Articles Posted in Technology

If a law department participates in a project to collect and organize the contracts of a company, one of the headaches can be to translate historical contracts into a similar format. Legacy contract conversion presents a challenge for a law department to the degree people had stored contracts and forms in different places, saved executed contracts in different formats, kept different pieces of metadata about them, and allowed different practices regarding retention of contracts.

It is well appreciated, and often rued, that conversion of matter information from one database to another can be a costly nightmare (See my post of April 7, 2006: the full cost of a new matter management system should include conversion of data.). Consulting teams love the detail and depth; clients abhor the delays and dollars.

A similar struggle can take place, apparently, when a new contract administration system comes on the scene. This much I gleaned from a brochure of UpSideContract. If you want to sweep the tangled past into your new contracts database, you might have to slog through months of knotty contract conversion.

Every now and then I run across unusual software packages that help law departments. Here are five of them that showed up during consulting projects or reading.

(1) Fidelity offers a package that handles equity compensation awards and tracking.

(2) ComputerShare has software that specializes in the arcane machinations of stock certificate transfers.

Many people have criticized PowerPoint for its rigidity, its format restrictions, riot of animation, endless slides. The overuse and abuse of the ubiquitous program has become a staple of cartoons. A chapter in Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) at 34-33 rehearses the usual criticisms. Its power exacts a high cost. Often its induced prolixity robs it of ideas expressed clearly. Neither power not pointedness comes from PowerPoint.

Even so, someone in a law department who needs to get approval for funding or for an initiative will be expected to walk the fire coals of PowerPoint. Courses, books and mavens can give good pointers to unleash the power, to a point.

An e-mail arrived from Thomas G. Oakes Associates about their services and software to support trial presentations.

Oakes’ spiel is that trial presentation technology can help the judge and jury visualize and understand your story. It lets you compare items, such as documents, photographs, or videos. You can retrieve and display impeaching testimony or documents at a moment’s notice. The firm can maintain depositions, exhibits and streaming video servers for your convenience. They can create Trialbooks, TrialDirector Indexes, Bates Stamped files and tabulate your presentation binders. For massive cases, or massively important ones, resources such as these can be invaluable.

Given the huge costs of trials, the scarcity of posts here on this blog regarding the topic seems odd. Or not odd, since trials happen rarely (See my post of Oct. 27, 2005: Fulbright & Jaworski notes 60% of cases settle during trial; Oct. 27, 2005: percentage of trials that go to verdict; and Dec. 17, 2008: roughly half of cases that go to trial settle during the trial.).

A post in Portuguese on the FDJUR group of LinkedIn, which is for in-house lawyers in Brazil, asked members to respond with the software they are using. [ Qual o software que sua empresa ou escritório utiliza?] I have written about one of them, from Tedesco (See my post of Feb. 6, 2008: Brazilian matter management system that translates into many languages.). In line with findings from the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, based on its question regarding matter management systems, there is much more legal department software out there than most of us realize.

Here is the listing of 19 packages from the LinkedIn item, in alphabetical order. I have given the URL that was in the post:

BC LEGAL, BENNER, COGNITIVA, CPJ – PREÂMBULO, CP-PRO, DIAFANIS, ESPAIDER, GENIALIS, INSO GR, LAWER, LEGAL MANAGER, LEXONLINE, PORTAL DA ADVOCACIA, PROJURID, PROJURIS, RR SISTEMAS JURÍDICOS, SISJURI, TEDESCO, and THEMIS.

One of the speakers at the SuperConference mentioned that his seven-lawyer department uses SharePoint as an internal blog. Inside lawyers and others can collaborate with that tool. Also at the SuperConference, a speaker from Hewlett-Packard’s law department mentioned that they have created a SharePoint application where, among many things, they share photos of the legal team members.

A law department I have assisted can have its law firms upload PDF files of their invoices whereupon SharePoint automatically forwards them to the correct lawyer for review as well as to the administrator. The matter number in the Subject line of the email invokes the forwarding rules. The department also uses SharePoint to list engagement letters and rates.

Hartford Financial also makes full use of SharePoint in its legal department. According to a recent article, “In conjunction with the teams’ custom-made intranet, SharePoint gives each law group a dashboard to manage calendaring and key information such as forms, boilerplate documents, and research materials. It was expanded in 2010 to include board materials and calendaring, and broker-dealer compliance functions.”

A white paper from Kiersted/Systems discusses whether a law department should replace or restore its matter management system. After a page or two on the total costs incurred by a law department when it replaces its current MMS, the white paper makes a controversial claim: “You will save up to 90 percent of the cost of a new solution by tuning up your existing application.” The paper does not back up this claim, but it adds some other arguments for rejuvenation over retirement. The former is quicker and less expensive than selection and implementation of new software and you can spend your time improving processes, instead of getting stuck on learning the new system itself. Finally, an overhaul might include adding or customizing new features and capabilities.

All in all, this white paper makes an important point: before you chuck your matter management system, give some thought to improving it and the processes around it. Perhaps the face-lift will look good, save time and money, and meet most of your needs.

I saw a presentation the other day that looked at matter management systems and deconstructed their reports into eight levels of increasing sophistication and value. What they called “standard reports” are the canned choices that come with system implementation. Quite a few law departments rarely need to go beyond their capabilities, especially if they export the results to Excel and refine the output there.

Next up the ladder of sophistication were “ad hoc reports” where a user picks and chooses some fields, some parameters, and some layout. With report wizards, this has become fairly routine. Above that level the presenter said are “query/drill down” reports, where the user can click on an output field and look at the underlying data to get closer to the understanding the input of the report.

Five reports were listed above those three, each claimed to be of more value. To that list I could add “trend reports,” because to look at data from one year compared to previous years seems most insightful. My point, in summary, is that law departments should be aware of report types that are more powerful than the one’s they customarily use.

Representatives from Mosaic Consulting attended Mitratech’s Interact 2011 Conference. Some of their material referred to the category of “Business Intelligence” software. I asked about it and the Mosaic folks, Chris Wilson in particular, told me that he believes Business Objects has the most presence. He pointed out that both TeamConnect of Mitratech and TyMetrix’s 360 have that package built into their offering.

Second would probably be Crystal, which Business Objects has acquired. Third would be Cognos followed by Actuate. I have written before about report writer packages (See my post of Dec. 18, 2006: five ways to obtain reports from matter management systems; Dec. 12, 2007: Pfizer and Business Objects for its dashboard; Feb. 15, 2009: matter management systems and report writers, with a few others listed from an ILTA survey;

Some people, myself included, think of software for legal departments mostly in terms of features and functions. What the software can do and how well it does it dominates. But if a law department has several packages to choose from and those packages have converged on a fairly similar array of features and functions, then what?

Then ease of use moves to the fore, support provided by the vendor counts for more, training and customization tools take prominence, and congeniality of the vendor matters. Of course, cost always stands out, but my point is that what we first tend to notice – this set of fields, that style of drop-down menu, navigation tools, auto-backup, currency conversion, the ability to accomplish something in two keystrokes – fades when everyone offers about the same constellation of features and functions.