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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.).

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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.).

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Neuroscience and creativity. “We now know that moments of insight come from a particular circuit in the back of the right hemisphere of the brain called the superior anterior temporal gyrus.” Rotman Mag., Fall 2011 at 76. Aha, I get it, I finally get it! (See my post of Jan. 28, 2011: neuroscience and brainstorming.).

The story on narrative effectiveness. “Research has shown that people process information best when it is presented in a story or narrative format, ” writes Rotman Mag., Fall 2011 at 104. That reminds me to tell you a tale of narratives and stories (See my post of May 15, 2005: myths of change management; Jan. 17, 2006: strategic narratives in place of strategic plans; July 14, 2006: narratives, theories, and models; Sept. 21, 2009: neuroscience of stories; and May 4, 2009: stories with 6 references.).

Explanations, reach and hardness. David Deutsch talks often about a good explanation being hard to vary, which means they are most constrained by current knowledge. David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) at 25. Changing the details would ruin the explanation. He also makes much of reach: a comprehensive, indeed universal theory, hard to vary, has reach (at 29). It goes beyond the problem it meant to solve.

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“59 per cent of respondents [to the survey referenced below] indicated that the percentage of legal work outsourced to an external law firm has decreased in the past five years.” This quote comes from The In-House Perspective, April 2011 at 13, which cites Deloitte & Touche’s “Forensic Corporate Counsel Survey 2010: do today’s corporate counsel hold all the cards?” I have not been able to obtain a copy of the report.

Are we to read this squib that for almost two out of three legal departments over the past half decade, of the total legal work needed by their companies, the proportion handled by outside counsel dropped? How did respondents estimate the figure let alone measure it? If true, this shift would justify significant staff increases in law departments and a consequent rise in lawyers per billion of revenue. Neither has happened.

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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.

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Most outside counsel guidelines that I have reviewed make it clear: “You may not comment to the media or disclose your representation of our company.” Even so, I can only conclude from a survey I just saw that some law departments are more tolerant of publicity. The choices included permitted disclosures by external counsel of

The fact that they are acting for your company;

Press releases on completion of a particular deal or project; or

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No claims of originality or eloquence, but a writer in Diversity & The Bar, July/Aug. 2011 at 31, condensed the advantages usually cited for in-house counsel very succinctly. As background, Corporate Counsel Women of Color (CCWC) collected survey responses, among other forms of data gathering, from 857 women of color attorneys. Summarizing why they liked practicing in-house rather than in a law firm, they found the experience to be better “based on interfacing with senior management, working with clients, quality of work assignments, an atmosphere of inclusion, upward mobility, and training and development opportunities.” That’s a good list.

Someone can counter these positives, either by pointing out what law firms offer (more sophisticated problems, more money, autonomy as a partner, for example) or by attacking the stated benefits of in-house practice (limited career path in the department, cost center stigma, lots of humdrum work, no choice of clients, corporate politics and vicissitudes). Still, these six reasons hit most of the commonly given pluses.

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“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.”

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Has anyone encountered or heard of such a strange request?

A lawyer from a fair-sized department wrote me with a strange story. The Board of Directors is looking for “compliance certificates” from each area of the Law Department. My email friend wrote that “While other parts of the Law department can sign off on a compliance certificate because it is most likely they receive every matter that falls within their purview, I as head of the commercial group have refused to sign anything regarding commercial work.

My friend explained why she couldn’t sign such a certificate. “The commercial lawyers see only a very small percentage of the contracts that the organization enters into. We have prepared a number of templates for use by other departments but these documents are not locked down, so we know that they are changed, and, as well, many contracts are entered that don’t even use one of the templates. Because we are subject to specific legislative limitations, if someone in the organization signs off on a deal using vendor paper, we will without a doubt be in breach of at least one of those limitations (respecting indemnification).”

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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.).