Prism Legal Consulting, Inc. monitors several publications and web sites for news highlights about or related to legal technology. News items are organized topically and chronologically. News tracked since June 2001.
Online Legal Services, Including Document Automation and Compliance Training
Firm, Management, Professional, and Vendor News
Useful Technologies (Full Text, Workflow, Document Assembly etc.)
E-Learning
in the Legal Market
Online
Legal Services Update - New Allen & Overy Offerings
Law
Departments Reluctant to Invest in KM
Web
Logs for Lawyers: Lessons from Ernie the Attorney (LLRX)
Collaborative
Systems in the Business World – Info World Report
Survey
of In-House Counsel Tech – “Poor Stepchildren”
Microsoft
and BearingPoint Team to Provide Court E-Filing Service
“Startup
Revolutionizes Immigration Applications”
Legal
IT (London) Reports on IT Spending among UK Law Firms
eWeek
Magazine “Top Picks” – Two Products of Interest in the Legal Market
“Getting
IT Spending Right This Time” – McKinsey Quarterly Article
Survey
of Law Firm Extranets Finds Mixed Results
Linklaters
Expands Blue Flag Service with Document Assembly
Johnson
Controls Exploits Power of Law Firm Extranets
In-House
Counsel Approaches to Managing Outside Counsel
Work
Flow: “The Next Step Forward”
Clifford
Chance Adopts Document Assembly to Automate Routine Tasks
Allen
& Ovary Deploys Workflow Software for Matter Intake/Closure
“U.S.
Opposes Proposal to Limit Who May Give Legal Advice”
More
Marketing Tools: It Ain't Just the Web Site
Review
of 5 Online Compliance Training Systems
Having
Business People Set the IT Agenda and Manage Results is Critical
Compliance
Workflow Software Announced for Highly Regulated Industries
Know-How:
A Valuable Thing to Waste
Legal
IT and PA Consulting Survey of Law Firm Technology Spending in the UK
Gleneagles
(UK) Legal IT Awards
KM at
Wilson Sonsini + State of KM Generally
“Before
the Fall” – The Challenges of Digital Data in the Discovery Process
How
Evershed’s Built Its New Client Facing Services
Business
Process Modeling and Organizational Behavior
UK
Legal IT Survey Studies Role of Tech – Questions Extranet Value
Legal
IT Short List for Gleneagles (UK) Legal IT Awards
Seventh
Annual AmLaw Tech Survey
“Keeping
Track of KM” (The ROI of KM)
Benchmarking
KM in U.S. and UK Law Firms
Clifford
Chance Selects West KM Product
Baker
& McKenzie Upgrades KM System with Document Assembly
Remaining
Brobeck KM Staff Depart
Hildebrandt:
The 21st Century In-House Legal Department
KM
Professionals Struggle with E-mail
DC-based
NetCompliance Files for Chapter 7 Liquidation
Hildebrandt
Publishes Legal Tech Survey
Report
Says McKinsey's Growth Hindered Its Ability to Use Data [WSJ]
Brobeck
Rolls Out KM System and Pares KM Staff
King
& Spalding Expands KM Staff
Clifford
Chance Releases Two New Online Services
Clifford
Chance Considers Outsourcing Technology Operations
Legal
IT and PA Consulting Survey of Law Firm Technology Spending in the UK
LinkLaters
Deploys Web-Based Document Assembly in Blue Flag
Law
Firm Web Sites: Get a Return on Your Investment
Lovells’
KM Efforts Win Legal IT Award
Blue
Flag Expands Beyond Financial Market
“A
Challenge to Google” [Teoma]
LawPeriscope
Offers Search Engine Dedicated to Large Law Firms
“Retooled
as Techies” [Law Firms Move Associates to Knowledge Management Projects]
Baker
& McKenzie Uses NextPage to Streamline Time-Intensive Transactions
Orrick
Re-Locates Tech Operations to West Virginia
American
Lawyer Media Reviews Third Party (ASP) Deal Rooms
Bryan
Cave Adopts Secure E-mail Firm-wide
KM
Magazine to Cease Hardcopy Publication
Hildebrandt
Survey of Law Firm IT
Orrick
Herrington Introduces Video Game for Recruiting
When
Documents are Really Multiple Files
NY
Times Article on Online Compliance Training
Orrick
Builds Custom Portal for its Lawyers
Verity
Adds “Social Network” Feature to Search Software
Ballard
Spahr Automates Commercial Real Estate Finance Practice
Clifford
Chance Rolls Out New Extranet
Interesting
New Document Assembly System (Business Integrity)
West
Suspends Selling of WestWorks
Venture
Law Group Moves Associates to Knowledge Management Positions
LawCommerce
Announces Initiative to Create Deal Room Standard
Wilson
Sonsini Automates Document Creation for Venture Capitalists
Designing
Your Web Site (plus Automating Bermuda and Cayman Incorporations)
Chrissy Burns of Blake Dawson Waldron in
The
The article notes that little has happened with online legal services of late.
The article interviewed Marc-Henri Chamay, who leads the firms online services.
"Chamay argues that the only sure-fire way for law firms to sell web
content is to embed this content thoroughly in their own internal processes
and, initially at least, in the regular services that they sell to
clients."
It goes on to describe three new online services. One is a derivatives netting
product. More information about it is available from a PDF file from the Netalytics website. The second product,
CSAnalytics, also relates to derivatives. The third, Global ShareWeb , "is
a knowledge repository marked up in XML and designed to feed into a bank’s risk
management system or netting engines."
The June 2003 issue of Corporate
Legal Times, in an article titled Legal Departments Struggle to Harvest
Internal Knowledge (p. 12), reports on a knowledge management study conducted
by the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida School of Law.
Only 48% of 130 law departments responding have initiated KM programs and less
than 20% have KM budgets. Of those departments with KM initiatives, only 18%
think there are sufficient resources to achieve KM goals.
The
In a piece appearing on LLRX, Jerry Lawson writes a thoughtful and analytic piece about Web Logs and their potential value for law firm marketing.
http://www.llrx.com/features/lawyerweblogs.htm
First Web logs started gaining wider notice (see Blogs (Web Logs) in the Law). More recently, several articles about Wikis have appeared. Wikes are a shared web space in which anyone in a group can add – and delete – conent. The NY Times reports that recently “the business world has begun experimenting with wikis. For example, at a recent technology conference by the publisher O'Reilly & Associates, participants set up a wiki for posting notes on conference sessions, forming discussion groups, creating a collaborative glossary of emerging technology terms and even organizing ride shares.”
Wikis may be a tool useful for knowledge management. The Times reports that “over time, wiki advocates say, a group voice or consensus emerges into what some enthusiasts call ‘emergent intelligence.’”
“Business Is Toying With a Web Tool,” The New York Times,
In two cover stories, InformationWeek (
Learning To Share,
Getting The Message,
Corporate Counsel Magazine conducted its first survey of technology use among inhouse counsel and found that “many in-house departments are still mired in the late 20th century.” While most law departments have basic desktop applications, they are not investing in more advanced or specialized applications.
Corporate Counsel Magazine, May 2003
Related tech
survey chart.
A Court Microsoft is
glad to Spend Time In, Information
Week,
An article by Julius Melnitzer, Startup Revolutionizes Immigration Applications, Corporate Legal Times, April 2003, page 28, reports on a service that automates the visa application process:
“Companies recruiting foreign employees
traditionally relied on law firms specializing in immigration matters. For the most part, attorneys for these firms
work with paper files and have to haul them out every time a problem or question
from an applicant arises…
“VisaNow approaches the problem by automating the
preparation of visa-application forms, as well as the underlying questionnaires
and profiles employers and candidates to submit to the INS.”
See also VisaNow.com
Average IT spending among law firms surveyed was 4.4%. “Within the magic circle, firms’ IT investment ranged from more than 7% of turnover to less than 4%.”
LegalIT.net,
Firms’ turnovers outstrip technology
spending,
The April 7th issue of eWeek includes the third annual excellence awards (“top picks”) for software by category. One category this year is “Analytics & Reporting.” Stating that “the past year’s lapses in corporate governance give new importance to the category,” eWeek picked EnCase Forensic Edition 3.22 as the winner for its ability to capture and analyze digital documents. This product “combines courtroom-quality rigor with remarkable ease of use…”
Separately, in the “Portal & Knowledge Management”
category, the winner is MindServer Product Suite 2.0. “Using powerful semantic analysis algorithsm,
[the product] delivers effective search results, returning even relevant
articles that don’t include the actual search term.”
Abstract:
“Cost pressures have led many companies to cut spending on IT initiatives aimed at improving performance. The McKinsey Global Institute finds that this is a risky approach, since well-targeted IT spending can make companies more productive when it helps them to innovate. Companies should identify and invest in the right productivity levers as well as time IT investments carefully, so that basic corporate systems are ready to benefit from them. Being the first to innovate sometimes offers competitive advantages, but investing in leading-edge technologies often costs more than waiting until the bugs have been worked out. The take-away: IT is not just another cost to be managed. Companies that focus excessively on slashing expenditures can miss out on technology's potential to promote innovation.”
McKinsey Quarterly (Spring 2003)
“Elite will join West, the leading provider of integrated
information solutions to legal professionals in the
West
Press Release (
Also reported in the April 4th editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
Chrissy Burns, special counsel at Blake Dawson in
Speculate to
Accumulate, Legal
IT,
e-Week magazine reports that a “new breed of software automates creation, tracking of purchases, helps executives analyze trends.” While the primary focus of these companies (Zeborg, Mindflow Technologies, diCarta, and Frictionless Commerce) appears to be on supply chain automation, they also have features to manage contract language and drafting. For example, diCarta’s recently released version “enables users to edit contract drafts in Microsoft Corp. Word, then import those documents directly into the system.”
From a press release on the Linklater’sweb site:
“The speed and accuracy with which banks can create term sheets - crucial at the start of all deals - is set to be revolutionised. This is thanks to a new intelligent online system that has been pioneered by the law firm Linklaters, with the launch of its latest on-line service, BLUE FLAG® Term Sheet Generator….
“Fully interactive, it also contains an embedded advisory capability and directs clients to the most relevant advice for structuring their deals…
“The Term Sheet Generator radically speeds up this process for syndicated lending, from hours to minutes. It enables bankers to create term sheets automatically at their desktops - with thousands of possible combinations - by completing a simple questionnaire.
John Tucker, head of banking, said: ‘This is the first stage of development. New and expanded online services for clients are to follow, so watch this space!’”
See also Legal IT
See also a descriptive article by Linklaters lawyer Kirsty
Thomson, Automating
Banking Term Sheets for Clients, Law
Technology News, April 2003
According to an article in the Corporate Legal Times, Johnson Controls makes extensive use of Extranets to control legal costs. For example, Foley & Lardner lawyers have saved 30% of the time to draft IP contracts because “the IP section of Foley’s extranet allows a Johnson Controls lawyer to generate customized non-disclosure, joint development or licensing agreements in real time simply by filling out a web-based questionnaire.”
Johnson Controls decided 10 years ago to decentralize its law department. The Extranet is a critical element of support for the department’s 24 lawyers scattered across multiple locations. This has led to web-based systems that allow lawyers to access a variety of information from anywhere and integration with information from several outside counsel firms. The company continues to enhance its Extranet. It is now “working on an application that will eliminate the need to [transport documents] for signatures in favor of electronic approval and signature system.”
Johnson Controls Exploits Power of Law Firm Extranets by Julius Melnitzer, Corporate Legal Times, Page 21, January 2003
This article reviews how four law departments manage legal costs and outside counsel:
Cracking the Whip by
Catherine Aman, Corporate
Counsel Magazine, February 2003
A feature article in Legal IT provides detailed analysis of
how and why workflow software may be widely adopted in the legal market.
LegalIT
(
LegalIT reports that Clifford Chance has begun deploying
document assembly software “to automate routine tasks and processes within
simple and complex matters across a number of practice areas. The move will give CC the ability to
profitably process high volume, low value work from key clients — work that the
firm has traditionally either refused to accept or undertaken at a loss.”
LegalIT (
“Allen & Overy (A&O) is set to roll-out a new workflow application, based on the Metastorm development toolkit, to streamline and standardise the firm’s processes for matter closure…. A&O has also designed a Metastorm-based workflow application for matter inception, to help the firm manage conflicts globally from a centralised conflict and relationship management unit.”
LegalIT (
The New York Times,
“A proposal by the American Bar Association that would prohibit anyone but lawyers from giving advice about the law is drawing opposition from the federal government, which says it is intended to stifle competition and could subject real estate agents, income tax preparers, credit counselors and other laypeople to civil and criminal penalties….
“[T]he Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are concerned about the scope of the proposal and submitted objections in a letter to the bar association in December. In whatever states adopted it, the agencies said, the rule could subject tenants' associations, claims adjusters, tax preparers, real estate agents, investment bankers, business planners, hospitals, labor unions and others to penalties.”
“Law firms are harnessing the power of the Web to connect to clients, referral sources and prospects. Three hot trends have emerged: online, opt-in newsletters, branded e-mail alerts and Webinars…
“The hidden benefit of HTML is that the newsletters are
completely trackable. The sender can tell how many e-mails were opened, who
opened them and what links the reader clicked on.”
By Larry Bodine, Law Technology News,
“Fueled by Sarbanes-Oxley, regulators are requiring
corporations to adopt strict codes of conduct for their employees. This
requires employee training -- often on a broad scale -- in financial reporting,
insider trading, codes of conduct and corporate ethics. For large corporations,
training online makes obvious sense. Here's a look at five companies that offer
comprehensive suites of compliance training online.”
Browse Your Way to
Compliance, By Robert J. Ambrogi, Corporate Counsel
Magazine, January 2003
McKinsey Quarterly explains that companies need to close the gap between business goals and information technology. “To bring IT spending under control and get more value from IT investments, companies need to persuade business managers—not technologists—to set the IT agenda and then hold them accountable for the results.”
The link below is to a summary – registration for this
particular article is free.
McKinsey
Quarterly (2002 Number 4)
“Axentis, LLC announced … the first comprehensive software application that meets all seven elements of governance and compliance mandates as determined by The United States Sentencing Commission and Office of Inspector General… Axentis Enterprise (AE), is a hosted software application that provides an easily configurable set of functions that combine process, people and knowledge enabling line of business compliance managers to easily develop and organize regulation driven policies and operating procedures, organize people in virtual groups that share administrative, or policy driven requirements, communicate those requirements, and ensure that they are being followed and exceptions addressed.”
Company
Press Release (
Gretta Rusanow of Curve Consulting surveyed leading law
firms about their knowledge management practices. A useful summary of her findings appears in
this AmLaw Tech article. She found that
“among
AmLaw
Tech (December 2002)
[For
a summary of the prior edition of this survey, click here.]
LegalIT and PA Consulting conducted a tech survey of
“Measuring the Value of IT” LegalIT
(
Legal IT (UK) has published a list of winners of the Legal
IT awards (awarded October 2002).
“Thompson wins top award at Gleneagles” by Kieran Flatt, LegalIT
(
In “Information, Please,” Andrew Simons, writing in the
Recorder (
Ashby Jones of American Lawyer Media discusses how “[t]oo much data doesn't just lead to overflowing servers; it can make your company vulnerable to savvy plaintiffs' attorneys, too.” A good overview of the challenges and issues of managing digital data and evidence in large corporations.
See also companion pieces “A Happy Ending: HP
1, FedEx 0,” an overview of how HP managed the FTC filings required for
HP’s merger with Compaq, and “Who Ya Gonna Call?,”
a list of vendors who can assist with electronic evidence discovery.
Corporate
Counsel Magazine, November 2002
Rick Klau, a VP at Interface Software, discusses in “How I Learned to Love the Blog” what a Web Log (“blog”) is and why blogs are valuable (see Rick Klau’s Blog). He argues that blogs will play an important role in knowledge management.
See also Guy Alvarez’s articles “To Blog or Not
...”.
Law Technology News, November 2002
Kevin Doolan, a partner at Eversheds in
Law
Technology News, November 2002
Two articles in the October 2002 issue of Optimize Magazine explore interesting and related questions about managing workflow and organizational structure and power. Modeling business processes may be hard at law firms, but have a high potential payback. Power and knowledge may not be where you really think it is. These two articles raise interesting possibilities for the future.
A
NEW PATH TO BUSINESS-PROCESS MANAGEMENT
“The IT department's job is about to change. The third wave of business-process management will give control of business processes to the businesspeople, letting them adapt almost immediately to market conditions. In fact, tools to make this happen are already under development.”
http://www.optimizemag.com/issue/012/leadership.htm
MODEL
BEHAVIOR
“Just as everything else in modern business is being re-evaluated and overhauled, so is the traditional organizational chart. Long a human-resources staple in most companies, these detailed flow charts showing who works where and who reports to whom are essentially a tool for control and planning. That may have been sufficient in a time when companies faced only gradual change, but no more. In fluid business environments, there's often a big difference between how managers think work is getting done and how it actually gets done.”
http://www.optimizemag.com/issue/012/culture.htm
Legal Director, an affiliate of Legal IT (
“On the subject of extranets and virtual
dealrooms, most legal departments seem to be sending out mixed messages.
Twenty-nine percent of clients say that IT systems introduced by law firms have
resulted in improved relationships, so the collaborative aspect of these
technologies is delivering some value. But the usefulness of dealrooms for
mergers and acquisitions was seen as limited. Fewer than one in seven in-house
lawyers surveyed had used them for due diligence or transaction management
purposes.”
“A Thirst for Knowledge” Legal
IT (October 2002)
LegalIT has published a list of
“The Contenders” Legal IT
(October 2002)
“These are austere times. According to the survey, technology spending on a per-lawyer basis is declining. Firms have budgeted about 5 percent less per lawyer for both capital and operating expenses. Nearly two-thirds of the firms we surveyed said that they would spend the same or less on capital items in 2002 than they did in 2001… BlackBerrys, handheld wireless e-mail devices, are one fringe benefit that firms are not abandoning. Half of the firms reported buying BlackBerrys.”
Links to Tables in the Survey:
Tools
Lawyers Use: Organized by Firm
The
Basics
Applications
Software
Intranets,
Extranets and Portals
Communication
Running
the IT Department
Financial
Stats
Knowledge
Management
Chrissy Burns of Blake Dawson Waldron (Sydney) visits the question of KM payback and how to measure ROI, with examples from Telestra.
Legal IT
(September 2002)
The FloSuite, a business process management (“BPM”)
solution, is expanding. Stibbe, one of
the largest
FloSuite is a “no programming required” end user development capability that uses Microsoft Visio for process definition. The idea is to capture and re-use work processes.
Flosuite
Press Release, reported by Legal
Tech Insider
An interesting comparison of KM in the
According to Canada Stockwatch (Canjex Publishing Ltd.) on
“The world's leading international law firm will leverage the collective expertise of its more than 3,600 legal advisers around the world thanks to a powerful new knowledge management solution recently announced by West, the leading provider of integrated information solutions to the legal market. Clifford Chance will implement West km, the innovative new knowledge management tool that enables law firms to take advantage of West's more than 125 years of experience organizing legal information, as well as powerful Westlaw technologies, to easily update, access and use intellectual assets from across the organization….
“West km does not require firms to introduce any additional
codes or markup into a document collection. Instead, West km seamlessly extends
West's extensive indexing structure to the firm's private information
collections behind its firewall. West km
effectively leverages a firm's existing technology platform by integrating with
its document management system (DMS) to provide new functionality designed to
increase the value of work product repositories. For example, when a researcher
finds a case of interest on Westlaw that is also cited in firm documents the
firm's icon is automatically displayed on the case within the Westlaw citations
list. The researcher simply clicks the firm icon to review the list of internal
documents. The researcher can then retrieve the full text of any of these
internal documents from the firm's DMS to edit it or incorporate portions of it
into a new document. Firm documents also are enriched with KeyCite flags.”
“Global law firm Baker & McKenzie is developing a major upgrade to its know-ledge management (KM) system, to be deployed across all of its offices. The KM system, Bakermaks, will be powered by Deal Builder, a document assembly system from London-based supplier Business Integrity. Deal Builder — which is also used for Linklaters’ Blue Flag service — automates complex legal contracts and presents them as web-based questionnaires.”
LegalIT.net [
See
also LinkLaters Deploys
Web-Based Document Assembly in Blue Flag [January 2002]
The brain drain from San Francisco-based Brobeck, Phleger
& Harrison continued last week as 25 associates accepted job offers from
Clifford Chance. The exodus began July 1 when 18 former Brobeck partners opened
Clifford Chance's
[See also Brobeck Rolls Out KM System and Pares KM Staff from April News]
An interesting and useful analysis of the challenges in-house law departments face.
‘[K]nowledge management's leading lights are still figuring out how to capture knowledge from e-mail, the most widely used application on a lawyer's desktop.”
Some key findings…
An internal report by McKinsey & Co. concludes that the prestigious consulting firm's ability to manage research and information deteriorated as it experienced rapid growth during the 1990s….
The company's analysis, finished last year, has resulted in a shake-up of the firm's roughly 1,000-person research staff and a sharp increase in the amount of money that McKinsey spends on such efforts….
McKinsey officials say the company had fallen behind its own standards in managing information but insist that the problems didn't significantly affect the advice it gave to clients….
McKinsey's internal study found "teams have no way to be sure they have got the best knowledge the firm has to offer. To cover the bases, they replicate their requests to multiple sources, causing duplication of work and expense. But often, the right knowledge, much of which exists only in the heads of people in the firm, is either not found or found too late to be used for real client impact.” ….
"Knowledge management" is a big management buzzword these days. … McKinsey employs hundreds of researchers who dig up data about companies and industries that consultants can use to make recommendations to clients.
But databases frequently turn into information dumps, teeming with poorly classified or outdated information. It is often hard to make the knowledge floating around in an individual employee's head accessible to everyone in a firm because employees are often reluctant or too busy to share information.
McKinsey says it is investing $35.8 million in "knowledge-management" systems and technology this year, a big leap from 1999, when it devoted $8.3 million…..
The consolidation and increased use of technology could end up eliminating as many as 150 jobs worldwide, memos say, and the firm also anticipates losing staffers because of attrition, a process that is continuing. A McKinsey spokesman says: "We're now trying to rely more on technology and have the consolidated knowledge centers to be more efficient."
The Wall Street Journal,
“
“:Ironically, it's Brobeck that's doing the paring back. In the late 1990s, when the firm was riding high on the tech wave, it employed four full-time KM staffers other than Rovner. But last month, budget tightening forced the firm to axe three of the four. "The firm made its decision, and now we have to move forward," says Rovner, struggling to mask his disappointment. “
Following the trend of lawyers moving into nontraditional
roles within law firms, two attorneys at
“Clifford Chance, the international law firm, has launched two new leading edge online services - Cross Border Acquisition Guide (CBAG) and an Alerter for Communications & Media. Responding to client demand, the launch reflects the success of the firm's existing suite of online products and services; and demonstrates its on-going commitment to utilising newly developed technologies to provide the highest quality client service.
“CBAG is a cross border mergers and acquisitions structuring
tool. The Guide provides users with a themed analysis of key issues and
potential problems that may arise from public and private acquisitions. It not
only gives legal guidance, but also uses commercial experience from the Clifford
Chance pan-European network to provide the most up to date practical guidance
on prevailing market practice. The Guide covers twelve jurisdictions in
Western, Central and
Clifford Chance Press Release See Also LegalIT.Net
"Clifford Chance (CC) is considering outsourcing its entire technology function in a radical move that will affect 430 IT staff worldwide. ... The outsourcing option was recommended by management consultants Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, which finalised a report on the state of the firm’s technology function towards the end of last year. .. CC’s IT platform has been the subject of much internal debate, culminating in the departure of IT director Brian Collins, who was highly regarded in the industry, in December 2001"
Legal
IT (March 2002)
“A new survey by Legal Week, in conjunction with PA
Consulting Group, looks at how the major law firms in the
Legal IT of the
Legal IT (January 2002)
An article by Larry Bodine in Legal Technology News with practical tips on designing a law firm web site.
"Increasing speed, agility and the quality of the reviews was my biggest goal and challenge. Even with unlimited staff (not a possibility), we faced astounding volume and frequency of ads --12,000 to 15,000 annually. We needed to manage the flow of ads (mostly paper) to our legal staff for review, and return comments back to the SBUs, usually within two to four hours. We needed to create a "real-time" document review and management system that would allow us to review each ad and maintain an adequate historical paper trail. .... Our new advertising review system is designed to run over the Internet, combining a document database with an image repository and e-mail enabled workflow tools. ....
LawTechNews (December
2001)
Lovell’s was presented an award on 18th October at the Legal IT Forum at Gleneagles Hotel, the citation reads:
" The award for knowledge management goes to Lovells
for Total Access 2001. Knowledge Management systems are notoriously difficult
to evaluate. Like teaching, knowledge management is a job that is easy to do
badly, but very difficult to do well. The judges were impressed by Lovells'
commitment to organising and processing those materials that represent the intellectual
capital of the firm. Total Access 2001 itself builds on a successful system
that has been running in Lovells since 1989 and which is now supported by 20
full time professional support lawyers. The firm has a highly developed
taxonomy for describing its practice and the repository of the system which
contains nearly 150,000 documents has now been rolled out in 20 offices across
Press Release on Lovells Website
Linklater’s Blue Flag online legal service has recently added a new service: Blue Flag Netmark. Quoting the firm’s Web site:
“Blue Flag® Netmark is an online domain name management product offering secure registration 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Netmark has been designed as an easy to use service with detailed information on registering domain names in multiple jurisdictions and offering advice on a range of topics related to domain name portfolio management.
In addition, Netmark offers access to Linklaters' corporate assets including trademark management and instant desktop access to a team of senior intellectual property lawyers.“
See also Legal News Media.Com, Issue.96 - 15.11.2001, which reports:
“Linklaters this week launched Blue Flag Netmark, a new online domain name portfolio management product in conjunction with the domain name registration service provider Net Searchers. The idea for Blue Flag Netmark stems Linklaters' recent work for a number of clients which highlighted the need for a service that more closely integrated the functions of the domain name service providers with those of the legal adviser, not least where the latter is also managing the trade mark portfolio.”
Ask Jeeves acquired Teoma in September. Teoma has features like Google but also organizes results into folders, like Northern Lights
“Teoma results are presented in three forms. At the top of the page are "Web Pages Grouped by Topic," similar to the Northern Light folder system of classifying results. However, only top result pages are included in the Teoma topical folders. Teoma builds the folders in real time, based on the link analysis and the text from the resulting sites of your search. This automatically allows new topics to be assigned on the fly.”
As reported in the Legal Intelligencer, appearing on law.com
An article in the November 2001 issues of Metropolitan Corporate Counsel reports on a new web site that provides easy and consistent access to the web sites of 300 large law firms.
From the company’s web site:
"Law Periscope is a dedicated law firm search engine
and online directory for locating, researching and evaluating the largest
"Law Periscope profiles the largest
See http://www.lawperiscope.com/
"In May [Venture Law Group] told six associates to move
down or move out. For a pay cut of about 30 percent, VLG associates were given
the chance to work on the firm's knowledge management project, called, in
appropriately newspeak terms, the Better Client Services Initiative. ... At
American Lawyer, October 2001
“LEHI, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 2001-- NextPage Inc., the leader in Peer-to-Peer Business Networking, Tuesday announced that Baker & McKenzie, one of the world's largest law firms, is deploying a knowledge system built with NextPage Matrix(TM).
The new application combines attorneys' global expertise with the company's distributed information to assist the firm in completing complex, large-scale transactions.
With Matrix, the firm bridges organizational boundaries by creating collaborative workspaces where practitioners, clients, financial institutions and other relevant parties can interact with each other and discuss contracts, financial statements and other significant documents.”
“Flywheel Communications, a start-up providing secure management of legal documents and agreements, has gone out of business barely eight months after its launch. … The start-up went out of business this month after failing to secure additional funding in a hostile venture capital climate, a company representative said. “
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20011015/tc/brief_life_for_legal_start-up_1.html
Orrick announced in September that “announced it was moving most of its back-office technology and finance operations to Wheeling, a city of 31,000 located in the northern end of West Virginia. The help desk, e-mail administration, accounts payable, billings and collections, and software support are the largest departments that will make the move.” The firm characterizes this as a cost saving measure. The article quotes employees who say it is a disguised lay-off.
The Legal Times,
Originally published in Am Law Tech in the summer of 2001, a review of leading deal rooms is now available online.
American Lawyer Media (Law.com)
"ZixIt Corp. (Nasdaq:ZIXI - news), a leading provider of products and services that bring privacy, security, and convenience to Internet communications, announced today that it is implementing its ZixMail(TM) secure email service at Bryan Cave LLP, a leader among corporate, transactional, and litigation law firms with a diversified national and international practice.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010906/60320.html
"Freedom Technology Media Group (FTMG) today announced plans to channel resources to its robust online knowledge management community and cease the printing of Knowledge Management magazine with the September issue. "
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010906/62592_1.html
Hildebrandt sent surveys to 700 firms; 70 responded. Key findings:
- IT spending is 6.6% of total revenue, up from 6.0% last year.
- “There are 26 users to every one IT person for the 500-750 lawyer firms, up 9 users from last year.”
- Only 25% of firms have docketing systems
- 45% use document assembly
- 62% send e-bills, up from 40% last year
- 40% offer e-subscriptions or e-alerts
- 30% have Extranets
Hildebrandt concludes that “[o]ur survey results seem to support our sense that increasing IT expenses has not dramatically changed the way law offices work.”
The article reports that “[l]aw firms are spending more than ever on office technology but many are not getting much bang for their byte, a new survey concludes.” It also reports some interesting statistics:
Hildebrandt. See also Law.com, carrying an article by Larry Keller from Miami Daily Business Review.
Orrick has introduced a video game that awards jackets and hats. According to Information Week, the game involves catching objects falling down the screen.
Reported in Information
Week,
“Aug. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- West Group today accelerated its expansion into the law practice management and productivity solutions market, announcing that it has acquired ProLaw, the leading provider of front-office and back-office management systems to the legal market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.”
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/010823/mnth002.html
The September 2001 issue of Knowledge Management magazine has an article “Managing the Modern Document” (at page 48) that has a useful discussion of the challenges of document management given that documents are often the result of collaboration and consist of multiple files spread across one or more systems.
Managing the Modern
Document, by Lee Sherman, Knowledge
Management Magazine, September 2001
In the front page of the business section (
“Workplace training programs are nothing new, of
course. But now companies are discovering a bigger advantage in using computers
to educate their workers about policies against sexual harassment and age and
racial discrimination: as a shield against unwanted lawsuits…
So long as its employees are trained about
impermissible behavior and the recourse that victims can take, an employer will
have a strong legal defense against liability if a victim of harassment by a
co-worker sues, employment lawyers say…
Online programs have a particular appeal for
multinationals, for which organizing classroom courses would be a logistical
nightmare…
Also, if a court decision or legislative initiative
changes the rules of the game, an electronic training program can be updated
quickly. And then there is the benefit of creating a record of who took the
training and when.
“… Orrick's portal is one of the more ambitious big firm models to come along… , lawyers create a new Word document not by clicking on a Word icon, but by clicking on "create document" from the pull-down menu in the portal itself … Lawyers can also enter billing information directly through the portal… And lawyers don't need to open Westlaw or Lexis to run searches; they simply type search terms directly into a query box in the portal… But matter pages form the heart…. They list information about the lawyers and client contacts for each case or deal… tightly integrated with the firm's PC DOCS”
See “Orrick’s Portal Project”, National
Law Journal by Ashby Jones,
“Verity K2 Enterprise has a three-tier foundation that allows enterprises to organize, discover and connect electronic information. Discover means search. Organize means automatic classification. Connect means social networks. Social Networks focus on the patent and latent relationships between the people in an organization and the documents they create, modify, access, search and organize. Verity K2E's personalization feature identifies subject ``experts'' within an enterprise and automatically links users to them while recommending documents based on the users' behavior or search criteria. The result: Verity K2E transcends searching and allows humans to interact with other humans to maximize the efficient utilization of a corporation's information assets. For example, an engineer searching for a product's technical specifications may also locate the product's developers and find relevant documents judged as important by others in the enterprise.” [Emphasis added]
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/010730/sfm026.html
Compare this to the approach of Tacit, which analyzes e-mail content to infer expertise.
“Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP Selects e-Cognita's Streamloaner(TM) Closing Management System to Automate Commercial Real Estate Finance Practice”
e-Cognita appears to have an interesting workflow and document assembly system. It looks promising for high-volume, routine transactions.
See the press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/010711/dew006.html
Or visit http://www.e-cognita.com/ecognita/aboutus/whoweare.asp
Clifford Chance rolls out a new Extranet for clients, supporting both relationship information (e.g., matters in progress, contacts, and financial reports) and matter-specific information (e.g., share documents).
See the press release on the Clifford Chance site.
According to Legal IT
(a
An intriguing and promising new document assembly system… Business Integrity's "Dealmaker" and "IntelligentContracts"
http://www.business-integrity.com
“WestWorks Goes South,” National Law Journal, Monday, July 16, 2001 at Page B12
WestWorks is “a Web-based collection of practice management tools for small and midsize firms… Since West started full-scale marketing of WestWorks in December 2000, sales have been soft. So soft, in fact, that West recently stopped selling WestWorks altogether.”
The Recorder, June 20, 2001 reports that the Venture Law Group moved four associates into non-billable positions to help "build the firm's online resources for clients." This was motivated by tough times, but it is interesting to see firms 1) try to keep talent and 2) build their know-how.
See the press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010618/0374.html
“When venture capitalists raise new funds to invest, they generally need reams of paper in the form of offering memorandums and partnership agreements… [Wilson Sonsini] is trying to alleviate that paper jam with a new service that puts many such documents online in one place… The Document Access & Subscription System was developed in-house at Wilson Sonsini and will be a service for the firm's existing clients and a way to lure new clients.”
Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 11th, Page B5
Interesting article by Warren Cabral, a
See LawTechnology News, June 2001, at Page 12