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29 March 2010
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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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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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.
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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).
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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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21 July 2009
In mid-May, ten providers of e-billing software received invitations from me to provide metrics for three questions. Two declined but eight sent me data: Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTyMetrix, DataCert, DOELegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti.
One question asked for the “Number of active law department users during the past six months, meaning only those who have logged into your system during that period.” Three companies reported multiple thousands, one reported around 2,000, and two were in the hundreds of law department users. Read more...
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15 July 2009
A surprising emphasis on technology training appeared in a recent white paper. A chart summarizes the survey responses from 150 lawyers among the largest in the United States and Canada, reported in Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in Challenging Times (Robert Half Legal 2009) at 6. The question asked of them was “Which of the following techniques, if any, are being implemented by your law firm to enhance your team’s focus on client services?”
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08 July 2009
Most of the metaposts on Law Department Management Blog look at specific categories of software, including the following seven:
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Contract management (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: contract management software with 11 references.).
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Decision trees (See my post of June 17, 2009: decision tree software with 6 references.)
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Document assembly (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: document assembly with 16 references.).
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Document management (See my post of Dec. 6, 2007: document management with 15 references.).
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Idea visualization (See my post of May 15, 2009: idea relationship software with 6 references.).
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Matter management (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.).
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Portals (See my post of June 27, 2006: portals with 4 references; and Aug. 16, 2006: portals.)
Several metaposts focus on broader aspects of software usage in legal departments, including the entire genre (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: law department software with 59 references.).
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25 June 2009
The larger the legal department, the more likely it has its own employees supporting at least some of its software and hardware. No data exists (that I know of) that tells us the tipping point, where departments typically hire their own technology talent. Most legal departments, and all smaller departments, rely on personnel from the corporate IT function for their support, training, and development needs (See my post of June 16, 2009: Information Technology staff group with 23 references and 1 metapost.).
There are advantages and disadvantages to each solution. Read more...
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16 June 2009
Like other corporate staff groups, IT supports the legal group and is supported by them, such as with contracts issues. They team on some responsibilities, such as e-discovery.
Mostly, however, general counsel often bemoan the lack of support they get from corporate IT. Even with the griping, most software customization projects involve corporate IT. No one can definitively resolve the debate about which support approach is better: support from the company’s IS group or support from members of the legal department. Read more...
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15 June 2009
A survey conducted a year ago on behalf of LexisNexis, hosts of Connected, gathered responses from more than 449 in-house attorneys (See my post of Oct. 12, 2008: background details on the poll; and June 9, 2009: some questions about data on social networks used by corporate counsel.). One question asked “What are the top advantages of participating in an online legal professional network?” Here are the choices on the survey and the percentages of those who selected them. Read more...
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02 June 2009
Law departments ought to consider Microsoft’s SharePoint for some of their automation needs, according to an article by a consulting firm in ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 18. The article describes it as having the potential to serve as a matter management system, a document management system, an integrator of information from other applications, a corporate governance suite, plus much else. More a platform or toolbox than a finished application, SharePoint has many fans. Read more...
"A common vision for control and governance of email and documents that will satisfy legal requirements and address cost and feasibility concerns from the IT department is slowly emerging. The publication of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) has helped a great deal by codifying the common components that the legal department needs and that IT must provide." 
"The persistence of temporary backup files for four days presents obvious security and privacy issues. If such files contain sensitive, confidential, or otherwise privileged information, their existence can expose a law firm to malpractice risk, court sanctions, or other serious problems / penalties
"The UK Legal market is certainly not a leader in Social Networking but one or two firms are using some of the tools such as Linkedin, Blogs, Twitter and a couple are experimenting with Facebook as a consumer facing marketing tool. " 
