Articles Posted in Technology

Results from the tenth annual ACC/Serengeti survey on managing outside counsel give some insight into the incidence of three kinds of software that helps collect spend data about outside counsel. According to the ACC Docket summary, Sept. 2011 at 18, of the responding “hundreds of ACC member law departments,” 64.6 percent work with internal spreadsheets and databases, 41.6 percent use web-based systems for matter management and electronic billing, and 15.2 percent use internal matter management system software.

The percentages add up to more than 100 perhaps because some respondents employ more than one system. Remember, also, that many ACC member departments are one- or two-lawyer shops, so a spreadsheet or Access database (or nothing at all) may suffice. What would be more useful would be a breakdown among these three solutions according to size of law department.

Selection of a matter management system seems daunting; configuring or customizing the one you chose, installing it, converting historical data to it, and then training staff on its functions and the changes it requires in processes seems even more intimidating. Even then you have to keep it running and bringing value. This raises operational issues (See my post of June 28, 2009: four applications for tracking and managing matters in one law department; Sept. 22, 2009: Belgian Post’s litigation management program; March 29, 2010: four technology observations based on speaker’s bio; Sept. 12, 2010: my plan to blog about sales to named legal departments; and April 12, 2011: Rockwell Automation’s matter management experience.).

It never ends, the care and feeding of a matter management system (See my post of March 19, 2008: metrics presume effective policies and disciplined procedures; July 5, 2010: programming burdens and multiplicity of packages; Oct. 22, 2010: percentage of law firm fees billed other than on an hourly basis; April 3, 2011: ratios of legal spend to the costs of two kinds of software that track it; June 1, 2010: difficulties with replacement of a matter management system; July 28, 2010: four levels of support for users of software in a legal department; April 22, 2011: security and access by law firms to matter management systems; and June 2, 2011: tune-up your system rather than replace it.).

Corporate Legal Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1988 by three attorneys to provide matter management software geared toward corporate legal departments. From its history on the company’s website, the first product, Legal Management System, was DOS-based. It shaped the basic principles of design for what became Case&Point.

Case&Point was introduced in 1995 to take advantage of the Windows user interface. Corporate Legal Solutions states that it orients itself around service, not a ‘shrink-wrapped’ product. Accordingly, over half of its users have a custom system designed to fit their individual needs. Supported from its headquarters near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, the company states that Case&Point is now in use at well over 250 companies worldwide.

In various posts I have tried to get a handle on the number of matter management systems commonly available for law departments and even the numbers of their users. It’s hard.

Part of the difficulty is that other kinds of software relate to matter management or overlap with some of the traditional functions (See my post of March 5, 2009: why law departments use billing system with only half their firms; May 8, 2009: neck and neck among the leading e-billing systems; June 1, 2009: information collected by registered agents; July 16, 2009: number of invoices processed per user through leading e-billing systems; Dec. 7, 2008 #5: appliances; Dec. 18, 2008: mashups of complementary databases; Feb. 13, 2009: ILTA metrics on document management systems used by large law departments; Sept. 1, 2009: similarities between contract management and matter management systems; Oct. 21, 2009: extranet that goes beyond; May 25, 2011: the most common third-party report writers; Nov. 23, 2010: procurement functions integrated into matter management systems; Dec. 27, 2010: 17 law department applications commonly in three levels; Feb. 1, 2011: app cottage industry coming for matter management systems; Feb. 15, 2011: “innovation platforms” and matter management systems; and July 26, 2011: matter management systems and blur with other applications.).

How many law department matter management packages are available and installed in more than a couple of departments in the United States? Somewhere in the range of 20 to 40. No one knows for sure, but my recent posts have referred to some of the choices (See my post of Feb. 5, 2009: 8 vendors at LegalTech NY; Feb. 25, 2009 #3: CSC’s system; June 1, 2009: Microsoft SharePoint as an option for legal departments; and June 3, 2009: three points beyond the overview post on SharePoint.).

That’s hardly all of the posts. The past two years added more (See my post of Feb. 10, 2010: TrialNet; June 7, 2010: three European providers of software for legal departments; Nov. 27, 2010: Thomson Reuters on a buying spree; Dec. 13, 2010: Bugzilla open source software as a matter management tool; Feb. 23, 2011: Hyperion Research’s report on matter management and e-billing; Feb. 24, 2011: prediction of large players entering the matter management arena; March 6, 2011: large number of competitors in matter management; March 12, 2011: GCM’s survey and 30+ matter management systems worldwide; March 25, 2011: German software: April 29, 2011: Lecorpio’s software: June 20, 2011: legal department technology from Brazil; July 27, 2011: big international players in matter management systems; and July 30, 2011: well more than two-score providers of matter management systems.).

Many departments, however, get by with no matter management software and some write their our own program (See my post of March 8, 2009: get data from accounts payable; March 29, 2009: Access database; April 13, 2011: GCM shows:quite a few large departments with no system or a customized one; May 4, 2009: the $5 million threshold, “at which level general counsel start wanting software to assist”; and June 15, 2011: departments that gave no information on matter management software had fairly typical legal spend to revenue.).

Founded in 1995 by Gary Levine, the former general counsel of Pilot Software, Two Step Software offers Corporate Focus. As explained by the Needham, MA company on its website, Corporate Focus provides law departments with “a single, consolidated online system for entity management, ownership administration, equity accounting, and corporate compliance.”

They claim that with online minute books and capitalization tables, it’s faster and easier to locate accurate answers to your questions. “Our users have centralized the governance, ownership, and compliance information, as well as the minute book and other legal documents, for more than 200,000 companies,” which must include law firms that handle these corporate governance issues for clients.

“A mobile ‘app’ is a piece of software linked to a smartphone [such as a Droid or iPhone that has computer capabilities] that allows its user to perform any number of functions,” write the authors of an article about the legal issues associated with mobile apps (Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2011 at 13). Some mobile apps reside on top of the smartphone operating system, in which case they are called “native,” as are many that are downloaded from a site. Others a smartphone can access as needed from the Internet and run with the phone’s browser using Javascript or HTML5 (See my post of March 29, 2011: HTML5 and its advantages.).

The future is here; specialized law department apps everywhere (See my post of June 15, 2010: apps that screen out distractions; Feb. 1, 2011: app industry for matter management functions; and April 15, 2011: information delivered in-house by mobile apps.).

There will be blogs about apps; awards to progressive apps; LinkedIn groups; directories and evaluations of apps. Law firms will publish and promote them as marketing tools and profit centers. Vendors will shower the in-house world with clever ones and we will see app combinations and mashups. As tools to write apps become easier to use and as users become more familiar with them, lawyers in corporations will say “Don’t worry, be appy.”

As the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey collects increasingly fuller data about law departments and the matter management systems they use, I decided to bring up to date my posts on that software. Previously I collected three dozen posts (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.). Since then, there have been almost twice as many more, which I have divided into four posts to be published over the next few days.

Law departments license and implement matter management systems for many reasons. Many of my posts within a year or so after mid-2008 mention advantages to users of that common genre of software (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: save money –“matter management” vs “legal spend management”; May 20, 2009: keep audit trails of changes; June 1, 2009: report accruals; May 6, 2009: reduce costs; June 29, 2009: support productivity measurement; Nov. 5, 2009: reduce 36% of outside counsel spend; and Dec. 30, 2009: spot trends from data.).

The past two years saw even more references to the benefits of matter management software (See my post of Jan. 28, 2010: monitor alternative fees; Feb. 10, 2010: visualize and make sense of voluminous data; Feb. 10, 2010: report and analyze; March 1, 2010: track metrics to learn from benchmarks; May 30, 2011: produce a variety of reports; Feb. 15, 2009: report on collected data; Feb. 15, 2010: rank complexity or value of matters; Jan. 24, 2010: group contracts by complexity; May 28, 2010: collect data on outside counsel spend and matters; June 11, 2010: expedite the work flow for invoices; June 23, 2011: understand fees through UTBMS codes; and June 14, 2011: reduce total legal spending.).

General Counsel Metrics asked on its benchmark survey “What matter management system do you use?” Of the 190 other law departments so far that indicated either “none” or “n/a,” it seems that a “none” means what it says, however, “n/a” could mean there is a package but the person does not know the name or does not want to disclose it. In any event, that group has a median of four lawyers, so it is dominated by very small departments. Specifically, 32 of them have a single lawyer; 26 have two lawyers; and 21 have three. What most surprised me, however, and makes me suspect that “n/a” does not mean “no system” is that six companies reported more than 100 lawyers.

As a final note for this update on matter management systems, there were a dozen departments that reported a “custom” system. I assume that means they rolled their own, not that they licensed a package and modified it significantly for their own use. Now step back. Having reported on 125 departments in the group that have licensed a matter management package, it may be that for every ten doing that, one creates a bespoke system. Some of these, we should consider, have legacy systems from years ago; today, few if any law departments have IT or consultants write a system from scratch (See my post of April 3, 2011: early data on no-system departments.).

For those of you who think that a law department needs to have some minimum number of lawyers to justify licensing a matter management system, you are right! But the number is one lawyer.

I looked at 125 law departments in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey that have licensed a law-department matter management system. Not a contract management system, or document management or patent tracking; not a customized system – I mean one offered by a vendor to law departments so that they can collect and report on data about the matters they handle and the fees they pay.

One department of one lawyer appeared; eight departments have two lawyers; 14 have three or four; ten have five or six; and two with seven. Given that the median law department in the 402 participating law departments so far is exactly 7, I stopped at the 35 smallest departments. Twenty-eight percent of the departments that named a legitimate matter management system were of the median size or smaller.