Articles Posted in Technology

One of the questions Major, Lindsey & Africa, the executive search firm, asked in-house respondents in a survey was to check which of eight topics interested them. The third-most checked topic was “New technology for legal departments.” Let me riff on that.

Three variations on the central idea of technology could be in play, and only one of them do I wholeheartedly encourage.

(1) Some general counsel might like to know about software and hardware capabilities that have not been used in law departments but that have promise (“New technology for legal departments.”) I doubt that truly novel offerings hold much promise because so many of them disappoint and the learning curve is high.

Here is the latest backgrounder on a leading matter management system’s founder, Joe Bookman of CompInfo (currently the CEO of PinHawk).

“CompInfo was incorporated in 1978. Yiorgos Athanassatos and I, along with other early CompInfo people, had worked for CBS News Elections and Surveys. We were part of a small group responsible for the Election Night computer system and we started out with large system consulting projects.

Our first law office project came in 1980 when Skadden Arps asked us to develop an accounting system to help them run the firm. We exchanged lower consulting rates for the right to license the resulting software, and LawPack for Law Firms was born. The idea of running a law firm like a large business was unique at the time. The system gained lots of attention, mostly as a curiosity. Eventually, the system was implemented in 11 of the 50 largest law firms in the U.S.

Yesterday, Vista Equity Partners (Vista), a private equity firm with some $6 billion in investments, acquired Mitratech, one of the leading providers of software for law department matter management, e-billing, as well as governance, risk and compliance. The press release says that the capital and management experience of Vista will bring added stability and operational expertise to Mitratech, which has been providing software solutions to legal departments for 24 years.

As part of the acquisition, Eric Thurston will become the new President, replacing Afshin Behnia, who has served as Mitratech’s President and CEO since 2004.

I have no profound insights regarding this major shift in the field of cost control software for inside-counsel. It will take months, even years, to assess the tradeoffs and consequences from the acquisition. On the one hand a family-owned company with years of laser-like focus on a niche market; on the other hand, access to capital, broader managerial experience, and a different level of business discipline. This change in ownership may presage others in the specialized industry (See my post of Nov. 27, 2010: Thomson Reuters acquired Serengeti; and July 27, 2011: major international players have entered the niche, legal department software market.).

The International Legal Technology Organization (ILTSO), founded in early 2011 by a group of people involved in legal technology and law, has published guidelines for best practices and standards for all aspects of law firms’ technology needs. From my quick glance through them, they look meaty. The rest of the website suggests very little other activity, however, because several parts are under still construction.

None of the board members are in-house lawyers or with service providers primarily to legal departments so the initiative appears to be limited to law firms. Still, it is good for this to be underway, and to be applauded even more if it extends to the in-house community’s technology.

A strategic plan to make better technology available in your law department makes much more sense to me than overall departmental plans. The software, hardware, and training covered by such a plan falls much more to the control of the department, although with corporate IT embracing it and standardizing it, than does an overall plan tied to the performance of the company and its business initiatives.

A department can much more chart its own course. It need not be reactive. Achievements can be shown within a few months; members of the department can see and appreciate improvements directly; and investments of time and money can be modest of manageable.

Some bias comes built into these results since 70 percent of 54 departments responding to a recent survey belong to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010. It found that for legal departments with 50 or more attorneys, 78 percent reported that their departments have their own, dedicated IT group, as compared to relying on corporate IT.

The advantages of employ-your-own include more control over how IT staff spend their time, perhaps better quality because you select them yourself, and better knowledge of the law department because they are housed there full time. If the IT department charges for its support, the cost might be about the same. The downsides, though, include that there can be an us-versus-them feeling sometimes, there is no career path inside the legal department, and the position can be insular.

Advantages of relying on corporate IT staff include more resources behind them and greater familiarity with the infrastructure and standards of the company. The disadvantages include periodic rotations so that just when they have learned a fair amount they whisk off to another assignment. Also, they may have limited knowledge of or interest in legal department technology. Further, who can effectively manage someone else’s staff and agenda?

Here is the latest backgrounder on a leading matter management system’s founder. I asked these “cottage industrialists” to give some idea about the start of the company, some metrics about the current company, and an usual use of their software. Here is Mitratech’s.

“Mitratech started in 1987. When Ladan Behnia moved to the United States, she found it difficult to put her Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence to use. Picking up her daughter from school one day, she met a classmate’s father – Leon Pizante, a lawyer with big need to automate legal operations. Over dinner with Leon, Ladan mapped out the processes required to successfully manage legal matters. What started as a napkin sketch soon got the attention of leading corporations. Mitratech has evolved into a thriving business that pioneered Web-based software for corporate legal operations management.

Today, Mitratech’s largest implementation allows 2,500 internal and 50,000 external participants to collaborate.

Rights management software helps companies cope with contract complexity, third party content creators, new distribution platforms, and reporting requirements. According to the website of RSG Median, a provider of this specialized law-related software, “Generally, the process of identifying content and isolating restrictions has been an extremely manual process, one that requires legal departments to sift through paper contracts to identify any possible use limitations. Automated centralized applications serve to maximize the use of cleared content and minimize risk of misuse.”

RSG’s software, called RightsLogic, is a suite of five media industry-specific modules designed to not only simplify tracking contractual rights but also to facilitate the exploitation of those assets. The website says, “Now it is possible to track media assets and their associated financials from acquisition or production to final use. Managers can easily maximize yield, reduce risk, and speed decision-making by streamlining the complex workflow associated with the deal approval process and scheduling.”

I have not seen a demo of the software but I point it out because it is highly specialized, even by industry, and complements or goes beyond generic contract management software

What I have referred to on this blog as “document assembly” software others refer to as “contract automation” software. An article by Gabrielle Walker, the general counsel of a leading provider of contract automation software, Business Integrity, offers three points for comment. The article is in the Met. Corp. Counsel, Oct. 2011 at 32.

Point one is that clients, too, can use the software, not just law departments. If clients have access to applications, it allows those “business users to go directly to the customer without being slowed down by the legal department – without compromising the company’s risk tolerance.” That helps everyone, so long as business users don’t alter the approved language of the agreement.

Second, Business Integrity names some corporations that use ContractExpress: Cisco, Cadence, Microsoft, Pepsi, Henkel, AXA PPP Healthcare, and SolarCity. On the website of Business Integrity are listed Amazon, Catholic Healthcare West, Georgia Pacific, Jumeirah, PetSmart, Sodexo and, Standard Chartered. Law department managers respect service providers and vendors who identify at least some of their user base.

In the “anything else” category of law department software, the 54 respondents to this year’s ILTA survey of its legal department members came up with a range of software. Workshare for document comparison had the most mentions (8) while the other 10 packages in eight categories had only one each: ReqWired for CLE tracking, Paisley for compliance, WinScribe and Dragon Naturally Speaking for voice recognition, LawLogix for employment, dtSearch for enterprise search, Thomson Innovation and LexisNexis PatBase for intellectual property, Esquire Innovations iCreate for templates, and Thomson CaseMap for trial management.

If these 54 departments have licensed 11 uncommon software packages, as compared to e-billing, matter management, document management and corporate secretary packages that are quite frequent, don’t we wish we had ten times as many respondents so we could gaze with wonder at the plethora of packages in use in-house?