Articles Posted in Tools

Honeywell International has about 25,000 patent files at any time. According to an interview in Met. Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2007 at 37, Honeywell’s Chief Intellectual-Property Counsel, David Hoiriis manages a team of approximately 36 intellectual property lawyers.

Unlike litigation or transactional matters, patent applications often spawn multiple related patent matters. An application can produce divisions, continuations, continuations-in-part and so forth, not to mention that applications may be filed in many jurisdictions. Accordingly, the IP group at Honeywell sought an e-billing package customized for their IP-world’s complexity.

The article describes well the tasks that Hoiriis and his colleagues went through to choose and implement IP e-billing solution that integrates with Honeywell’s patent docketing system (See my post of May 1, 2005 on IP matter systems.). Currently, the group uses its system to process roughly 1,000 invoices per month.

ACC energetically solicits sponsors and ACC Alliance partners, always with a hand deep in their till, and recognizes their contributions of talent and talents (as in the ancient currency weight) in various ways. All this is the daily trade of any association. I make no comment whatsoever whether any Alliance partner, including the three cited below, is indeed the best in their respective spheres.

What I quarrel with are ACC’s descriptions of its partners. For example, LexisNexis Examen is described as “the leading innovator of web-based outside counsel management solutions.” This appeared in Acc Docket, Vol. 24, Nov./Dec. 2007 at 65 (See my posts of July 14, 2006 on the cottage industry of matter management systems; and July 11, 2006 on e-billing solutions.).

Later (at 106), readers are told that WeComply, also an Alliance Partner, “is the leading provider of customizable, web-based compliance training” (See my post of July 15, 2006 on other providers of such training.). And Lex Mundi is “the world’s leading association of independent law firms” (at 104)(See my posts of May 30, 2005 and Dec. 19, 2005 about it and other associations of law firms).

IBM has a group of 160 research mathematicians who do not immerse themselves in theoretical research but rather apply their experience and discipline to solve real-world problems. This group harkens back to the operational research (OR) that came into being during and after World War II (See my post of July 14, 2006 on models.).

Examples of practical calculalations at IBM abound in Fast Company, Feb. 2007 at 98: the math whizzes worked on how best to send equipment and firefighters to forest fires; that analysis sounds useful for allocating law firms and in-house staff to lawsuits that break out.

The mathematicians developed algorithms and a model for how to staff consulting projects; that thinking sounds useful in terms of understanding how best to put lawyers and paralegals on large projects. Some day the tools of math boffins like IBM’s may help law departments manage their resources more effectively.

If you go one past the well-known two-by-two matrix, you have a three-by-three matrix, referred to sometimes as a nine-box. When you categorize data or concepts in such a nine-cell format, you can make finer gradations than with the classic four cells (See my posts about 2-by-2 quadrants of Aug. 28, 2005 on SWOT analysis; Oct. 1, 2005 on the Johari window; and March 12, 2006 on their use in an analysis of law firms.).

For example, you might classify your law firms as primarily local, national and global (See my post of March 1, 2006 for this taxonomy, along with boutique firms.) and the matters you assigned in the previous 12 months as relatively simple, normal, or complex. If you then match the matters to the firms – which is a crude match obviously – you can see more clearly whether the best level of firm has gotten work at its capability level.

During the late 80s and early 90s, I was enthralled by the prospects of artificial intelligence for lawyers. I even wrote for the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s newsletter on document assembly (See my post of March 24, 2005 doubting the spread of such software.). But that early promise never ripened into robustness, and I drifted away

A profile of one of the legal AI pioneers, Marc Lauritsen, carried me back to those years. The piece, in Law Practice, Vol. 33, Jan./Feb. 2007 at 27, mentions the International Conference on AI and Law, to be held at Stanford Law School in June 2007. http://iaail.org I wish the participants and their projects all the best.

Someday, forms of AI I will help law departments, but it may be about when we all go paperless, vendors understate the benefits of their wares, and the Internet calms down (See my posts of March 27, 2005 on artificial intelligence software; April 7, 2006 and its reference to neural networks; Feb. 23, 2006 on patented search software.).

Much of the ruckus about off shoring legal work has died down, but there is the occasional recrudescence. Two vendors were mentioned in the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 15, 2007 at 16 as part of the legal process outsourcing industry: Pangea3 LLC and Lumen Legal. Others I am aware of include Office Tiger, Atlas Legal Research and Xansa (See my posts of Nov. 14, 2005 and references cited regarding off-shore resources; and Jan. 27, 2006 and Jan. 6, 2006 and references cited.). OffShoreXPerts listed 875 cites when I searched for “Legal/Law Outsourcing” on Jan. 27, 2007.

The article makes the distinction between fungible and non-fungible categories of legal work, including in the fungible categories such tasks as “review of electronic documents, contract review, patent application drafting and even legal research and writing.” The gamut of tasks that can be done is potentially huge (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007 with a different slant on commodity legal services.), the dollars (and rupees) and stake are huger, and the potential implications of offshore legal services over time are, well, hugest.

In several of my consulting projects I have helped my client law departments compile a representation of their management history. In the form of a timeline, it depicts changes in the department’s size, locations and spending in relation to significant external events. The events include acquisitions, divestitures, organizational restructurings, revenue milestones, government investigations and others.

The diorama on paper pulls together an assortment of useful background information. The resulting map can be useful, such as how it correlates the number of lawyers in the department and their specialties to various changes in the company and to outside counsel spending. A retreat or off-site is a good place to display the results.

General Motors Detroit-based legal department employs 107 attorneys and 109 support staff. The department chose Mitratech’s TeamConnect and then both designed and implemented an impressive set of modules. The integrated modules include “document management, records retention, off-site storage management, regulatory reporting and rule compliance, intellectual property, litigation support, and issue and problem tracking.”

Further, according to InsideCounsel, Jan. 2007 at 2 (Mitratech Special Section ad), GM’s legal department also has modules for matter management and budget controls.

Nine applications! There are a few others I have run into, such as corporate secretary and subsidiary tracking, board books (See my posts of July 19, 2006 on board software, Aug. 9, 2006 on the merger of corporate secretary and Board software; Oct. 1, 2006 on matter management software joined with corporate service-of-process software; and Jan. 24, 2006 for ten corporate-secretary applications.), and options tracking, but this is an impressive collection.

It was a small item, but it touches a topic many readers may never consider: how secure from third parties is the information in electronic bills transmitted by law firms?

An item about Utica National Insurance Group, which uses billing review software from Allegient Systems, mentions that “every legal invoice submitted will be subject to a highly secure (128 bit encryption) communication link.” Every bit of me is impressed, all 128 of them, but I have no basis for comparison or experience to understand the issue. Has anyone ever hacked into a law department’s e-billing system?

One of the bubbles burst in Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 49 is that managers remember well and therefore learn accurately from the past. There is “an enormous problem with inferences based on recollection.” Humans have terrible memories, and worse, according to the authors, those lousy memories are further distorted when events are labeled successes or failures. As the authors put it, “using reports from winners and losers to find ways to turn your … team into a winner is questionable at best.”

Unfortunately, journalists, consultants, and others outside law departments depend on participants from a law department to recall how the department triumphed. Their memories are incomplete, changeable, and biased. In all likelihood, revisionist history runs rampant.