Christy Burke interviewed some interesting visitors / vendors during LegalTech. Listen to the short interviews here.

Rees Morrison

Four technology observations based on the bio of a speaker at the upcoming Interact Conference

Written by Rees Morrison | 29 March 2010

Rees Morrison One of the speakers at Mitratech’s upcoming Interact Conference,is Libby Troughton, Senior Manager, Legal IT, at The Home Depot. Since the conference doesn’t take place until May 16-19, my observations are based on Troughton’s bio in the program materials.

A - “Troughton directed a multi-year, multi-million dollar project for the custom development and deployment of web-based matter management solution for the legal and compliance departments and 110+ outside counsel law firms; including interfaces to electronic billing, third party claims administrator system, litigation support and content management.” For a legal department of that size and both the scale and complexity of its software solutions, it takes a skilled person, dedicated to the projects, to implement them successfully. To spend several million dollars on such a program is not unheard of.

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IT functions supporting law departments and law firms share some of the same annoyances

Written by Rees Morrison | 08 February 2010

Two points struck me from findings in ILTA’s 2009 Technology Survey, at 42 of law firms: one about the shared challenges of providing technology to lawyers – inside or outside – and the other about overhead support for IT that legal departments often enjoy free of charge.

The law firms that responded to the ILTA survey chose from a list of the “top 3 biggest technology issues or annoyances within your firm.”

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Seven recommendations for successful technology projects in your department

Written by Rees Morrison | 06 October 2009

From guest author Steven Levy, slightly abridged, here are seven key “go-do’s” for successful Legal-IT projects. They’re based on but somewhat different from CIO Magazine’s tips, and they take into account a few ways in which “Legal is different.”

Require an honest business case. ROI, ROI, ROI. I can't repeat this enough. Return on Investment. Understand -- and require proof of -- the value of the project. Then follow through (see item 7).

How can matter management systems average an ROI of 36% of outside counsel spend?

Written by Rees Morrison | 08 November 2009

“Average reported savings from using matter management systems were 36.8% of outside legal spending.” Incredible, and not to be believed.

The claim comes from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, which obtained survey responses from hundreds of ACC-member law departments. I have twice before challenged similar claims drawn from this survey, and won’t repeat my criticisms here (See my post of Aug. 5, 2005: average savings on matter management systems from survey of more than 250 law departments in 2002 was 16%; and April 13, 2007: from same survey in 2006, “average reported savings from using matter management systems was 11% of outside legal spending.”). Little of this do I believe can be substantiated.

Working backwards from a figure of $4 billion to be spent on e-discovery software and services

Written by Rees Morrison | 01 September 2009

The e-discovery niche, according to the ABA J., Vol. 95, Aug. 2009 at 29, is crowded with about 600 vendors. They are jostling for pieces of a large pie. George Socha, a consultant deeply involved in research about e-discovery vendors, projects that “Commercial spending in this young niche is expected to increase this year by 20 percent to $4.05 billion.”

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