonymously and see results instantaneously.  (I have teamed several times with Express Interactive Solutions.)

For example, at one retreat I facilitated several years ago, we asked the lawyers put themselves in the shoes of their clients.  They considered ten traits of Legal Team effectiveness, and used voting pads to vote on how important they thought clients would think those traits were.  We compared those scores to what the lawyers thought of the Legal Team’s performance on them.  [For more on retreats, see my March 31, 2005 post on Morrison’s Rule of Three.]

A European company I have been consulting to asked seven of its major European law firms to submit bills electronically.  The law department asked for them to comply with the standard LEDES 98b format. 

Four or five of the law firms demurred.  They responded that they could not report from their time and billing systems the data in the LEDES form.  Before this recent experience, it had been my supposition that all law firms with a time and billing system can generate the requisite easy-to-format files.  Perhaps the reluctance of these firms stemmed from something other than technical inability.

In the glare of downsizing, law departments debate letting go their own staff who analyze budgets, handle the procedures of compensation and promotions, or support the hardware and software in the department.  Relying instead on the Finance, Human Resources, and Information Technology departments sounds attractive when heads are being counted.  The trouble is, when you do not control a person dedicated to your group you lose expertise and commitment.  Worse, supporting a staff group often does not appeal to the career ambitions of the best staff people in those departments.  They want to be where there are profit centers, not costs centers.  That means turnover in the support you get from a staff group.

One innovative way to address some of this might be to turn to one or more of your key outside counsel.  They can assist especially well with your IT needs, and they will care about pleasing you.  They understand lawyers and they understand legal technology.   Many firms, like Foley & Lardner and Reed Smith, pride themselves on their practice technology strength.

I have written extensively for years, with the outpouring far outpacing my ability to remember.  A little nag says to me as I write “Rees, you have probably spun together some words on this before, but where?”  So when I read about this free software that takes your files and lets you use Google search techniques on it, I asked our IT people to install it.  The next day, writing about shared services structures for a law department, I put the free program through its paces.  Wow!  It found 17 documents in nanoseconds – really, in about 1 second – and I proceeded to read them to find the yellow marked words (and I used Word’s Find function to be sure) and grab what helped me.  No more the little nag.  And that is why I am writing these blog entries on my laptop before entering them on the site.  Google can then find them if I need them.

Spend some time on www.denniskennedy.com/blog if you have an interest in legal technology topics.  Dennis Kennedy , the blogger, has made a name for himself in this area, with a constant stream of activities and memberships.