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Lexis Nexis aquire UK's Axxia - how things will shape up - a note from Lexis Nexis

2008-02-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

Lexis Nexis present answers to your questions

The strategy

How will the company be structured post-acquisition?

Axxia will join the UK Practice Management portfolio, part of LexisNexis’s Global Practice Management solution line.

Kate Holden will oversee the Global Practice Management portfolio with Edouard Tavernier driving the strategy. Stuart Holden will continue to oversee the Axxia portfolio working with
Dan Marshall, who will be directing all operations across the UK Practice and Productivity
Management business.

Will Axxia be run as a separate business or integrated with LexisNexis?

Axxia will be fully integrated with the LexisNexis business within the next six months.

What is LexisNexis’ mission?

To help our customers to become more efficient, productive and profitable through the provision of integrated workflow-based solutions enhanced with relevant content.

Why has LexisNexis acquired Axxia?

LexisNexis is committed to delivering a solutions strategy offering product and service combinations that address customers’ specific needs and fit into their existing workflow, to enhance productivity and profitability.

As the leading integrated solutions and back office provider for medium-sized law firms, Axxia
has an installed customer base of 220 law firms and over 20,000 users. This makes it an extremely attractive proposition for LexisNexis to combine with its existing portfolio for medium-sized law firms. The acquisition of Axxia will accelerate the delivery of content-enabled workflow solutions for medium-sized law firms.

What will happen to the Axxia corporate brand? What will happen to other brands, such as dna* and Artiion?

To provide the most consistency and clarity in our communication with customers, the company will immediately fully align with the LexisNexis corporate brand.

Axxia will become the umbrella name for a product family within the UK LexisNexis Practice Management portfolio. Product brands acquired from Axxia will include the Axxia name (for
example, "Axxia Artiion", “Axxia dna*). The Axxia product family will be treated in the same
way as the other product families within LexisNexis UK - Butterworths, Tolley, Visualfiles etc.

Does LexisNexis plan to acquire other companies?

We are committed to providing our customers with leading practice and productivity management solutions and will continue to explore all avenues that may help us achieve this
goal.

LexisNexis acquired Visualfiles more than a year ago. Isn’t Axxia operating in the same space?

Although both businesses serve similar organisations, the product portfolios at Axxia and Visualfiles are extremely complementary. Both Visualfiles and Axxia hold leading positions
with their respective offerings. Visualfiles has a first class reputation for its case management
software in both mid and large law and Axxia’s key strength lies in its integrated front and back office solution. With both Visualfiles and Axxia in the LexisNexis stable, we can offer our customers an unparalleled wealth of knowledge and experience across a broad range of markets. This will significantly strengthen our ability to deliver the leading portfolio of integrated and open solutions that satisfy the widest range of customer needs.

Does this acquisition change existing relationships with 3rd party suppliers?

No, we are delighted to be in a position to offer our customers the widest possible choice. Our policy of developing both integrated and open solutions means that we will continue to work
with a wide range of suppliers to satisfy the differing needs of our customers.

Products/technology

What will be the technology platform resulting from the combination of Axxia, LexisNexis and Visualfiles?

LexisNexis currently operates many different technology platforms through which we deliver a
broad range of solutions and capabilities to our clients. As we develop new solutions within our Practice Management portfolio, we will work closely with our clients to select whichever technology platform is most appropriate for their particular needs whilst ensuring that our underlying architectural decisions adhere to key principles:

• Ability of our solutions to integrate with a broad range of 3rd party systems

• Use of mainstream, future-proof technologies

• The provision of a clear evolution path for existing LexisNexis customers

Over time, the mix of technologies we use will evolve to suit the changing needs of the market. Rather than be led by technology, we will be driven by an overriding desire to deliver compelling solutions that genuinely improve the productivity and profitability of our customers.

How will the product portfolios be integrated over time?

LexisNexis will accelerate the execution of existing product roadmaps whilst over time developing a range of new offerings through the combination of LexisNexis and Axxia
capabilities. Integration between Axxia and LexisNexis products will take various forms, from
the launch of standalone product modules to the development of fully integrated suites of back office and front office solutions. Examples of such integrations include:

• Strengthening the integration between Visualfiles case management solutions and the Artiion back office system
• Developing integration between dna* and best of breed LexisNexis applications (e.g. InterAction)
• Combining dna* with LexisNexis Legal and/or Risk & Compliance content to create distinctive value propositions for legal practitioners

Customer Support

What support benefits can customers expect from the combination of Axxia, LexisNexis and Visualfiles?

We aim to deliver “Best in Class” in all aspects of the customer experience and will strive to
continuously improve all aspects of our customers’ contact with us – content, user interfaces,
customer services, billing, etc. We are determined to accomplish unparalleled support and delivery and have committed significant investment in order to achieve this.

Both LexisNexis and Axxia have developed solutions that, following the initial system implementation, enable business users without an IT background to create and maintain
complex applications with the minimum of tuition. This approach protects customers’
investment and maximizes profitability.

On a broader level, both LexisNexis Visualfiles and Axxia share a passion for innovation and
a commitment to developing and delivering customer-driven solutions.

Will there be any changes to my account manager?

We will evaluate the ways we interact with our customers on an ongoing basis to ensure we are delivering the highest quality relationship management. Customers will be notified if there are any plans to change the way their accounts are managed.

Whom should customers call for product support?

We will be working to quickly align our infrastructures, including our customer contact points.
Meanwhile, customers should continue using the existing contacts, and we will ensure enquiries are dealt with by an advisor who can handle their issue.

Whom should customers call for invoice, statement or payment queries?

We will be working quickly to align our billing infrastructures, but at present customers should
continue to use their previous Customer Support team. Any changes to the contact points will
be communicated to customers in advance.

For further information, please contact your account manager or for integration enquiries:

Gunes Sahillioglu
LexisNexis
gunes.sahillioglu AT lexisnexis.co.uk
+44 (0) 77 99 62 16 89

Saturn27 launch

2008-02-06T11:29:00.001-08:00

An independent consultant, not aligned or reselling any vendors products, launches in London. (Saturn27).

Santa and the tech vendor

2008-02-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

Whilst talking to vendors at Legal Tech NYC 2008 and hearing their stories, which are re-told with vigour and enthusiasm each year, I was struck by how similar this moment was to our early childhood. As your Mom told you about sleighs, reindeer and Santa, your friends in the playground dis-illusioned you and called you a fool for believing in such silly things. Over the years vendors have had their up and down cycles with R&D, but inevitably bounce back and each time they ask us to 'believe' again (and again), that software like Santa will make all your law firm dreams come true.

We want to believe: we like our vendors, but I guess, it is up to you to decide if you believe in Santa or what your playground buddies say.

Tech-philanthropy

2008-02-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Client Profiles, who are Atlanta based, are soon to launch the CP Foundation and aim to 'partner' with law firms to raise $2.5 million for charitable causes including education programmes in Georgia. Their drive will be to do deals with law firms with a negotiated percent going to their CP (Client Profiles) Foundation.

Running the CP Foundation as a not for profit, Whit McIsaac the CEO of Client Profiles, plans to raise the quality of Georgia education and its ranking, which currently sits at number 49 out of 50 compared with Atlanta which is ranked as one of the top spots in the country for education.

Client Profiles is already working on software deals with clients at discount costs to help Californian lawyers working with death row inmates.

Whit was inspired after hearing a CSR talk at Clifford Chance, who are following or mirroring their clients, like UBS and Credit Suisse in matching funds that employees give to charity to help their local communities.

Client Profiles grew 29% in 2007 and Whit believes their Microsoft alliance has helped them really reach the top. "They have 20,000 sales people and 4,500 partners." He points out, highlighting their capacity for sales. Client Profiles have made great strides in the UK market also recently partnering with well known reseller and consultant TFB.

http://www.clientprofiles.com/

Also see my article on http://www.probono.net/ on this or the Microsoft professional site.

The soft economy

2008-02-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

George I. Rudoy, the Director of Global Practice Technology & Information Services, who by his own admission has a long job title, works at Shearman& Sterling LLP in New York. Just back from San Francisco, he has a schedulethat would barely allow most of us to breathe. Speaking at Legal Tech next week, he says his theme will focus on the newage of legal technology. “We might already be in the middle of it,” he says laughing. The new age for legal services and law firms will or has arrived because there is a realization, he says, that technology is an absolute must in law firms. “It’s not just your generic technology like DM or emailsystems, but more specific technology for the business of law.” George saysthere is a new notion. “People need to be both technologists and businessanalysts, as well as understand end deliverables. We came up with the ideaof the Head of Practice Management, which fits with some firms but notothers, so it may get refined.” He thinks there is much more to it than isolated litigation support, library or KM functions. “It’s a combined effort of technologists, ex-legal assistants who became technologists and‘recovering attorneys'. These individuals appreciate the challenges and thedeadlines and tend to be more outward looking.” George paints a scenariowhere lawyers won’t have to search for solutions by contacting different departments around the firm, but instead have someone like the Head ofPractice Management analyze their business problem, develop a strategy,coordinate departments, and carry out the solution. “Tell me what service or solution you want and I will translate that into a vision.” He confirms.“It’s not just about a liaison; it's more than that. We sit in with theattorneys and attend their 'business pitch' meetings to highlightcapabilities like speed of service, deliverables, and cost management toclients. Attorneys are comfortable with the idea that we participate incase discussions, and it gives us an opportunity to give each case theproper assessment and consult on the use of technology it requires.”George says he would typically expect to deliver ‘the full servicepackage.’ “Although the idea isn’t new, I believe we, the technologists,should work very closely with the legal assistants. Some firms evendecided to merge the technologists and legal assistants under the umbrellaof Practice Management. At the end of the day, we must be a businessorientated group that is strongly aligned with marketing and business development initiatives.” He says the idea is picking up steam, and more firms are appointing directors or chief executives of practice management.At this time, he says there are no more than ten such people in the world,with only four or five being officially recognized as Heads of PracticeManagement. I asked if it means the techies should get MBA’s, but hedoesn’t think it is essential. “We are business savvy and earn our workingMBA’s by being close to the economy of the law firm.” He suggests the realskill is in being able to understand how to help a client beyond supporting a case. “You can see how it is put together. I go along to client pitchesthese days and have an opportunity to tell our clients that Shearman attorneys are much more efficient and effective in delivering their legalservices because they are strong users of technology. No two pitches arethe same so I focus on understanding the client's unique business needs toget their full attention.” George says this is a good way to differentiateShearman & Sterling from other firms competing in this space.George believes today's legal technologists even have an opportunity toprovide some of the solutions for the economic problems currently beingexperienced in the USA. “It’s more than evident that we are in the middleof a recession. We’ve already seen an AmLaw 100 law firm recently lay off asignificant number of attorneys, and the others will most certainly follow.The more progressive thinkers have already started to downsize, which couldprove to be crucial. In past down cycles, the litigation and bankruptcycase load arrived to balance the books. However, this time it is nothappening yet, or, according to some sources, will not happen at all. The government is in rescue mode, so not only is transactional work down butthe bankruptcy work isn’t appearing, and companies save money and settlelitigations rather than go to trial.” This highlights how difficult it may eventually get for law firms. “The current economic conditions might influence the way that legal services are delivered, as well as the degree of technology used to augment these services in order to stay competitive.It will influence not only the choice of internally used products, but also creates an interesting environment for the industry vendors. We can make adifference with clients with improved technology, but vendors are going tohave to be sensible; they can’t just keep raising their prices. "If I have a department of twenty people and little work in the pipeline, the first answer isn’t to lay off staff that took significant resources to hire. We may get a new case the next day but I can’t buy all the necessary softwareon the fly. However, if I have a relationship with a vendor who could workin the way most suited for case needs and be hired for the duration of thecase, then that is what I am going to do.”George doesn’t hold out much hope that the question of technology helpingattorneys during difficult economic times will get much air time at LegalTech and other Legal Technology events because he says it takes time formajority of people to catch on. “I spoke about Unicode compliance andcross-border document collection challenges for more than a year beforeothers picked up on the notion.” He stresses the point. “But I hope this one will be recognized fast - technology will help firms in tough times. It will help win and keep clients if you can say you apply technology againstthe practice of law to stay effective and efficient, especially in fiscally challenging times.”

Open Text v Interwoven

2007-12-19T16:36:00.000-08:00

These days in UK legal the facts speak for themselves: Interwoven on numbers has won the sales battle of the DM/ECM and Geoff Hornsby is officially a David Beckham “golden balls” style superstar. Even the president of Interwoven happily talks of his success.

In an article I wrote some time ago for Citytech, Interwoven was winning the race for having been consistent in supporting legal, which can not be underestimated: good vendor relationships matter, as does consultancy and solid sales support.

So, why the heck should we get involved with some more vendor DM/ECM hustle as OpenText (formerly Hummingbird) insist on tempting us with their slick software ways and interesting interfaces away from Interwoven? Well if you haven’t realised already, everything changes. Staff come and go, branding and websites look like dogs dinners after a couple of years and more and more organisations are in buyout mode: your boss today, may not be your boss tomorrow (so no point sucking up to them too much).

In our modern day, which will undoubtedly look prehistoric in years to come, we must understand that software isn’t an heirloom to be handed down over generations. It’s a temporary state that provides excellence and good effort at that slot in time. The minute something new is developed like email replacing the phone call and fax replacing the telex, its time to march forward and listen to new stories. Making the most of your software and current purchases is fine but there is a point where you just have to say “telex go to that landfill site and create a hole in the ozone layer (or recycle thyself).”

Whether you are looking at a DM/ECM purchase or not and many of you at the top end won’t be for a couple of years with so many new Interwoven sales on the books, there is an undisputed growth in the desire to have this type of software. Interwoven sales stats showed a 25% increase in a recent quarter of completely fresh deals. Never been seen in legal before and not gravitated. That means that IT Directors are spending, if not at the top end then moving down a bit to mass-market, mid tier and smaller firms.

So there is lots of business sloshing around and some of you do need to know which way to turn. I’m afraid the answer is not easy.

Current management thinking, says that organisations will have to shape up to face the future. Considering both OpenText and Interwoven, each have positioned themselves well. Interwoven is the leaner, meaner, marketing machine, able to react on a dime and provide what you want. OpenText are going for 100% market share which is said to be a sure-fire way to win by ensuring you grab all customers before anyone else can.

Speaking to Open Text they hypnotise you with sensible explanations. Its hard not to buy into the philosophy. Their reason for buying Hummingbird was simple they say. “It brought two markets to us: government and legal. We realised the nuances in each vertical market were important and knew it was essential to have the particular expertise within. Acquiring this information, allows us to translate products into useable software.”

They also says that the fit was perfect in that Hummingbird did well with Canada, Australia and UK government and Open Text did well with the US government. It seems for some time the Hummingbird customer share had been coveted in the Open Text camp.

The approach is pragmatic. “Its going to take time to get our house in order but that is what we are concentrating on first. Our responsibility now is to current customers and to make sure they are happy and are behind the direction we are taking. After that, when our install base is behind us, then we will be targeting new customers aggressively. We have world class support and developers to maintain market share and a 95% client retention rate.” Said a now former staff member.

I asked what they thought made a successful software company. He said it was a combination of things: Opportunity; being ready for opportunity; relentless focus on a market; extraordinary development and support staff and focused management.

Of the merger the commentator said. “This merger will give customers real benefits as we go deeper into R&D. We are significantly larger now which will give us enormous leverage.”

Interwoven of course, do not agree.

Max Carnecchia is President at Interwoven and no-one can dispute that his eye for a hire and staff motivation must be top tier. With a background in electrical engineering he has spent the last five or so years on the customer side of the business. It is obvious he is a gifted man manager: you don’t get rocketing sales with unhappy and de-motivated staff.

He is resolute in saying that “the customer drives everything.” He is closely in touch with his workforce and knows that their Gear Up conference doubled in size this year and that Geoff Hornsby, their sales supremo, is on a roll. I quiz Max Carnecchia about his average day and he says confidently that he spends “25% planning and 75% working with teams and keeping lines of communication open.”

The next big thing for Interwoven in this space is the “corporate legal department.” As in-house counsel wise up to technology, Interwoven see an easy extension of their expertise into the notoriously ill equipped in house counsel territory. Ben Kiker is set to help this push, he sits as Senior Vice President controlling the marketing function. (Neil Araujo, founder of iManager which was bought out by Interwoven, is in his team). They also have their Universal Search functionality, which they are confident is going to sweep the board with Oscar style success.

His background encompasses a mortgage call centre and then substantial time in the CRM space. He takes his job very seriously and believes Interwoven have one of the strongest brands in legal.

So Interwoven v Open Text? As you can see, I am not giving you much help, in fact firmly sitting on the fence. Interwoven say “look at our proven track record with legal”; Open Text say “We own Hummingbird and now Open Text in this space, things are going to get much more interesting.”

Whatever happens, both sides agree that relationships are everything. Both are very keen to say that its all about the customer and seem prepared to bend over backwards to deliver software that suits you exactly.

Its clear, Interwoven are sitting pretty. They already have deals in most of the key UK legal firms and now extending their client base into corporate legal consolidates this.

Open Text are battling with a merger; making staff redundant and putting themselves up against Interwoven who are a proven, slick machine running at full speed. At best that looks a difficult place to be.

So what does do OpenText think about this stiff competition? “I’d be surprised if Interwoven were still around in a few years time.” They said.□

The low down

Open Text is easily twice the financial size of Interwoven. It opened its doors for business in 1991. For the quarter ended September 30, 2006, Opentext expects to report revenue between $99 million and $101 million. The Hummingbird. transaction was valued at approximately US$489 million. Nine of the top 10 global law firms and 65 percent of AmLaw 100 firms now own these products (Hummingbird and Opentext). After acquiring Hummingbird they have a workforce of 3,500 people but plan to reduce this with a 15% head-count redundancy programme.

Interwoven has achieved their success in one decade. Interwoven revenues for 2005 totaled $175 million. Interwoven customers include 9 of the top 10 global companies and 64 of the top 100 US law firms. They started the company in 1995.

Chewing the ECM gum

Strangely there is still some confusion about the two competing DM/ECM companies in legal. Trying to get direct comparison’s on the two (or in fact others) isn’t always easy.

Buying software is a worrying experience. No-one wants to make a mistake, so confidence is something that software companies need to build, like governments campaigning for your vote. There are expensive teams of people ensuring you get lots of good news, have the right spin and people standing up to be counted (testimonials/case studies).

Interwoven say: look at our market share and look at our recent success in legal. They also say: Why have large UK law firms like Simmons & Simmons dropped Open Text in favour of Interwoven?

Open Text say: concentrate on the products - they will stand the test of time. Open Text has a 95% customer retention rate and positions itself against meatier players like IBM/ Filenet.

I say: The spin here is really about UK legal and Geoff Hornsby (Interwoven sales) who is definitely basking in the ECM sunshine. However all software needs replacing at some stage. Both companies will have to deliver consistent products or the balance can shift either way. As Cathy Wallach, President at EncoreTech said in a Citytech interview: “the use of each software goes in waves of popularity.” Over time like stockmarkets, blips iron out.

OpenText say

“More on more applications will merge and be built on top of each other. The main players will be IBM/Filenet, EMC/ Documentum and we are the third and already have 50% market share.”

OpenText pitch

John Shackleton is President and CEO of Open Text. He joined in 1998 and has a background that encompasses Oracle and Sybase and also on the management team of the first ever DM company Viewstar.

Hot shot clients on board already: “The merger of Hummingbird and Open Text has resulted in a leading independent ECM vendor that is one of the top three vendors in this rapidly consolidating market,” said Sue Hall, CTO, Baker & McKenzie and co-chair of Open Text Legal CIO Advisory Board. “This brings exciting possibilities for legal customers both in terms of products and services. I am looking forward to working with Open Text management to help deliver solutions that meet the needs of the legal market.”

Open Text statistics: Open Text supports approximately 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries and 12 languages. For the quarter ended September 30, 2006, Open Text expect to report revenue between $99-101 million.

Interwovens thoughts

Neil Araujo who runs Interwoven’s, VP of Legal Services Marketing says he sees Opentext as “a Swiss army knife, with multiple blades, tin openers and cork screws. You need it if you are going camping but perhaps not if just cooking a meal.” Of the best campaign he has ever run in legal he says “switch to Interwoven” was the most effective. Of other marketers he praises ‘Apple’ and Denton Wilde Sapte. He says “people just love Apple” and “Denton Wilde Sapte really got their message across – if you want this type of law, ring us.” He sees their success in clearly identifying what they are about. Neil wrote the first few versions of the software. He says that the forward motion for Interwoven is to make the IT experience for lawyers/attorneys much simpler.

He believes that customers don’t like being sold to and that you really only want to see them when your need arises and not before. He thinks that all vendors in this space have functionality, performance and stability but that Interwoven are better at performance and stability.

He confirms the biggest change their industry ever saw was brought about by the email.

Interwoven movers & shakers

Max Carnecchia
President

Ben Kiker
Senior Vice President

Neil Araujo
VP Legal Services Marketing

Major event to meet heads of accountancy and law firms plus global banks, London May 8th 2008

2007-12-14T02:39:00.000-08:00

Citytech a market leading legal tech publication has a sister publication called Citywealth that runs events that have become legendary for attracting ‘stellar’ audiences and for providing Five star comfort and entertainment for important accountants, lawyers and attorneys, wealth managers, private bankers, consultants and advisors and rich list guests. A mix of sophistication with cultural themes, Citywealth events encourage attendees to linger, something that no other publishing and events company serving the industry has managed on such a scale. This year numbers are set to exceed the four hundred mark and guests will be some of the biggest glocal names in the world - UBS, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and Citigroup who are the major purchasers of technology in the world and referrers of billionaire clients and for those seeking affluent individuals (like lifetyle companies), attendees are very wealthy individuals themselves (c£1-5million). The Citywealth Top 100 lists are now in an advanced stage, with those listed for 2008, shortly to be notified that their slot is assured. Many have left the list this year, new entrants have arrived. The nail biting tension begins, culminating in our flagship event “The Zoo Do.” Tickets are limited, please book now to secure your spot.

See our events on the website http://www.citywealthmag.com/

Contact ljarvis at j-p-c.tv for sponsorship information which starts at £7,995 + vat to invite select guests on a table of ten and includes advertising by web and in the programme on the night. Overall sponsorship is £50,000 + vat and includes a two minute speaking slot.

The search gold rush

2007-12-14T02:35:00.000-08:00

John Tredennick a Denver, Colorado, US based tech entrepreneur spent twenty years of his working life as a trial lawyer at Holland & Hart.

Doing a UK visit at the moment, he is keen to look at Europe because his current clients, who are corporates involved with mergers and acquisitions performing extensive due diligence, are increasingly asking for an EU data centre, as their business sprawls across the world. This is something that will resonate with most UK law firms, who tell any US lit’ vendor who steps on UK shores “we need data held here, not in the USA.”

John, who founded the business in 2000, is seeing a marked increase in due-diligence-style search requests from corporates who are keen to understand any liabilities, particularly environmental, in an age where this is of increasing concern to governments and the public and legally he says “could end up ripping a company apart.” He is also getting frequent requests for merger and acquisition, due diligence reports and ‘second request’ reviews which allow the US government to do a deeper drill down should a ‘first request’ not satisfy them.

But his order books weren’t always so bountiful. Receiving backing to the tune of $1million in 2000 and with a staff of six, his board asked for a review of the company and the future of search from experts. The feedback was terrifying. “Shut it down, there is no money in that business.” John says it was a pretty difficult time. “Search wasn’t a big deal then. I had $200,000 left in the bank, wages to pay and the future looked pretty bleak.” Fortunately his backers weren’t pushing for closure, so he knuckled down and time brought some big contracts to the company, but he says with a shrug of his shoulders and a frank smile. “I can’t say I knew it was definitely going to happen.”

Now an author of note with books, magazines and articles under his belt, John says Catalyst has picked up fifty sites with ease following their partnership with Fast who offer hosted, search software which he says uses multiple servers for searches with anything up to five hundred terms. He tells us why they are better than others. “Old search engines were built in the seventies, then in ‘98 Google landed with new architecture. Fast, who are Norwegian, were born ten years ago and similarly built their business with new ideas and architecture.” He adds an example of their power. “The Library of Congress had five exabytes in 2004 but Fast scanned ten exabytes that year alone.”

John, who is a great story teller, says Catalyst has fifty staff in Denver and eighteen in Bangalore who he confirms have a strong bond with the US office. He thinks the edge his company has over others is the speed and language capability which spans eighty different types. “We’re getting more and more foreign documents to review, including Korean recently which meant reviewing character styles.” He says. “In the past vendors used to grab a dictionary, scan the lot, then work from there and most software can still only do one language search each time and can’t recognise differences in character spacing. We can do twenty queries a second compared to twenty minutes with one search elsewhere. Fast do bigger stuff than Google: they handle 32G compared to 1G worth of data.” He adds that Autonomy is the closest rival but thinks Fast are better for straight, rather than conceptual search.

As Catalyst have come to the UK with a solid business stream from US companies expanding onto European shores, battling increasing US regulatory burdens and ongoing data rises, it looks as though John and his near seventy strong international team, can now sit back with some satisfaction, benefiting from being one of the few who strike gold in the multi language, high speed “search gold rush.”

www.catalystsecure.com

Trilantic litigation support talk about eMailThread

2007-12-14T02:23:00.000-08:00

eMailThread – Reduce the volume of eMails to be Reviewed

eMailThread, unlike other technologies, uses the content of emails to determine the thread which allows the legal review team to focus review efforts on the last email in the thread. By analysing the content, you can be sure that the “inclusive” email contains the information from all the previous layers in the thread negating the need to review the other mails.

www.trilantic.co.uk

3E or not 3E?

2007-12-12T02:47:00.000-08:00

There’s a rumble in the legaltech jungle at the moment and 3E is on the drums. There has been lots of good feedback and a few “its amazing” comments and lots of deals but this has been followed by a backwash of “oh but we don’t want to have to chuck our current stuff away” type feedback. So for a while I’ve been chasing a demo and chance to hear what the score was in the Enterprise v 3E match.

According to Kaye Sycamore who heads up the Thomson Elite sales team and was recently promoted to overall boss, Thomson has employed an army of R&D techies on 3E and by all accounts this has cost a small fortune.

3E does simple stuff like clip into Outlook and SharePoint and wasn’t really worth getting screen shots for, because these days you almost don’t need to bother. Its all much more intuitive and a lot of software seems very similar to me. Click here for this, click there for that and lots of dedicated areas and slice ‘n’ dice options. Naturally I’ve oversimplified but you get what I mean, plus you can do what you like with it, with drag n’ drop customisation, so it will just look how you want it to look anyway.

About the criticism being levelled at 3E, Kaye Sycamore says this is not the first major change or leap that Thomson Elite have ever made and suggests that the “noise” in the sector is unnecessary. She says “this is a fifth generation system; we’ve had many big generational shifts spanning twenty years.” She admits that they’ve always previously developed on their existing platform but adds “there have been so many major technological developments in the last five years that we had to make the decision to stay with our current legacy system - Enterprise - or break free to create more benefits.”

Kaye says firmly “we aren’t asking any existing customers to migrate; Enterprise is going to continue side by side with full Elite support and backing. We want new customers and new markets and that is what 3E has been developed for.”

Whether this is a new plan or not, I don’t know, but I guess the furore has emerged because 3E salespeople have been in to see existing legal Enterprise customers to show them their new app’.

It’s a difficult sell, in that, if you just bought a new car and then get a leaflet about an improved one, you are either going to be a bit annoyed or bonkers to upgrade…unless some other big change occurs at the same time. A bit like trading your 4x4 jeep in for a little electric car. The reason would be blindingly obvious, you are saving the environment.

I think the reasoning behind the new 3E app.’ is similar to that. Technology has just moved on. It isn’t only Thomson Elite saying ‘we are changing for the better’; its everyone. Suddenly Interwoven have full functionality on the BlackBerry ®. We all get sms from Addison Lee, the taxi firm and you can get karaoke on your iPod (iKaraoke). Technology got much better, very quickly basically.

In my book their move makes sense. Why wait until Enterprise is falling over like our subway system and costs money to patch and takes long periods offline to fix? They can get something else running side by side like Richard Branson did with the railway. Taking time to update and look after existing stock but all the while bringing online a speedy new option at the same time. Kaye says “we are offering the best of both worlds.”

I guess if any of the above worries you then its time to look at your contracts and speak to Thomson Elite but with an £8 billion balance sheet, they really do have the greenbacks to do what they say.

Pissing you off as well doesn’t seem to me to be a very clever option. They are a market leader, have been for years so why would they shoot themselves in the foot by getting all dodgy on the support?

I think the only issue is keeping up with the Joneses. Someone got a new system before you: so why not work out if you can live with that? The other problem may be for the competing vendors in the sector. The new 3E ‘sell’ is decidedly combative. The main message from Team Elite is that you can migrate from whatever you currently have (not just 3E) and Thomson Elite will work out your connectors, click ins and middleware. If you want to migrate they will convert data and do configurations. Basically they are keen.

So onto SAP.

IT directors say that the new 3E project is pushing them to review SAP. If they are going to go to all the trouble of changing their whole system, then they may aswell look at the market options thoroughly. With a big campaign just started on telly in the UK “SAP isn’t just for big companies, its for SME’s (small to medium size enterprises) too. It would seem to be pushing itself back into our frontal lobes. Kaye is quick to respond “We are offering a global business solution. SAP are invisible in the USA and Asia Pacific, they have Germany and some of Europe and that’s it.” She does concede though that SAP functionality has turned heads. Kaye says “We’ve listened and taken law firm comments into account.” Hinting that 3E have covered every objection and you won’t be yearning for that SAP demo anymore. Kaye continues “law firms want global financial software and need to control risk long-term. If the market is marching forward, we want to lead.”

The development of 3E took three years and a hundred people on their engineering team to bring to market. Key performance indicators are entirely customisable with their ‘timekeeper’ functionality and its made to be essentially what you want.

I ask about the trends Kaye is seeing in law firms: any time n’ billing hot tips? Apparently not. Kaye says “its very different in every firm - some want lawyers to see all their financials and some don’t.”

Focusing back onto 3E, the message that becomes loud and clear is that their new offering is pure ERP. It is for the law firm with multiple offices, who doesn’t want disparate data or systems. Its for firms who want one view of the financial position for staff wherever they may be located around the world or different national locations. Kaye regularly says “the data I’m showing you is sitting in Los Angeles,” to demonstrate this point.

She says “you can look at individuals performance, view particular departments or look by client. Stats are real time or near real time depending on how the firm wants it. New information can feed into the system every minute or every week.”

Views consist of ‘billed, collected and written off’ and all is context sensitive. Reports are report-ready with different drill down. There is also a query option within 3E to put notes on files and send them to action queues of someone else in the legal chain. For money laundering you can add pdf’s of passports and link these to your DM.

A phrase that popped up was “self service”. Rather than having staff waiting for chunks of information they are sourcing it themselves. Kaye adds “its all about speeding up the process.”

I decide we have hit another SAP moment and ask her to defend the comment that software has got a little too much functionality these days, suggesting that a return to simplification may be around the corner. Kaye disagrees: “people need to grow into software, it needs to last the distance. There should be more than you need on offer. 3E has multi currency selections; can check up on lawyers and can compare lawyers and there is a ‘secure module’ for the uber bosses to see confidential areas.”

Having heard a lot of about customisation being easy but suspecting its all slick, sales patter, Kaye obligingly clicks to the back end and switches between screens and she drags off a couple of columns then clicks back to show they are gone.

I wonder about implementation times and this triggers some advice. She says: “So many firms go for a ‘big bang’ approach, wanting it all out of the way in one go. This inevitably takes between nine to eighteen months. (Small firms 9, big firms 18). We are proposing a phased implementation with individual pushes which may take up to six months at a time.”
She cites Team Elite clients Lovells and Weil Gotschall as taking eighteen months.

Kaye continues “its all about less human involvement in cash cycles.” I asked if she thinks law firms are faster at billing these days. She comments “some are and some aren’t.” I push for a tasty example but don’t get anything more.

Getting back to the technology and why Thomson Elite chose such a hard path for themselves, Kaye takes a deep breath and reconfirms: “technology is just so much faster these days with much less code. In previous software we would have had 5,500 lines of code now this is replaced with 500 and we have modernised using Web 2.0 techniques.

As Kaye globe trots a lot, I wondered which country was winning the tech’ dominance race? Was it still Australia, UK then USA? Kaye says “its very hard to compare country by country. Each has its own requirements. Australia is very competitive: there are only five big banks and two big airlines so they need to get a lot out of their tech’ purchases; the US is litigation focused which brings its own specialist needs and the UK similarly has its own economic factors.”

I enquire about market feedback and so far, Kaye comments “we are very happy. People see the benefits of re-architecting and take up is looking good.”

In my view most vendors are experts and offer a broad view of the legal world which you would do well to tap into. I ask what the problems are for law firms in taking up software projects. Kaye comments “for most firms, its their capacity to change. Also some law firms lose sight of what they are doing with a project and forget their objectives. She reiterates “it is important to phase introduction and implement progressively.”

As to business trends, Kaye comments “Most are looking at international growth and more efficiency. Also for us the buyer has moved seats. We used to speak mainly to FD’s but the decision now lies with IT directors.” As to why this might be Kaye confirms “its more a business system now, not just about the finance department.”

Wrapping up, I ask Kaye what she would like the legal market to know. She says “its about the three E’s: embedded business processes; enabling your firm to be its best and allowing you to be everywhere with one single, global financial system.

As to developments at Thomson Elite. Kaye finishes “In the past we’ve been perceived as the UK branch of a US entity but the changes that have taken place in the last twelve months have changed us culturally. We now see ourselves as a large, global software team.

So 3E or not 3E? I think it’s the vendors who should be worried, not you the law firm clients.

3E is built on Microsoft, Sequel server and .NET.□

Reprintable paper

2007-12-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

One of the law firms sent me a link to this article to fuel the fire on the old paper debate. Will we ever give it up or will it remain our friend through thick and thin?

The law firm person commented

“We've been saying for some years that with the rise of electronic information that paper is dead. The announcement by Toshiba of reusable paper may well lead to one of us checking our pulse for a premature diagnosis.

Potentially, if it really works properly and takes off it could cause no end of ructions from a legal perspective. Imagine the scenario "You can't prove that I wrote the blackmail note because I've printed over it" You can't prove that you made manuscript notes on the contract that made it watertight because its been overprinted"

"No, we don't keep any records, the company policy is that we overprint our documents after 6 months"

Reading the article on the PC Pro site it seems this is akin to a prototype: nice idea but can it really work?

The jury is out and even Toshiba after negative press have gone for a low key launch and are phasing it into countries rather than going for a global launch.

One imagines it’s a ‘green’ idea but as our law firm commentator pointed out, it rather changes the direction of the paper/or not paper debate.

Interestingly, all the multi function peripheral manufacturers (photocopiers to you and me) and cost recovery people are going the ‘paper will never end’ route. They believe everyone has been saying it for so long that the desire to print will remain and is set for serious growth.

Introduction to TAPI and USB Handsets

2007-12-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

In future releases of Windows 2000 operating systems, Microsoft is planning to provide built-in support for USB-connected handset devices. Support will initially be targeted for USB composite devices that implement audio functionality compliant with the USB Device Class Definition for Audio Devices, Version 1.0, plus a human interface compliant with the USB Device Class Definition for Human Interface Devices (HID), Version 1.0 and Version 1.1.

Such devices will be supported by enhanced TAPI functionality and by TAPI-enabled applications such as future versions of Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing software.
NOTE: All features are in a planning stage only, and Microsoft has not committed to delivering these features in any form in any particular release of any product.

Windows 2000 includes TAPI 3.0, a set of services and APIs for building telephony applications. TAPI 3.0 allows applications to make use of telephony infrastructure for both call control and media streaming in a device-independent, language-neutral manner. In addition, TAPI 3.0 includes native support for IP telephony protocols.

To encourage the development of USB telephony devices and to facilitate adoption of PC-based IP telephony, Microsoft is planning to add support for USB-connected handsets to Windows. The purpose of these devices is to improve the user experience for PC-based telephony by presenting the user with a familiar audio streaming and call control interface. Experience has shown that many users prefer a phoneset-like interface for making telephone calls because of the familiarity, simplicity, privacy, and protection from echo that such an interface can provide.
Optionally, a phone keypad on the device can provide familiar dialing capabilities. Devices without a phone keypad are also useful; dialing can be accomplished using voice recognition, TAPI 3.0 directory integration, or the numeric keypad on a PC keyboard.
www.microsoft.com

Tikit and TFB partner with Corebridge

2007-12-10T03:06:00.000-08:00

If Tikit and TFB have signed Corebridge then this app’ is coming to a desk near you (UK) very soon. Best to be prepared.

You may be thinking “oh, seen all that before” type of thing and I do remember there was a rash of telephony type people swilling around in the market a few years ago (many of whom have since disappeared). This seems to be in the same general ball park but is more developed. Rather than just allowing dialling from your computer it actually brings up documents across various different software applications.

As we all know Tikit are quite sniffy about who they partner with. It is an acceptance badge to have Tikit signed up already.

So what is it? Well its software that integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. At its heart the app’ has a meta directory which gathers basic contact information. This is synchronised with multiple databases and directories.

Which means when calls arrive key data is found before the phone rings and launched for the person answering the call. If there is a bad debt it can re-route callers to accounts. (Only for the very brave that one I would say). Both Jenny Peart, Marketing Manager at Corebridge and Sarah Cox in the same role at TFB confirm that individual rules for each firm can be set up.

Corebridge say very bravely that their technology will have as much impact as email. Also that implementation times are three to five days on a single site.

TFB who offer case and practice management software called ‘Partner for Windows’
Launched their partner programme about six months ago and since then have been ‘ironing out creases’ and lunching law firm purchasers in the UK to promote the product.

Jenny Peart gives us her take on the software “if you are sitting in your office it will auto-launch applications. Law firm clients using it can see who is phoning but will it also bring up relevant casefiles. And it also tells you if your clients are on ‘stop’. You can automatically route callers accounts payable. Essentially you set up the rules you want to achieve your aims.”

One message that Jenny says repeatedly is that “it doesn’t change the way anyone works. Jenny continues “It slots in between apps and telephones which links through TAPI- enabled technology. It doesn’t change systems, it just enhances them.” (See later note from Microsoft on what TAPI enabled means). Continuing Jenny says “the Corebridge server sits in the middle and acts as an interface between the two. In our view it just makes people faster.” Then adds “Its not data management, it just flags it up, but if you pull up five apps and start to see disparate data you will obviously be able to correct this.”

Jenny continues “What we are hearing more, about is convergence. Corebridge does not only doesn’t change anything but all the systems you put in place for particular reasons will work better. “

So down to the tacky question of cost. After a bit of thinking Jenny says “You can come on board for as little as £50 per user. We have a matrix of cost breakdown which is published on our brochures.”

Corebridge the company – the low down.

Jenny says “The CEO Dr Francis Zadan, had the foresight back in 2003 and realised the potential to work more effectively. He is a major shareholder.”

Corebridge have fifty employees

Background of Jenny Peart, Marketing Manager from Corebridge: Been with Corebridge for six months. Her main experience is in product management and product marketing but she also did consulting for Centrica (energy company) and Intuit (business and financial management software). Jennifer also has some twelve or thirteen years of telecoms and ISP experience.

Main areas of Corebridge business currently are: Recruitment, finance and investment banking. Legal is a new push with TFB and Tikit as core partners.

Main benefits of using Corebridge: Can log all time spent on emails for time and billing. Can see correspondence on email, phone, mobile, pda, CRM and case management.
In terms of contact lists you can, click on telephone numbers and the software dials it.

Clients so far: Investment bank in Hong Kong. Further announcements due out shortly.□

www.corebridge.com

Technology training? On a need to know basis

2007-12-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

Many pioneers throughout history have been ignored. Their inventions, idealisms or artistic endeavours discounted or under appreciated during their life times. We are sometimes embarrassed to be wrong or stand up and say something that others with stronger opinions disagree with. However, history is a great story teller. It allows time to unfold truths that aren’t always visible to us at our position in time. Training is almost in this camp. Like a warm cup of hot, sweet tea, it sits in the background – often taken for granted. Where ‘intuitive software’ wins its sales war by “cutting down training costs” with ‘ease of use’, many maintain that a little more investment and attention to training is the birth of those eureka moments for techno-phobes “I get it!” can be a building block to help staff work faster and provide hands on help for others. It reduces desktop support, frustration and ultimately moves law firms toward quicker software integrations in future. Arguably by skimping on training, you keep your firm handcuffed to the past.

In technology we mostly talk excitedly of the “next big thing.” Many people are keen to identify the problems of the future and be respected and revered as a trend setter or product spotter.

For others it is refreshing to step away from this industry froth and talk of “maximising purchasing investment” or concentrating on internal mechanisms without the noise of new product salespeople, financiers and the media clouding judgement. The latter group is almost Swiss in its attitude - steady and slowly wins the race.

For those involved with training, change in the technology industry happens as Cathy Wallach of EncoreTech puts it “in incremental shifts.” In essence applications such as Word, Interwoven and OpenText remain much the same but economic and software developments bring improvements and additions.

Specialising in document management Cathy works with her co-founder, Stacy Gittleman, who was the first trainer working with her in her previous entity Perfect Access Speer (sold in 1998). Working across the USA, clients range from firms such as Clifford Chance to big corporates like Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley brought EncoreTech in to learn proprietary systems, write up manuals and then train them.

Surprisingly e-learning has not made much impact on the training business. Its used mainly to give students a quick heads up before EncoreTech hit the classroom. Cathy says these days the emphasis is on quick training or “what do you need to know training” so their emphasis is on being ultra prepared, getting it right and having a one-stop project manager for each client.

Other ongoing clients include Debevoise & Plimpton, McCarter & English and Cadwalader with two to three month training projects usually on the cards and big EncoreTech teams parachuting in, to get the job done.

But training is not all fabulous big contracts, there is a known under investment that pervades the corporate and SME world that mainly centres around smaller firms. Cathy says “the big firms talk to each other so they know they need training. In smaller firms they work so much on their own that they can’t understand the impact of an assistant spending ten rather than four hours on trying to fathom out how different document formatting works. Training increases productivity enormously.”

Getting clients mainly by referral, EncoreTech do the rounds at ILTA and LegalTech but say their plan is to stay at a level of around twenty five trainers to keep the business controlled and high quality. She comments “Stacy and I have both been in the training business for more than twenty years and we know its hard to maintain quality when you stretch to a hundred people.”

http://www.encoretech.com/

Bill Kirby, tech consultants, ten point plan for aligning IT strategy

2007-12-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

Ten point plan for aligning IT with business goals

1. Commit money to unforeseen costs like necessary project management, business process review and training. Most projects fail or are less successful because of lack of ongoing investment in training and project management. Once the big bucks are spent many don’t want to spend more but it’s a mistake. Project management and training are not free and they represent the glue that holds your bricks together.

2. Have a clear, written business strategy for the firm.

3. Have a business plan that states the path “from now to then” within the business strategy

4. Share this fully with the head of IT and expect a matching strategy and phased implementation programme in return. Ensure you all understand it and have agreed ways to measure success or failure. For instance: lawyers spend less time phoning desktop support equals fee earning hours improve or: lawyers give better advice/win more clients because knowledge on offer is now real time and not out of date.

5. Benchmark /network with similar firms for ideas/knowledge/peace of mind/to ensure your budget is in line. Set aside budget for this to attend conferences or meet colleagues.

6. Do think about what business returns are expected for the IT investment proposed. Do you expect ten more clients if you install this software? Is this enough to cover costs first year? How will the software achieve this (automated processes, information portal to save lawyers being engaged with clients on menial tasks or information).

7. Ensure there is a communication methodology within the firm that makes this clear to all (intranet, regular meetings, monthly report).

8. Agree to measure IT performance with set criteria ie how effective IT desktop support is (ie number of complaints), delivering applications on time and within budget and look for a simple measurement for ROI (for instance year on year profits or incoming clients (where did they come from – website can be measured for instance and is an increasing source of new business).

9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions so that you build realistic expectations about what a proposed system can achieve. Ask: ‘will it do this?’ ‘Will I be able to do that?’

10. Focus on improving core applications that assist the business, don’t be distracted by fancy ‘bells and whistles’ that deliver no long term business benefit and eat up IT budgets.

Bill Kirby works at Professional Choice Consultancy

MOSS 2007 - It’s all in a handshake isn’t it?

2007-12-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

Throw away your text books, stop going to seminars. The confusion is over. SharePoint can be sorted out with a firm, corporate handshake.

Its my business to try and understand the rudiments of legal tech offerings and sometimes it takes a while. You do what? It plugs in where? You are the greatest, most innovative software company ever seen?

Although MOSS (see explanation for what it is below) is taking rather a grip in law firms now, if you don’t get MOSS, you aren’t the only one. Sometimes as Citytech has discovered, IT directors really want to understand and buy from vendors but they might just not ‘get it’ or have the time to spend ‘getting it.’

So who’s doing what? Well it seems for the most part (from information from Tikit) that firms are liking the fact that intranets and extranets can be managed automatically through Sharepoint. If statistics are to be believed then up to around ¾’s of most intranets have out of date material on them. I imagine this doesn’t apply to those of you who’ve already invested in ‘search and delete’ style applications. You can sit smugly and view the inefficient kingdom below you. In addition although business intelligence is making waves, its not freely available within law firms so Sharepoint offers all that on a plate in an easy to use, one, two click, kind of viewing. For instance client rings lawyer ‘hmmm, you’ve overbilled me’, lawyer clicks into Sharepoint, inputs client name, client records come up and he/she can click again and see who worked on the matter, see who billed what and why, with no further involvement from finance or IT or asking a secretary to get back to the client.

I’ve had a look at the demo and its very intuitive, we will all know how to use this except our gran, who is too busy eating Jammy Dodgers and drinking cups of tea anyway. So top tip: if you are wondering what the hell to do with your intranets and want better ‘drill down’ info available to fee earners then this could be the application for you. The unusual thing about the financial information offered to the user is that they can check up on their own billable hours. No more surprises from management “Watson can I see you in my office.!” Fee earners can see what they’ve billed that month, for whom, compare with previous months and get a real feel for how they are doing internally before any trouble hits. A little bit of self management heaven.

There is also a self service HR section and I hear one big law firm has taken this up. Staff have an area where a bank of forms sit to allow them to fill in holiday or sick forms and ping them off for collation and automated record keeping.

If you are starting to get any creeping impressions that there is a lot of cross over with other applications then you are not far wrong. It seems all software suppliers have something that criss-crosses on someone elses turf these days and Microsoft Office Sharepoint is no exception. The general response to this doubling up is that you still need the Lexis Nexis InterAction, the OpenTexts, Interwovens, the Metastorms… well just about everyone else if you plan to do more complex work. Sharepoint are mainly offering an ‘ease of use’ interface with simplistic tools like DM which are perhaps useful if you don’t play in big boy vendor land.

The search gold rush. The 80 /20 rule.

Up until now most of us have been told about ‘searching’, in fact we may almost be obsessed. Its not about searching we hear, its about finding. Then its not about finding, its about finding what you want. Now its only about searching for things you don’t know about, which apparently is about 20% of all the items you need. The idea with Microsoft Office Sharepoint is that we mainly know where stuff is, so we want it it to be around two to three clicks away and then instantly viewed.

So now if you want to sound bright, ‘with it’ and generally techno savvy you need to say: “80% of all searching is really just about navigation.” Is it a eureka moment? I’m not sure but it certainly seems a step somewhere.

There are some key areas: financial, people and documents are your core and they leak into the intranet for staff to review everything necessary to complete their work and similarly can flow into the extranets or onto the internet for clients to have access to mini billing areas or knowledge.

The good bit. There is some free software called WSS in the whole deal (check still available) that allows you to create these billing areas or client rooms willy nilly. Apparently it’s a hook to get you interested. I have to say rather than a hook its more like a serious competitive advantage tool particularly if you get in early. I completely love the idea that I can click onto my lawyers website and see what, when, who, how in real time and without any fuss. This stuff is now not just for the big boys: anyone can get involved. Uses so far include one firm bringing seventy applications down into just a handful through use of this technology.

The main drive from Tikit is the reduction of time wasting and bringing together disparate data. Although others have this, also said this, like Solcara (less bespoke) it seems that the Handshake part of the outfit does really enable this to happen and with the easy recognizable template for users (modeled on law firm websites) its going to be difficult to ignore and might even catch on.

If we can only work out what its all about. If still unsure see me after class.

So what is the Tikit pitch?

Drag and drop functionality
saves a lot of copy and pasting.

Reduces “brain drain.” (☺)

Don’t be put off because you think its an enormous project, you can tackle small things at a time like a ‘desperate’ intranet site.

Increases fee earner access to real time financials

Intranets were the number 1 reason people were buying this but expansion is now rapid with a lot of buy in from law firms - particularly Lewis Silkin in the UK with a more complex DM project that says no to OpenText/Interwoven and yes to SharePoint on its own. Another reason is building a financial intranet on the back of the knowledge one. □

What is MOSS?

Sharepoint or as it’s now called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) has been around for a while but despite seminars and lots of ‘oh my god, it’s the Next Big Thing’ type of information, unless you see a demo you will probably be a bit puzzled about what it is so don’t be worried if you still haven’t got a clue. Its essentially an interface (or one button or one initial screen) that clips onto some middle software like Handshake which then clips onto or ‘talks to’ your essential tech software like Lexis Nexis InterAction, OpenText (formerly Hummingbird) or Interwoven, Thomson Elite or Aderant to deliver all your current applications through a simple icon on the desktop. Within Outlook for instance you can have a Microsoft Office Sharepoint button that connects to everything without the user needing special skills and their view is not the InterAction or Thomson Elite view, it’s the Sharepoint view. The Sharepoint part is that its all blindingly obvious for fee earners: if they know how to use Outlook then they can navigate all the stuff they need for client billing, contacts, knowledge and even have their own little world that provides a unique space for their type of news, matters and office announcements. (You set rules to achieve the look and feel required).

Points of note.

Its not the same as OpenText or Interwoven Sharepoint: their Sharepoint integration only brings their software to the party. You need Handshake (who are reselling through Tikit in the UK) to connect to all your other applications like Lexis Nexis InterAction, Thomson Elite and the other main players.

Who is the star in the Microsoft Office Sharepoint, Handshake, Tikit trio?

Its hard to say, Tikit for being influential in the UK and clever enough to explain it and sell it to you? Microsoft Office Sharepoint for developing such an easy interface and perhaps for coming down off their hobby horse and really working with legal vendors? Or Handshake for developing some communications software that just worked it all out for everyone?

Probably they all get equal votes but Handshake is undoubtedly garnering some serious respect for developing software that has brought to life the Sharepoint concept. In my view companies working on bridging applications are the ‘ones to watch’ for they are beginning to rule the world.

www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Sci tech trends in Japan

2007-12-05T22:24:00.000-08:00

This is a really cool site - particularly as we move into a robot automation age.
http://web-japan.org/trends/07_sci-tech/index.html

They have stuff like this
THE WORLD'S THINNEST TV
The Age of Organic Electroluminescence Dawns
http://web-japan.org/trends/07_sci-tech/sci071205.html

And this
PC CONTROLLED BY USER'S EYES
New System Developed by Japanese Professor
http://web-japan.org/trends/07_sci-tech/sci070316.html

Ladies love legal tech

2007-12-04T15:16:00.001-08:00

I adore legaltech and the people within it. My career spans media that includes The Times, The Sunday Times, The Financial News, The Legal 500, Legal Business and the late In Brief Magazine (RIP). Now running my own junket - JPC which includes Citytech, I do it because I loves it (very Gollum) not just a little bit but a big bit and although I've worked in many sectors, I rank legaltech as an all time favourite. Why? It’s rammed full of party people, who make the best of life. They share their enthusiasm with everyone and are highly sociable creatures always ready to laugh and tell a joke or cheer everyone up. They can talk for hours about topics that include sentences like “You need ECM, not DM with CRM and BPM.” They are always fighting to put their credit cards down to pay for drinks bills and are the most deeply loyal set of people I have ever met. Karen Jones as herself and Citytech Editor declares her ongoing adoration of legaltech and its wonderful population. Here is what other tech ladies think. Victoria Shortt, PR at Samsung: “I‘ve been working in the tech industry for five years now as a PR consultant and have worked across a broad range of tech clients including Interwoven, O2, Jobsite and now Samsung. I love working in the tech industry because its such a fast paced environment. I enjoy taking dry and sometimes overcomplicated tech stories and making them interesting. DM, ECM and WCM are all great but how do they actually benefit the end-user? That is what is interesting about tech for me – not being bogged down in details or jargon but how technology can actually add value to someone’s working day. The biggest achievement for me is probably taking a former client Interwoven to the number one spot in terms of press coverage – beating some significant names in the business whilst we were at it. I think the reason we did it was that we believed in their products as much as they do – 47 out of the Top 100 law firms can’t be wrong. The best thing about being a woman in the tech world is blowing apart people’s preconceived notions of women in business.” Thereza Snyman, IT Manager, Boodle Hatfield: “I’m an ex South African, ex lawyer, ex property developer, ex industrial relations student, always fashionista, I fell into legal tech after my MSc in Industrial Relations at the LSE... and was desperately looking for a job (in HR). As an ex-lawyer with a fair bit of self-taught tech nouse at that stage (and thanks to my mother's insistence, keyboard skills), the most obvious means of putting cat-food in my cat's bowl was to temp as a legal sec while the job-hunting process followed its painful course. A temp assignment just after the millennium landed me with a small city firm, looking to expand....and who thought that someone as wacky as me could possibly make a contribution to their support structure. They offered me a job as Office Manager - which I accepted. As it turned out (a classic case of the half-blind leading the blind), I was gradually sorting out most of their IT problems. After about 8 months we put the IT responsibility on a slightly more formal footing. A few networking courses later, I realised that I had found my mission in life (or at least, this part of my life.). Nearly seven years later, I am IT manager for Boodle Hatfield, having graduated from managing none but myself (both helpdesk and strategic planner) to managing a team of 6; from contending with one piffling NT4 server to overseeing gleaming racks with 30 powerful beasts humming away. What do I love about legal tech? The problem solving, of course and dealing with the lawyers, bless them (used to be one myself). But above all the fact that each day is a challenge, always shifting, always changing, always something new to learn.... (am cursed with an extremely low boredom threshold. No risk of being bored in legal IT). Whilst I have a string of degrees - all my official qualifications are unrelated to IT. It has been learn-on-the-job throughout, with a few courses thrown in here and there over the years. I don’t have a single biggest achievement - every solution found, every problem solved is an achievement. But perhaps, on a personal level, the achievement was to start out at a 40 user firm and inspire enough confidence in a 200 user firm to offer me the position of IT manager - and to have lived up to their expectations. As for winning out over the (male) competition - well, in landing my current job in November 2005 I obviously did. What the anorak brigade have to realise is that IT is no longer a macho stronghold. Technology is as much about people, about managing expectations, managing change, ensuring "best fit" with the business environment. And that is (amongst other things), the lipstick brigade is so very good at. Melanie Farquharson, consultant at 3Kites, started working in legaltech five years ago without any technical qualifications. After fourteen years as a practising lawyer and six years as a partner at London law firm, Simmons & Simmons, she came to the conclusion that ready access to knowledge and greater efficiency in the way that lawyers work could dramatically improve the service they provide to their clients. Melanie left front-line lawyering and became the firm’s head of professional support at the beginning of 2001. Climbing a steep technological learning curve in her knowledge management role, she was quickly converted to the view that the market and the impact of technology would require the legal profession to change and that technology could be the key to success as well as the driver of change. Recognising that a law firms’ natural pace of change is glacial, she has nevertheless in a quiet way been pushing the boundaries, promoting tools to help lawyers manage matters more effectively, and regarding the reinvention of wheels as a heinous offence. Her enthusiasm for the positive impact that technology can have on the profession has grown over the last few years through, or perhaps despite, involvement in various projects both internal to the firm (such as the implementation of a worldwide practice management system, involving finance, CRM and workflow in 20 offices) and client facing (including a refocus of the firm’s online legal resource, http://www.elexica.com/ and involvement in the Banking Legal Portal project with four magic circle firms and a collection of the world’s largest financial institutions). Seeing things from the lawyer’s perspective has enabled her to push simple ideas that can really work for the fee earner – like the link on each page of the firm’s CRM system to a tailored summary of business information about each client entity, drawn in real time from external sources (using a specially designed OneSource ‘tearsheet’), with the help of which the lawyer can use those few moments before a meeting to get right up to date with the client’s affairs. Bringing about change in a law firm is always going to be an uphill struggle and isn’t the best way to be popular, but Melanie manages still to be respected and listened to both by her partners and by the IT professionals she works with. Her secret satisfaction? Standing up in front of a room full of (mostly male) partners and telling them that they are wasting their money on technology unless they recognise that its benefit will only come from allowing it to change the way they operate. Space tourism? Bring it on. Christine Tomas, LDM. LDM celebrated their tenth anniversary with a supersize bash at The Royal Exchange in London. The reason I love technology? How can you not? Technology has changed the way people do business more than any other factor (could you imagine life without mobile phones, email or even fax or telex machines?!). To dismiss technology is to not conduct meaningful business these days. Not all lawyers use technology the same way - some love it, others loathe it, some understand it, others just want it to work. More importantly, not all technology was created equal. I help level the playing field by finding the most suitable technology for lawyers. I’ve been working with the legal tech industry for over ten years and managed international on-site projects, scanning over a million pages across ten sites over three continents in six weeks with less than one week’s notice. Would I be a space tourist? I like to call it home. I am a Legal Technology Consultant with LDM. I jumped on a plane, crossed the Atlantic and voila! No really, I grew frustrated at being locked up in document review rooms for days on end. I had to find a more effective solution and a one way ticket to freedom. Hence, I jumped on the technology bandwagon and never looked back. My experience managing electronic and paper disclosure exercises and implementing legal technology solutions from both a top 10 law firm as well as a vendor perspective has been invaluable. Being a techno-geek at heart (albeit in lipstick and heels) as well as understanding lawyer's requirements has placed me in a unique position. How did I get through the winning line first before male counterparts? Being organised and cutting to the chase whenever possible. A clear answer and an intelligent approach is key to my success. For other top tier ladies in legaltech, check out Citytech’s global tech leaders list http://www.citytechmag.com/graphics/globaltechleaderstop100.pdf WE NEED YOU: BLOGGERS LISTEN UP! Citytech is finalising its 2007 list of global tech leaders and it includes BLOGGERS! Email me your suggestions and we will add them to our pot for review.

The ABC on London tech vendor: Axxia’s DNA

2007-12-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

In the UK, Axxia with their product DNA is up against the likes of Thomson Elite 3E, Aderant, and CS Group (CS Group are a UK software venture capitalist who own AIM, Videss and Laserforms - all bought out in the last two years). Axxia historically offer case and practice management software and have a strong time & billing component aimed mainly at mid tier firms. (Think of it like an all day travelcard rather that a one way ticket).

Stuart Holden, Managing Director, Axxia says of their product which launched just over a year ago. “Its taken three years of commitment and investment to bring our dedicated legal, ‘DNA’ product to market. We liken DNA to SAP – it does everything a firm needs rather than buying separate silo’d bits like CRM or billing then glue-ing them together.”

Stuart says he was delighted to see my 3E article recently in Citytech. He believes there’s been a general lack of debate about law firms and their approach to technology which has led to a sleepy market. He thinks with 3E stirring things up with a new approach is just the kind of thing that will help law firms realize they are at the dawn of a new age. Stuart comments “we’ve been out there talking about law firms needing to change for a while but only a few are picking up on this. In my view adapting to change is going to be an essential element to enable them to stay in the increasingly competitive legal game.”

Although time and billing has always been a strong component of Axxia’s offering, Stuart says DNA is more than this now. In his view their offering is aligned to SAP (a European vendor who dominates in Germany and non-legal in the UK) rather than running up against the likes of stalwart vendor Thomson Elite 3E. Stuart says “3E handles part of what a law firm does and handles it well. DNA handles the whole lot: time and billing, CRM, DM, practice and case management.” He sums up “DNA offers everything that interfaces with what the lawyer needs to do.”

Stuart continues “Its took us three years and a lot of thought to develop DNA and we do feel we’ve got it right and can steal a lead on the competition.” He adds “The way lawyers deliver law is changing; already we’ve seen the competitive-end legal markets like conveyancing commoditise which means firms have had to adapt their business to more demanding, cost sensitive clients. We’ve monitored this progress for some time now and developed DNA to mirror this business revolution.” Although Stuart hastens to add “We don’t preach, we know all law firms rely on individual strategy. As an example CRM may need a different approach for every practice area.”

Stuart sees billing as a high spot that will present challenges and growth for firms and says
“The larger law firms are most interested in DNA – the ones who’ve written down most of their processes and are gearing up for increased profitability.” But adds “For the moment we aren’t selling into the multi jurisdiction operations but are talking to large national firms in the UK and Australia.” He continues further “We are also turning heads in progressive mid size law firms. They’ve realized if they can put change through the firm and enablers to make it work for them then both will act as a major benefit over competitors.”

Asking about Thomson Elites 3E which started over (different product to their legacy Enterprise app.’) he agrees 3E have a valid argument that software has moved on considerably and would only mean compromises if they didn’t make the break. He comments “the pedigree of their enterprise product goes back many years but even so, from a theoretical point and depending on what they are working with, you do have to start again at some stage. It is the right thing to do. The only problem is migrating users.”

He continues “We took a different approach, partly because our design wasn’t at the end of its lifecycle. Also because our users depend on a workflow process using many areas of our software together As an example if you consider Pannone or Weightmans who use workflow throughout their firm: lawyers/attorneys and back office, if you say tomorrow lets pull the plug, change the whole thing and expect it to work, its not going to happen. Maybe in the back office it would be ok - its painful but do-able but when you have everyone connected to it, you will inevitably get problems and downtime. For this reason we felt we had to design in co-existence. So when firms are rolling out they can stay on their existing workflows, phase it in and unplug the old when they are ready. Stuart comments “Its slightly different with time and billing silo’d software because firms can unplug and switch the next app.’ in, because its mainly back office focused.”

I mentioned that Thomson Elite 3E said that decision making for their product was starting to shift to IT Directors (over the FD). Stuart says “We generally talk to the whole management team which includes FD, IT, Managing Partner and CRM head because clients are realizing that the decision is multi faceted.”

I wonder at this stage about connectors to other software like Lexis Nexis InterAction (which is heavily invested in many law firms) particularly as Axxia is saying ‘you just need us now.’ He hesitates saying “DNA is a web services app’ so will connect to any CRM /DM but we think there are more benefits to using DNA than silo’d app’s.” He continues “We work with the Microsoft suite which is also a SAP model. We don’t write bits of it our self and interface so can’t segment it unlike best of breed. (Editors note: Large app’s like Interface InterAction/3E stay like this because law firms can go deeper into applications – it gives more developing capability). Stuart elaborates “Our background with applications has also been manufacturing which means we link every process. We see legal in the same way ie with areas that should blend together.

I mention the new wave of thinking ‘phasing’ rather than ‘big bang’ implementations and wonder what Stuarts views are: “There are several reasons for phasing: firstly firms want to see benefits for going through the pain. In my view it’s a sensible way of doing things.” He continues “Axxia have very slick implementations with three to four months for PMS (practice management software) and for case it could vary but would usually be a month to two months.” I comment on their phenomenal speed and Stuart says. “Our view is if we get it in quickly, then clients can tweak it and do their own thing rather than us spending hours consulting. Ultimately its down to our design. Although DNA is similar to say Visualfiles, in terms of the complexity of what could go into it, our experience says, keep everything very simple. Don’t try and design an ultimate, just let clients build upon it.” He adds “We could have done something much more combative and competitive but don’t think there were many that could have written with the straightforwardness of DNA.”

So the acid question. Who’s buying it? Stuart says “We’ve got DNA in part rolled out to six or seven firms and one firm with around 150 users is in its last phase now.” He continues “We are seeing a lot of activity in non legal like government for managing processes and dealing with compliance. Gordon Brown wants to lose civil servants so is making them more efficient with automation.”

I ask how all the players in the market will shape up with so much competition. Stuart believes that some companies will fight on price with no real product development but agrees with Kaye Sycamore, who just got promoted to a big boss role at Thomson Elite 3E in saying “you need to buy something you can grow into in future not something that is about to retire. If you buy older systems not built on new, faster platforms then you are likely to have to repurchase again in the foreseeable future”

Axxia is a privately owned software company that was bought out by the management including Stuart some years ago which publishes financial results every year. Stuart says “having worked in big groups delivering quarterly results it is a relief to publish annually. He says “to be able to put a strategy together for five years and really work it and for us the launch into Australia too is something we wouldn’t have necessarily achieved. The freedom from this constraint allows us to do a better job.”

And will they sell to any of the VC’s stalking legal? Stuart says firmly: “We are not for sale.” He continues, “What we are and what we’ve invested will not reflect any valuation. We aren’t positioning for exit we want to ride the next wave of success which we see in our sights within three years.”

And the market as a whole? Stuart says “there is lots of change which is creating a lot of buzz and Thomson Elite’s 3E is helping. We feel IT selling has gone very consultative now. When we drill into issues they normally become very complex. So we treat bigger picture rather than symptoms.” He continues “3E is helping us all sell the concept of workflow and nailing down processes which is creating the needed debate in law firms.” He adds “As well that what other companies like CS Group have done, is create uncertainty. If you are AIM or Videss users (both case/PMS vendors pitching mid tier bought out) you have had to swallow change so its gotten people thinking. Aim users were very loyal to Aim and were very difficult to convert. The uncertainty of the buyouts has created opportunity.” He continues further “We have good product strategy, we are cash rich, profitable, have loads of users and are in an enviable position.”

VC (venture capitalist) stalkers in the sector are sniffing around vendors worth around £5mill. I dig to see if I can get a valuation on Axxia. Stuart is number shy but says “we are not in the CS Group buying space they would have to pay more than £10million.”

Stuart is very optimistic about Axxia’s future. “We are always more successful when there is an aggressive market out there.” He says, then adds combatively “Let the best product win.” He believes that the main four players, (Axxia, Aderant, Thomson Elite 3E and CS Group) are really shaking things up.

Although Stuart compares DNA to SAP – both having a broad product, covering all areas, like HR, CRM and time & Billing he says that SAP have brought their legal product to the market from a very complex enterprise solution. He says “They’ve scaled it down into an SME product” but he believes, Axxia, Aderant and others understand legal nuances more. He continues “There are some comprises SAP can make, but there are a lot they can’t. He interjects “I expect we have an advantage over SAP but SAP will find its niche. Those buying it in after having had legal specific software will lose legal specific functionality.”

I give Stuart his opportunity to tell us why you should buy DNA. He smiles and says “its different and unique. What we’ve done for the first time is take what the legal market is asking for and added from outside industry what they will need in future years. Order processing, planning, identifying where work is coming from and business process which will be very important. Law firms do need to change and work in future will be very process led.”

He continues “Business agility is the buzz.” I ask what that really means. He confirms: “Ability to respond to compliance and increase in legislation.” Then adds “we all have to respond to change however it hits us even if just because we’ve designed a better way to do business. Tech agility is about being able to do it in an energising way to ensure you aren’t outwitted or crippled by the process.”

Moving on to general views. I mention Clementi which is a UK law change which the press are saying will result in the ‘death of the smaller law firm.’ It deregulates law firms here saying that any company can now offer the same service ie hire a team of lawyers and deliver law and allows support staff into equity structures. I wonder if this is really true and if in fact ‘tesco law’ providers will just create new business markets not yet seen? Stuart thinks and responds “the counseling aspect is missing from the ‘tesco law’ idea.” Then adds “Computers can replace the way lawyers operate but can’t cope with the emotional decisions that keep deals on track.” He continues “A firm in Australia is looking at franchising their software to other lawyers. It would mean if you walked into a high street, firm he could use software expertise from a bigger firm which would help small firms compete.”

On after sales service? Stuart has a novel approach “I think clients should phone up and get through to someone, we have log webbing for problems, we don’t have automated messages on phones we divert to a human.” He continues “Service is coming back into fashion - internet purchasing works well when it works. Touch points (where clients interact with your firm) will be very important.”

And a last word on business agility: “Everyone accepts its, not the big firms which will snack on the small, it’s the quick who will win the race. If you can’t change quickly you will get left behind. Axxia is leading by example. We are changing the culture of our company as we go into high impact sales and putting staff into training programmes. We’ve also hired a non exec onto the board to bring in external expertise.”

He finishes “Clients will determine everything and what change is required. Law firms will decide winners and losers. Law firms are slow to want to change but when they decide to go for it they are quick.”□

Want the low down on Thomson Elite 3E?

2007-12-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

What is Elite 3E?

Launched in April 2006, Elite 3E is an advanced browser-based business optimisation platform that offers powerful core financial and practice management features, including built-in collaboration, automation and a rapid application development environment (Software Factory) in one integrated high-performance system. Elite 3E uniquely empowers law firms to create the processes they want and need as opposed to requiring firms to follow rigid, preset processes.

Independent view of 3E?

By all accounts the people demo-ing or using this product are impressed with the capability and change-ability.

What are people moaning about? You have to throw your current Thomson Elite stuff away and start again.

What do Thomson Elite say about this? "Software code has come on so much in the last few years we couldn't work with legacy code any more. It was time to move on."

Who’s buying 3E?

Al Tamimi & Co., one of the largest law firms in the Middle East selected 3E. With a diverse client base ranging from international banks, trading establishments, charity organisations and multi-national corporations, the firm needed a flexible system that would extract specific data for strategic planning and other activities.

The corporate stuff: Law firms across three continents have adopted Elite® 3E as their next-generation financial and practice management software. As the client list continues to grow, Thomson Elite maintains its aggressive development of 3E.

The pitch: “3E’s sophisticated capabilities and flexible platform set the new standard in advanced technology that can be deployed by legal and professional services firms to improve their efficiency and competitiveness,” said Jitendra Valera, international vice president, Thomson Elite. “Solving the complexities of conducting business on a global scale is a hallmark of 3E. It’s exciting to see both new clients and longtime Elite Enterprise users leading the way in adoption of this innovative platform.”

What are clients saying? “We are very impressed with Elite 3E for both the investment and thought that has gone into its development,” said John Matthews, the firm’s financial manager. “We are confident that it is the right solution and provides the flexibility needed for a practice of our range and ambition.” Al Tamimi & Co.

Whats new? 3E Collections Offers New Action Calendar and Control Panel. The Control Panel provides collections managers unlimited flexibility in determining how overdue invoices can be aggregated, assigned, scheduled and collected.

Additional new v.2.0 features include the following:

A smart tag feature that allows users working in Microsoft Word documents to quickly navigate to the appropriate 3E screen by using recognized terms that are already set up in 3E (such as client or matter name).

Built-in auditing tools that can be turned on, as needed, to monitor 3E activities, such as timekeeping and client or matter contact changes.

Data-level security that allows record owners to hide sensitive matter files from designated users to avoid conflict of interest.

http://www.more3e.com/

We have lift off

2007-12-03T12:12:00.000-08:00

Track a space station in real time with NASA and send astronauts messages.

On this website you can watch a Nasa space station in real time as it moves around the globe and also put in co-ordinates of your position on the earth and see when you will be able to see the space station at your location (with a telescope and a clear sky). You can also send the astronauts an email.

www.nasa.gov

The Bad Manners BlackBerry

2007-12-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Bad Manners BlackBerry ®.

IT Directors have had enough of having people twitching and fiddling with their micro friend in meetings… whilst talking in restaurants, bars and just about anywhere that would cause annoyance to the recipient of a BlackBerry buzz addict. Although its not destined for the dustbin, I can see a BlackBerry etiquette book about to be published…and some high profile celebrities launching a PR campaign saying “BlackBerry BE GONE!”

Gooseberry. Partner to someone with a blackberry
Crackberry. Blackberry compares to a drug!

Micro feature: What technology do you think will die?

2007-12-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

The Flipping Fax. Once a stalwart member of any office, it now consumes money renewing fax server licences, it takes up shelf space and worse of all, no bugger uses it. That is except for your biggest client who once a year absolutely insists on sending a fax. And its always a big deal order form so the fax holds on to its life for one more year. Like Tony Blair and George W Bush, the fax should realise when its time to go and not hang on for grim death for another term.

Lets go Galactic - $200,000 for a flight or a down payment for the petrol of $20,000

2007-12-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

If you are so over the Galapagos; have done Antarctica; go to Sweden for the weekend then, honest to goodness, what have you got left? Go baby go.

The reason Virgin Galactic has become possible is thanks to the vision of one man, Paul G. Allen, who has taken the risk of funding the world's greatest aviation designer of the modern era - Burt Rutan. Rutan's vision for mass space travel was born in the early years of interplanetary transport. The fathers of space exploration never planned sending man into space on what are basically large intercontinental ballistic missiles. They foresaw that people would somehow be taken up to a height and then launched into space. The Cold War forced the hand of space development. All the budget for space technology was usurped for military development, so the space programme became geared to what the superpowers were building - missiles. Burt Rutan has gone back to basics and developed a number of things crucial to making Virgin Galactic and sub-orbital space tourism possible: Firstly, the technology to get people into and back from space cheaply and simply, using an environmentally friendly aircraft that creates virtually no pollution. The key to Rutan's design is a craft, which on its return to earth turns from a beautiful sleek space plane into a 'shuttlecock' - to gently drift back through the atmosphere without overheating. It then metamorphoses once again into a conventional aircraft shape ready for landing. Cost is another factor to make space tourism of the moment not of the future. Burt adopted a much more efficient, and up to date approach to making his space craft, using composite materials as opposed to metals. The most important factor that brings us to the precipice of mass space exploration is safety. Burt has utilised a much safer fuel than ever before - nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and rubber. The two things separately are inert. Only when the nitrous oxide has been forced onto the rubber and then ignited will the motor start, producing its tremendous energy. This is much safer than liquid propulsion systems or solid fuel rockets. All these elements would be useless without the final component to this breakthrough - the ability to carry people into space without first having to train them for half a year at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. A few days of medical assessment and pre-flight familiarisation is all the space tourists of this decade will require prior to their real ET experience.

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

In-house counsel at National Grid get techno savvy

2007-12-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

In house counsel sit in a prime position instructing panels of lawyers/attorneyss and dropping them if they don’t perform. In technology terms though they have often just existed. As their private practice law firm counterparts have scaled new heights in technology, in-house counsel have usually got by using Word. However the worm is turning. National Grid has bought enterprise SharePoint ®, they have Workshare ® Professional and now they want a world where lawyers/attorneys click into their intranets not the other way round.

Adam Davidson works in the 45 strong in-house legal department at National Grid. A company sporting some ten thousand employees and with a merger (Transco) under their belt in the last three years they have→ →just finished a roll out with Microsoft Office SharePoint ® and Workshare ® Professional to bring their disparate systems into line. Following the high profile merger the two in-house legal departments realized they needed better working practices to join the two departments together more. In addition the whole business was reviewing the document management system to see if it could be improved. (Other departments within National Grid have the same sort of requirements as the legal team.

Wisely their first action was to put in calls to their panel lawyers to get advice on who they should call in for a beauty parade. The usual suspects were named. It seemed certain one of the big vendors would get the deal – as Adam says “why reinvent the wheel?”. But the head of information services at National Grid challenged their thinking. The company was already using SharePoint ® portal server and he thought it made sense to pilot the DM system through the legal department first, just to see if that might suffice. It made sense because it meant they wouldn’t have to support different systems across the business. The in-house legal team agreed and the pilot started. As Adam says “we were reasonably impressed.”

Customisation was required but interestingly not too much. The main things they needed were the automatic date stamps and individual access for lawyers to see their own files. Although Adam does add that since doing this they’ve realized that other parts of the business can use this customization which has enabled them to re-use some of the work.

Training is always an issue with vendors who usually lose their rag with clients who don’t invest but Adam Davidson has a down to earth view.

“I volunteered to run this project or some might say I was volunteered! But it has proven very rewarding. I have been able to shape the system how we wanted it. We had someone from IT come and sit with us in the legal department for three months to improve functionality. This really shaped what the system was like so when it came to training I knew we could keep it fairly simple. I organized an hour and a half for each user then whilst they were training switched their files into the new system. This meant when they came back their learning was fresh and they just continued from that point. “

Adam continues “there was a mix of learning capability and some needed more help than others but most have come on in leaps and bounds.”

Of the improvement in their working practices Adam says “We now have a seamless audit trail and more importantly people aren’t hoarding information in their own spaces. We also have a practice of manually uploading user Outlook email files to relevant matters in SharePoint ®. This is so that everyone in the department can see up-to-date information on each file and can work on them if someone is away or on holiday. Its making for better collaboration and culture for us.” he finishes.

As to Workshare ® Professional which they use to remove hidden meta data on documents, he gives this a 10 out of 10 rating and is undeniably impressed, “For us its about ensuring that other parties don’t get any upper hand in any dealings with us - we don’t want any internal notes read or any clue as to the changes we’ve made on documents.” He continues “Since using the Workshare ® Professional software which flags up high risk documents lawyers have got nervous about what they must have sent out in the past. It highlights the usefulness of this tool. “I did wonder if it would make people too reliant on the software but if anything its made everyone super aware of simple mistakes that could be made. The added ease of sending out pdf documents through it has also saved us having to have Adobe licenses.”

As to the future of their ongoing IT he makes an interesting point. “At the moment we click onto our lawyers intranet sites for information. We would like to see a time when they all click into our SharePoint ® portal and update or review our files from here. It saves us that whole deal of clicking onto six or more different web portals.” Although he adds “it may take us a bit of time fiddling with peoples firewalls and may need some training but I see these as basic teething problems and nothing more.”

National Grid is getting larger with a major presence through a merger in the USA. He says in future they will want to have more interaction with their USA counterparts and work out how to share data which they don’t really do now.

He also says that they plan to open up their legal pool of documents and knowledge to the rest of the company to help team heads keep up to speed on deals. Interestingly he adds it’s a strange cultural change not having complete ‘control’ of their documents.

Of the law firms who helped them navigate the maze of IT. He praises Martineau Johnson and Wragge & Co for giving them thoughtful direction and time to sit down and review their systems. □

Editors note: For all of you investing in intranets Adam Davidson’s comments mean an interesting shift in tech-working with clients in future. Speaking to clients to work out what their forward momentum is, would now seem vital (to align it with yours in future). Otherwise you may be doubling up offerings and wasting precious IT dollars.□

www.citytechmag.com - Go on sign up, its free for law firm staff!

What do you think of tech consultants?

2007-12-03T11:12:00.001-08:00

IT Directors in the legal industry respond

“As for legal technology consultants: 'well done is better than well said' as Benjamin Franklin once said. I have a feeling that at least some legal technology consultants excel with the latter rather than the former.”

“No one size fits all. Its important to think about what a consultant brings to the party – specific skills and broader industry knowledge. Choose the consultant based upon the job that needs to be done. Bit like writing a job and candidate profile before you recruit. A consultant needs to have empathy but not be a sycophant.”

http://www.citytechmag.com/ - go on, have a look and sign up. Its free for law firm staff.

Fantasy IT – what would you do with £1 million/$2million of no-strings extra IT budget?

2007-12-03T10:51:00.000-08:00

The question put to IT directors was: What would you do with an extra £1million if the partnership suddenly turned round and gave you extra IT budget – no strings attached? Some answers are silly, some self promotion and some are serious but all are heartfelt.

“Fantasy IT, now there's a thing. I think I would use some of my £1m for firm-wide biometric single sign on and security system, the rest on an air conditioning installation, coke dispenser and a massive chocolate fountain!”

“I would use much of the money to employ a sizable team of Change Managers (with exceptional interpersonal skills and a whole raft of recognised qualifications from established business schools so they are taken seriously by the firm as a whole) and business analysts on a contract basis for a few years. I would then instruct them to trawl through the firm and evaluate and then re-engineer our legal and business processes to operate in the most efficient way possible pretty much using the skills, resources and technology already at the firms disposal. I would then suggest the firm puts a sizable chunk of this money in a bonus pool and put in place a reward structure / measurement system that recognises those people throughout the firm who are most instrumental in supporting this initiative and realising its benefits. The process I would begin with as part of this initiative would be those associated with the way in which we manage the relationships with our top 20% key/critical/target clients. From then on I would look to the project team to propose those groups of processes which are most likely to reap the most value from being re-engineered. I doubt any of the above would truly require significantly more or different technology than we already have so a very small % of the £1m would need to go on buying more / upgrading hardware / software / IT services.”

“I would hire Bill Kirby’s company to really get to grips with the strategy of the firm so that I could put forward a sensible proposal to support the business.” (Bill Kirby sent that one in).

“People would be high on our list. Additional people to work with users and paid for secondments from fee earning floors to be primary project support on efficiency projects in their groups. Also longer hours for standard support. Earlier starts and later finishes if not full 24/ 7. And greater change management/ internal communications expertise together with a state of the art training facility and ideas lab which people could call into.”

“The entire stock from Gina and Jimmy Choo followed by bags to match them all from Harvey Nicks.”

“I'd spend it on expertise, internally, (though that would need another million next year to cover salaries again, but if they're giving it away anyway :-). Why? To leverage all that shelf-ware we've got sitting around and which was supposed to make life easier for fee earners and make them more efficient (but which we never had time to do because of parachute projects). So rather than buy new stuff we'll never deploy I'd invest in some proper business analysis to engage with the users and then drive home the benefit of what we've already paid for. Either that or I'd have bought shares in VisualFiles!" (Who got bought out by a Lexis Nexis).

“Karen. If only! The most important point for me remains efficiency and aligning IT to the business and the customer which we already doing to some extent. So to answer the question I would initially spend the money on more business process re-engineering to increase the efficiency of the business and improve customer service.It would mean bringing in some extra expertise to agree the methodology and drive the process, create the business model, review the customer value chain, approve the changes and implement with an ongoing continuous improvement process as part of the forward culture. Any money left over would have to go into system development/ product to support changes/ direction identified. So, when can I have it?”

US litigation software and support vendors - listen up

2007-12-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

There are two things about litigation software and support vendors that are a certainty: In America there is an enormous market of law firms to sell to and in America there are millions of vendors battling in the space "like herding cats" one Canadia tech purchaser said at LegalTech. The dominant software in the US for law firms is litigation and litigation support service, although I guess most of you got eaten up by big players recently. However in the UK, the second market that US vendors try to dominate, we have just twenty two (at the last count) dedicated litigation support managers in law firms; country laws that just don't support a litigation culture and to cap it all strong data laws that don't allow data transfer to any other country in formulaic ways, let alone to the USA.

Yet despite these glaring signs that we havent got the same sort of business available in the UK for lit' software suppliers, I get litigation after litigation vendor at my door step with bright, white smiles, asking how best they should scoop up market share in the UK. This is in the face of some pretty high profile launches and relaunches here by extremely big name brands that have done nothing more than spend up a big champagne budget and ring the same people.

My advice to you all, before you just think I need to take some positive pills. We have seen it all before. We don't have as much business as the US, we may smile and take your meeting but you will hear a heavy sigh on your departure and probably get your calls voice mailed out from there on in. Just partner. You need to meet Nigel Murry at Trilantic. You need to meet the guys in the UK at LDM. They are your only route to success, honestly!

And for what its worth, I know most of the law firms use a bit of everyones software but there is general agreement that Lexis Nexis Concordance really can handle those big, big trials and really does do what it says in the spin.

The litigation support industry is said to have a universe of s£1.6 billion to get hold of and vendors report growth rates of 35% a year.

For more peer stuff, look at ILTA

The big interview: Chris White, Director of Information Technology at London law firm Ashurst

2007-12-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly Chris White has only been in the legal sector for six years. For many, I’m sure he seems like a lifer, someone who has always been part of the legal IT crowd. Starting his career in financial institutions he says his journey has not followed a normal path. “I came into IT by accident and was more involved in project management and business related projects than IT beforehand.” He says he was working at MPI, a pensions company who took a decision to spin the investment department away from the main company to make it a stand alone investment house. So he worked with the CEO of the asset management business on a corporate structure, recruitment, organisational policies and then wrote the IT strategy. I ask if this prove hard. “If you can write a business plan then it’s not that far away from understanding what the business wants and then providing the bits that make that happen. I’d been involved with IT in the past and ran some projects and also had good IT professionals working for me. So I developed the IT
strategy then the CEO said we need an IT director, so gave me the job.”

Chris, who has an MBA, thinks it’s beneficial not to be too focused on IT. “The job of an IT Director and systems staff is very different, more like conducting an orchestra. I think a lot of IT directors get too immersed in the technology rather than the strategy. I think IT simply needs to meet the needs of the business and should spend time promoting the whole IT function to internal staff and beyond.”

Read the rest at http://www.citytechmag.com/assets/Citytech_Ashurt_edition.pdf

Interwoven annual knees up in London

2007-12-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

Interwoven went kerrazy this year with a knees up for their purchasers and soon to be purchasers in London's Edgware Road. Despite the hotel fire alarm going off and changing the GEAR UP conference to BEER UP, the event managed to WOW us all and enough booze was downed to sink a couple of ships. Gold star. I was lucky enough to "pull" a 25 going on 14 year old technology purchaser at the bar at about 2am. Fortunately I put him down before my rep was ruined and hailed a taxi! Home Jeeves your bed is a callin'.
http://www.interwoven.com/

Interview with a UK accountancy firm about their tech

2007-12-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

Accountancy practice Scrutton Bland is headquartered in Ipswich. It become newsworthy as the first firm to sign up to a deal with Konica Minolta and eCopy. James McElhinney, partner, is responsible for IT at the one hundred and sixty person firm.

James says the legal tech journey for their female led firm, started with Interwoven some four years ago. “We wanted an electronic document retrieval system which would enable us to do away with paper files altogether.” He says. They opted for the Konica Minolta and eCopy deal to advance again. James explains how they use it. “As soon as post comes in, we scan it all, then if a client rings up, we just look up their file and history and can see our own response trail. James says they signed up to eCopy through their use of Konica Minolta. “We’d used their printers and ‘copiers so asked them if they could come up with something with the essential requirement being that it had to fit with Interwoven. “That’s when they came up with the idea of eCopy. We now scan our post in and if someone rings up with a query on the Inland Revenue, can search on everything we’ve ever received from them by section.”

James says previously they had to sort post before it hit the document management system and things were sometime difficult to find on the server. “We had to put a title on everything then. eCopy allows us to put the post in, allocate it, then press send to lodge it into the DM where it can’t be mislaid. It also allows all staff to use the system rather than just allocated support staff.” He adds that pdf’s are used for finished documents so that everyone is clear where they are.

When I suggest that the firm is showing some style, James says he wouldn’t like Scrutton Bland to have any labels to live up to. “We don’t like to say things like that.” He says, allowing us to glimpse his cheeky sense of humour. “We might end up falling over a cliff.” He chuckles briefly before adding an insight into the firms thinking. “We look at what situations are going to arise and review technology that can speed up our workflow.” He explains some changes that have affected their industry. “In the past we had a thousand clients who wanted tax returns at a certain time. Things were easy.We knew we’d have a thousand bills to generate. With self assessment, that work has gone so we have to find work from other sources. We discovered that more and more of clients had moved to digital systems so felt we should as well to stay ahead.” James says one of the things they’ve looked at is allowing clients to access their own directories to see their postal trail and tax returns. “It saves partners doing secretarial work.” He adds that younger staff or as they are being identified as ‘keyboard kids’ are also driving IT initiatives. “They highlight new technology and lobby partners to review software.”

IT has become vital for their one hundred and sixty employees based in 3 locations and James confirms that they have specialist software to cover their main areas of business which are accountancy, general insurance and an IFA business. “We tend to use different suppliers for everything and ask incoming vendors to consider the integration issues before I sign off on purchases.”

Space saving is one of the main benefits of the digital revolution at the firm. “It’s enabled us to free up storage space and put ten desks back in. He says also the speed and agility is essential for retaining customers. “People want immediate responses these days. If they email and want a copy of their tax return, we need to know how to retrieve a document with no delay.” Of the eCopy system, James says. “It’s very simple to use with a big touch screen and big buttons.” Which he jokes. “Even partners can use.”

James is involved with IT at Scrutton Bland because in a previous incarnation as a sole practitioner he had a client who was an ‘IT boff’. “I used to talk to him for hours.” He says before having a trip down memory lane. “He used to tell me about programmes and introduced me to VisiCalc which was what we used before EXCEL. Everything was on the keyboard and Dos based then. I had him as a client so he told me what to do. When I joined Scrutton Bland, we didn’t even have email. They said can you do it for us so I did.” Although he confesses that his knowledge is limited so he supervises more these days.

Of his career, James says he started out wanting to be a lawyer then adds in his usual cheeky tone. “But I wasn’t bright enough.” He explains it was because he wanted a qualification that would enable him to change his job.

Work at the firm consists of a broad section of locally, owner managed businesses. “Many are trying to build businesses because there is less interest in pensions.” He confirms that the latest increase in the capital gains tax rate from 10 to 18%, which is set to hit retiring entrepreneurs, has caused a rush of work. “Anyone who had a company sale in the pipeline is pushing to sell by 5th April to save the extra tax bill. It’s also affecting the holiday let market with people thinking of selling up.”

Although James says there is plenty of work for Scrutton Bland, they have joined a group called Nexia to assist with international connections. “I have a client who has sold up and is emigrating to Australia. He went there to buy a business, so I referred him to a lawyer through the Nexia network. As the world gets smaller we need to know about international law and issues.”

Three reasons from James for recommending eCopy

Ease of use: incoming post is sorted in one hit instead of two
It has OCR recognition on mail.
They are nice people to deal with.

Three pieces of information about Scrutton Bland

They have twelve partners and two are female. The managing partner is female.
An unusually broad range of services that includes insuring your property or business and IFA advice.
Average age for partners in the firm is only forty five. Retirement age is sixty and staff can stay on if they want.

http://www.scruttonbland.co.uk/

The evolution of marketing in law firms

2007-12-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Twenty four years ago law firms in Britain were freed from legal constraints and allowed to market their services for the first time. Guilty of poor practice in the early years, marketing staff spent their time booking places on IBA conferences for annual partner jollies and organizing seminars with such heady titles as “the legal implications of food dustings for manufacturers.” A few things happened to move firms out of this rut. Law firms started to operate in an increasingly competitive environment, then skilled marketing directors were hired from outside the industry. The legal press also started to take an interest in maverick partners and their negative affect on firm performance until marketing took on a more professional look by the late 90’s. Part of this development was the emergence of customer relationship management software. Now CRM technology is a staple purchase in law firms, along with strategic plans, measuring how successful marketing is and gathering information for analysis from fee earners and clients to increase bottom line profits.

Dan Von Weihe who dominates the CRM software space, heads up the seventeen strong team at Lexis Nexis InterAction. Lexis Nexis bought InterAction two years ago and hold trophy site Berwin Leighton Paisner. Janet Day their IT Director can show that InterAction is second only in use to Outlook. It is viewed widely in the industry as the most successful CRM implementation achieved to date. Dan says vendor competition is the big change for him but having the likes of Microsoft pitching their software is increasing awareness of his. “Ten years ago there wasn’t anyone in the market but the last five years has seen, Microsoft CRM, Client Profiles who partner with Microsoft, Pivotal, SalesLogix, Aspective, legal practice management vendors providing marketing modules and Goldmine arrive. Our sales are up because of the increased awareness with a recent eleven office win from the Maitland Group.”

Reed Smith’s, Meirion Jones who is Executive Director of the firm’s Clients & Markets Group and CRM selection committee has a career that spans top law firms like Allen & Overy. His team recently signed Client Profiles. “CRM technology is a facilitator, nothing more. Relationships are built between people and always will be. However as law firms become larger it becomes more difficult to manage client relationships and build them. An average client might be advised by ten different departments in ten different countries. If a law firm is trying to say it will be consistent then this is where CRM technology can help. It can capture all the insights from client and store them in the system. It takes away the feeling that clients are dealing with a complex organisation and creates a village feel.” The Client Profiles system is just one tool amongst a number that they use. “We also have client plans, dedicated training and investment bank style business analysis. A client plan looks at tactical ways to develop the relationship. So if data security is an issue, we can go speak to the client and say we have this expertise ask who we should speak to and put an individual in to develop the relationship.”

Whit McIsaac, President and CEO, at Client Profiles, who has spent twenty four years in the business says law firms need to expand the use of CRM technology beyond simple mailing lists and event management.” They need information relating to the people, companies, clients, matters and entities that they deal with on a daily basis.” Client Profiles now have nine implementations under way in law firms across the UK and USA.

Susanne Pugsley, Head of Marketing at Winckworth Sherwood, who have nine IT staff and two marketing staff, soon to be three, is an unusual combo of e commerce and marketing. “I did some dot.coms and media before spending time at Norton Rose, Hammonds and Morgan Lewis but my roots are classic marketing” She says. When she joined Winckworth Sherwood, they didn’t have a strategic function so Susie is in the midst of reviewing CRM systems. Her primary task once a system is selected is to improve internal communications. “I’ve already built a weekly reporting system on the intranet to have everyone tell us what they are doing. This way we can let everyone know about client wins, lunches, speaking opportunities, accolades and what deals are closing. It’s been eye opening for the partners.”

Time is the main constraint with use of CRM she thinks. “The simplicity of a CRM systems is important because if partners can’t do it by three clicks, you’ve lost them.” On the client side she says. “It’s important to be targeted and have a data cleansing process with a careful eye on best practice. We ask clients to self select their news letters from our internet because we don’t want to blitz people with emails anymore.” She uses a company called Concep an email marketing provider to monitor effectiveness. “You can see what is opened and analyze success. It’s all a two way communication these days.”

She adds that clients do want information by emails and tells me about a recent innovative move “We sent our partner with a e brochure on a data stick to a conference. It meant they weren’t giving away heavy brochures and we could amend the information right up until the last minute. Although she admits it is a pricey option because prices of data sticks vary but adds “you can track how people use the sticks.” Of other new ideas like blogs she says most law firms really mean microsites which is something she did previously for Morgan Lewis. Winckworth Sherwood also have a blog where trainees talk about life at the firm. Susie tried podcasting in the past which costs around £3000 each time. “I think it works best for private client law firms because of the people element.” One thing increasingly being used she says is webinars at the desk which is becoming a hot tool because of bandwidth capability. “You don’t have to travel and can sit with sandwiches and catch up on important topics.

As to whether partners should be involved with marketing or left to professionals, she says this it is essential they are fully involved. “Clients all say they want technical excellence, a communicator, value added services, sensible billing and fixed fee. Fee earners really do have to call their clients and go for dinner to keep relationships alive.”

Susie points out that marketing is still illegal in Italy and says “there are so many cultural things to look out for with global campaigns. The French like raised paper with thick print. Germans want a website in German or they won’t deal with you. Spain has the highest data protection of anywhere and in France you have to have individual consent from each member of staff to profile them on websites. There is a lot of thinking to do before a global marketing push.”

Taylor Vintner case study

Taylor Vinters, IT Director Steve Sumner, who has worked in the technology field for twenty six years, started his search for a CRM system after a Business Development Manager hire was put into the firms business plan. “We needed a system that would help support the person in what they had to do” says Steve. Starting with a clean slate he reviewed the leading market offerings and arrived at a listthat included Goldmine, Microsoft CRM and Lexis Nexis InterAction. Although the incoming Business Development Manager and Marketing Director had used Goldmine previously, after further review the product was discounted. Lexis Nexis InterAction was eventually also discounted because of costs associated with integrating the software with their Oracle based Miles33 practice management system.

Steve, who has worked for firms such as IBM and Avis Rent-a-Car, says he then looked more closely at Microsoft CRM which he eventually chose. “I felt what we were doing with SharePoint and the intranet would open up a wealth of possibilities for the future and offer exciting ways to deliver information to our people. We talked to a few Microsoft Partners, Microsoft themselves, had some demo’s and a number of project determination meetings. We believe we were one of the first law firms to do so.”

He liked the Outlook style which he says: “is a natural extension to what people are using already.” The project also fitted in with a three year licensing platform Taylor Vinters had which offered good cost savings and flexibility in the budget.” Now we have the core system and integration in place, the plan is to embellish that core to add layered security, improved mail merging, event management and put in place data processing procedures and use InfoPath to get quality data into the system. We are talking to people like Client Profiles and C360 to see where their add-ons fit into our plans.”

Steve chose reseller consultant ISC Software Services to partner with Taylor Vinters for the implementation and integration development work. Steve says “ISC are a local company who have supplied Taylor Vinters for some years with hardware, software and DR services so we knew them well, they have reasonable rates and the people knew us and what we did as a firm, this was instrumental in choosing them. We gave them a spec’ and invitation to tender document, asked for a fixed price and a four phase plan. They costed it, agreed it and delivered it in six weeks.” He does add that there was a refinement process and prep time before the green light.
In order to facilitate the project Steve has astutely seconded one of his team to marketing for a year. The IT member is demonstrating procedures for data entry and showing marketing staff how to configure the system and key in effectively.

Inititally work was focused on consoliating existing databases and matching the information to their accounts records. “It’s partly to validate client details.” says Steve. The marketing team is now adding new client information and checking for accuracy. “It’s going to be a major cleansing process as well as adding client history which should help everyone understand the contact clients have had with the firm. The plan is to help us to make better decisions by having client documents, data and billing available and ultimately to surpass client expectations, all through a SharePoint interface, and where detailed information is needed then the native CRM screens can be used.”

Taylor Vinters, who are based in Cambridge, have five IT staff . Steve is the IT Director, there is a network manager, helpdesk, IT manager and a developer is just in the process of being hired to reduce costs on external consultancy work and to further develop what the firm can do with SharePoint 2007. Taylor Vinters are an award winning law firm and on the Easyjet and OGC preferred panels.

www.interaction.com/
resold through tikit

http://www.tikit.com/

www.e1business.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/default.mspx

http://www.clientprofiles.com/

http://www.iscnet.co.uk/
http://www.iscsoftware.co.uk/

http://www.concepglobal.com/

Probono work

2007-12-02T03:05:00.001-08:00

Check out my article on probono.net - software to link attorneys, lawyers and charities with the right work. http://charityandphilanthropy.blogspot.com/2007/12/pro-bono-gets-techd-up-and-serious.html

Microsoft and attorneys/lawyers space

2007-12-02T02:45:00.000-08:00

Microsoft have started their own legal marketing space. A new area of their website for legal professionals practices. http://www.microsoft.com/industry/professionalservices/default.mspx

The BlackBerry turns a new trick: Time recording goes mobile

2007-12-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

Charging clients costs has always been a big part of a law firms business. Once a pen and paper standard it was revolutionised in the nineties by a snap-on cost recovery device on ‘copiers or MFP’s as those in the trade call them (multi function peripherals). The cost recovery sector understandably sat back on its laurels getting fat for a good while as law firms woke up to the benefits of auto charging. Cash registers rang merrily for law firms and vendors.

So no more pen and paper? Well not everyone bought in. You will always have the odd firm hanging on for grim death to old fashioned ways. And what is wrong with pen and paper anyway? Well nothing except no-one uses it now unless writing a nice thank you note or drawing a moustache on Jade Goody in Hello magazine. The vast majority of firms are one or two versions of cost recovery down the line. But the market wobbled a bit in the last year or two. Some nifty cost recovery vendors went embedded. (Went what?). ‘Ditch the device’ was the message. Bigger cost recovery players in the market were suddenly off their seat and goggle eyed. The race was on and cost software embedded into an MFP was the finish line. The result? The MFP and cost recovery vendors have gone into the blender as cherries and chocolate and
come out as cherry cake.

Law firms weren’t all smiles though. Why should we ditch our devices they said? We’ve grown so fond. But like domino’s, many are falling on the embedded sword. Which means another tech landfill site opens up to swallow many of our hard working but now nearly defunct hardware.
If we didn’t have the BlackBerry, the ‘copier/MFP manufacturers might be taking over the world soon. Our humble duplication servant has turned into a smart network consultant and
software hub set to converge and challenge devices who once sat neatly upon it. Think of
vendor eCopy who popped up quietly earning tens of millions with a new piece of scanning software. We could now scan a piece of paper through an eCopy device sitting on the MFP
straight into the DM system or to email and in fact send it directly to a client and store it in our mail box.

eCopy started out with an exclusive agreement with Canon, then realised they could sell heaps more by letting all MFP’s have it. They haven’t looked back since. It must be minutes before a MFP manufacturer makes a challenge on eCopy territory or eCopy ditches its screen device
and also goes embedded into an MFP. But MFP’s are bah humbug when you put it next to our
other fast learning friends the BlackBerry and handhelds. Fortunately for products like the
BlackBerry the MFP is a lot less portable. Although I hear MFP’s do have a good set of wheels.
The BlackBerry has grown up from a grey plastic shell feeding email into a super communication and connection device in around three years. In the last year it has seen real progress. The integration promises that weren’t always fulfilled are now real. It can connect you to important mother ship applications like your DMand time and billing functions. Which means the whole software world is now about to unleash itself on the BlackBerry and other handhelds.

One new application first off the block is ‘time capture.’ You may have seen the recent
announcement in Citytech which shouted ‘Linklaters buys Time KM.’ Time KM are a NKOB (new kid on the block) who seem to have come up smelling of roses. They got one of the biggest and most respected UK law firms to buy their product. They also have White & Case under their belt with another US law firm to follow. The software is web based and sits on the servers feeding into BlackBerries or other devices. It allows lawyers to use Blackberry or handhelds and skip around town doing time recording using their BlackBerry and a pushclick motion. The
software has alerts like ‘did you want to charge this?’ so they can finish a call or work on a
document in the DM and with no effort just click "charge time."

Time KM is partnering with cost recovery vendor Copitrak so I asked Stewart Hadley, Managing Director of Copitrak why. “Copitrak captures activities like copying, printing, faxing,
telephones, disbursements whilst TimeKM does the part we don't, nor ever will do which is capture time. There couldn't be a better association for us. Pensera also see Copitrak as an
organisation offering a great deal of synergy.”

The sell from the Time KM camp is that lawyers find it much easier to record their work and are less likely to have to be chased for timesheets all the time. They say it also helps with
client relationships because everything is itemised and can be analysed. So the offering includes more transparency.

So if Linklaters have signed up TimeKM, it generally means we, in the UK, think the product must be good. This is because Linklaters have shown that whatever decisions they’ve made seem to come good. The Time KM link up with Copitrak is also a feather in their cap. Copitrak are well known in the UK market and have a solid user base in many leading law firms.
Where a hitch may come for TimeKM is that they are up against Sage Carpe Diem resold by Tikit. Although Sage Carpe Diem doesn’t have BlackBerry capability it does have a stronghold of legal clients that will be difficult to unseat. It has rock solid loyal support in the UK. But shifting out Sage Carpe Diem is what TimeKM must achieve. Many say that TimeKM will find this a difficult road. The view is that anything that requires switching applications and training will have a strike against it straight away. Despite this Time KM have a couple of juicy deals in the bag. So if nothing else they must be very determined. Or perhaps law firms are more willing to ‘swop out’ (throw away and completely replace) than others think?

Moving on to the next product launching in this space is DTE InHand. It gives you another option if you aren’t keen to throw away investment in Sage Carpe Diem. DTE InHand is an Atlanta based software company reselling this product through Paul Longhurst at 3Kites in the UK. Paul is quick to say they have no interest in going up against Sage Carpe Diem and have
made sure DTE InHand integrates with it. The slight shadow for DTE is that it has a competing time and billing product in the US being sold against the likes of Sage Carpe Diem successfully. This will make it complex for Sage Carpe Diem or resellers to partner or promote DTE InHand in the UK.

I asked Stewart Hadley at Copitrak for his view on the competition to TimeKM. He says “We understand that DTE InHand has the mobility option and link to existing vendors like Sage Carpe Diem. We are confident that TimeKM offers a great deal more flexibility than just Sage Carpe Diem or Sage Carpe Diem and DTE InHand combined. It can stand up against these products.”

Whoever you favour the benefits of the BlackBerry time capture functionality are easy to grasp. It is all familiar technology and push-click. It is very likely to bring in more billable time because lawyers aren’t forgetting work or losing it on scribbled bits of paper. It should pay for itself very
quickly as more time is billed. One imagines it must help your position on the profit per partner charts too. As well as this lawyers are recording information in real time. As soon as it’s recorded it goes through to mothership accounts for billing, so work-to–billing-to-payment time
reduces.

So what is Citytech’s recommendation? If you can’t cope with ‘chuck out the Carpe’ and you
like the idea of push click billing on Blackberry and handhelds then the DTE InHand route is for you. If you don’t have Sage Carpe Diem or don’t mind reviewing a replacement then have a look at both and make your own mind up. I’ve had a look at each and agree they are all new, shiny and added value. The TimeKM offering is web based. The DTE InHand isn’t. Paul Longhurst says “the benefit of this is that lawyers can work on DTE InHand on the train without losing signal.”

The ‘time capture on the move’ breakdown

Carpe Diem is sold through Tikit in the UK.

Carpe Diem have substantial market share but haven’t got the BlackBerry functionality.

DTE InHand is new to the UK market but can integrate into Sage Carpe Diem to give the on-the-move BlackBerry pushclick recording functionality.

DTE InHand being sold by 3Kites. First pilot in.

TimeKM partnering with Copitrak. New to market but swung Linklaters which is an impressive
deal. Doesn’t integrate with Sage Carpe Diem seeks to replace it.

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/ in February 2007

Profile of a USA tech legend: M. Thomas (Tom) Collins

2007-12-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

M. Thomas (Tom) Collins is one of the pioneer entrepreneurs of the U. S. information services industry and is the founder and former President of Juris, Inc. He began his career as a CPA with Price Waterhouse. Citytech called him an "outstanding individual and visionary" when Tom Collins was named as one of the Top 100 Global Tech Leaders in the legal community. In addition to continuing to serve as Chairman of the Board at Juris, Collins shares his 30 years of experience working with midrange sized law firms through his insightful blog www.morepartnerincome.com. The blog has been rated the number one practice management site for law firms and is a 2007 addition to the ABA Practice Management Section’s Hall of Fame.

Sony® Reader

2007-12-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Corporates are rushing to buy the latest Sony® Reader. New technology means the screen reads like printed paper. A revolution indeed. Will you still print your emails? Probably but it’s a step in the right direction to ending the needless printers on desks and disposing of warehouse storage costs.

Why is the Sony®Reader different?

It uses a brand new technology called EPD
An Electronic Paper Display is a display that possesses a paper-like high contrast appearance, ultra-low power consumption, and a thin, light form. It gives the viewer the experience of reading from paper, while having the power of updatable information. EPDs are a technology enabled by electronic ink - ink that carries a charge enabling it to be updated through electronics. They don’t need a back light either – the screen is reflective.
www.eink.com

www.citytechmag.com

Tech stars: 2007

2007-12-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

Citytech loves to get reader feedback to hear which software is lighting fires under techno wood piles. Bighand, in their usual style, did the most work to ferret out testimonials from you all, so they get the star slot for 2007. The MBO seems to have really propelled the business into heady new heights. The latest Bighand deal with Linklaters is the largest implementation of digital dictation workflow software in the global legal sector.

Some law firm tech purchaser testimonials for BigHand digital dictation

“We were one of BigHand’s very first digital dictation users back in 2001, and given the benefit that their software has provided the firm over that period we were more than happy to also be an early mover onto BlackBerry Dictation. Our lawyers have found being able to dictate on a BlackBerry extremely valuable, enabling a much faster turnaround on work recorded when out of the office, and the firm is set to realise savings when we no longer have to supply each person with two devices for remote working.” Victoria Cumming, IT Manager, Bentleys www.bentleys.co.uk

“I would like to nominate BigHand for inclusion in the 2007 best tech stars review, following our recent implementation of the BigHand BlackBerry client. A number of our lawyers are now using their BlackBerry smartphones for dictation and have found that the productivity enhancement from the instant delivery of dictations back into the office workflow is a major benefit. As we were one of the earliest firms to install the software the input of our lawyers has gone directly back into its ongoing development – for example, we have helped suggest and refine some advanced features that will help users who produce a large amount of dictation. That way the transition away from a professional recording device is easier, and convergence to a BlackBerry becomes more of an option for the firm as a whole. We were delighted to work so closely with BigHand.” Jan Durant, IT Director, Lewis Silkin, www.lewissilkin.com

www.bighand.com

“Peter Birley, Browne Jacobson gets our vote .”

“We sell very specialist property tax software to large law firms and normally it takes twelve months, and a mass of work to get our new technology through the layers of IT. One firm stands out as being quite different and receptive and that is: Browne Jacobson. We went from presentation to installation in a few weeks with Peter Birley, their IT Director, pushing the project all the time.” Simon Sabel, Landscape Software,
http://www.landscape-software.com/

TECH STARS 2007: BIG DEAL MAKING
IT Directors for 2007

Jon Gould, Charles Russell and recently of Burgess Salmon; Sue Hall of Baker & McKenzie; Simon Kosminsky of S.J. Berwin; Abby Ewen of Simmons & Simmons.

This first appeared in www.citytechmag.com

“The year of the copyright law suit”

2007-12-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

This is one for the vendors and those amongst you who are developing proprietary software this week or even taking notice of what banking clients are doing. Palamida is a San Francisco based software company backed by venture capital partners who include Hummer Winblad who has worked with significant tech’ companies like Napster. Having announced the arrival of Mark Tolliver as Chief Executive and President in May 2005, who was previously with Sun Microsystems, they plan to help software developers quickly identify what code they can and cannot use to avoid litigation in the ‘year of the copyright lawsuit.’ Palamida, who don’t as yet work with partners, say they can reduce software compliance efforts from weeks to hours. Well known clients using them are Microsoft, Cisco and EMC but they work for many smaller organisations as well.

Mark shares his intial thoughts. “If you read any of the headlines on the web in 2007, it’s becoming obvious that big legal fights are brewing up around copyright. You have the YouTube website with Viacom suing Google for a billion dollars over misuse of their material: they have 160,000 movie and music clips used without permission violating multiple licences. Then you have large banking operations writing code for customers but very often line managers don’t know what the code is being used for. Our software simply provides a report to highlight problems that may occur so that there aren’t any time bombs waiting to go off. It allows an organisation to set a plan for fixing any proprietary problem and to keep an eye on code compliance.” He continues. “We spend time talking to the developers and engineering people, rather than lawyers to help them get their house in order. It means they have the option to speak to their legal team so that any issues can be resolved before they bring products to market.”

Mark thinks there will be heightened awareness in the coming year about not infringing digital assets and copyright. “It’s something I’ve believed for sometime - the worlds IP will be increasingly delivered in digital forms so the world is going to have to understand the problems. Companies like ours didn’t exist three to four years ago, it’s an indication of how the world is changing. We were sitting in a basement with no sales just two years ago but continue to grow substantially quarter to quarter and are now five times our original size.”

Mark says this sets the stage for Palamida. “We are focused on one part of this jigsaw which is just the computer software space. One of the biggest topics on the rise is Open source software and in the last decade some even argue that it can challenge Microsoft for the desktop. Whether this happens or not there are now hundreds of thousands of programmes available. The programmes are destined to be created by a community and free but they have licenses based on copyright. The next phase in software development will be about how we take advantage of this code but pay respect to people who created it. There are also problems with Open source in that there are unknown security issues or gaps in the code that could make companies vulnerable.”

Another interesting application for their software is in the acquisition space. Two years ago Mark was involved in a Sun acquisition of Netscape in collaboration with AOL which had large amounts of software and IP rights and cost them ‘a couple of billion.’ “One of the big questions he asked was “what did we actually buy?” The answer was, no-one really knew. We were growing really fast and people were coming in from all over the place. So lawyers and technical guys went through everything. The result was that it took us three years to work out where the code came from and who owned it. It was a real eye opener, there were tens of millions of lines of codes. In the back of my mind, I thought this is crazy. We spent a fortune.” Mark says. “The upshot is if you are acquiring a company, Palamida can now search and detect code in vastly reduced time and ensures firstly that if you are buying another company you aren’t paying for software that might be freely available as Open source. If you are then you can negotiate this point and reduce the price. So in the tech’ merger and acquisition world you are at risk of over paying if you haven’t used this sort of programme.”

Mark elaborates “We do tons of work for software companies who want to pay an appropriate price or don’t want to pay too much for stuff that is freely available.” He also says “There are a number of organisations now who look at those using commercial code to ensure Open source code is compliant with the general public licence or GPL, if not they launch discussions and this can result in legal action.” (http://www.gnu.org/). “People need to be ahead of the game on pricing and security issues because fixing things after they’ve happened is a lot more expensive than finding them and addressing them up front.”
Palamida have within their midst a huge database to make copies of all of the Open source software they can find, storing thousands of Gigabytes with the ability to index and rapidly search and compare software you own. He gives us an example. “If you are looking for plagiarism from a high school, it would be like taking a page from a students essay and going back through all the books in all of the libraries.”

They have a compliance library with 750,000 projects and Mark says Palamida isn’t just another search tool. Palamida licence their software on a yearly basis and periodically update their compliance library and provide updates. “We have lots of different ways to search text or files. We also allow our customers to search Java and Namesspace so they can search directly for copyright. There is a software tool that people use when writing software, whoever you are ie a bank or healthcare company, which is a build system, it automates the process software that will run. You run tests during build process to see if things are running properly and I believe that there should be an IP test that goes alongside every build system. Which means our type of tool is used for responsible use of software.” The software licence costs roughly £5,000 a year dependent on varying factors like number of licences or individuals who are using it in development areas.

Of the future, Mark believes ‘the’ major software trend is Open source and believes it has disruptive capability particularly as banks strengthen their use of it and articles continue to support Linux. However he says. “It’s radical to say it can replace Microsoft” but then cites an historic example of how Linux won the day against a major rival. “I was with Sun for quite sometime which had a great operating system called Solaris. It was brilliant but in those days Linux could be downloaded cheaply using Intel which did huge damage to Suns business.”

Although Microsoft may be able to sleep easy, Mark says they will be at more risk than ever before. “Any time there is a disruptive element with no up front licence fee and with source code readily available to anyone, it will bring changes in pricing and models.” Open source hold the possibility of bringing substantial change to the tech industry.” Another trend he notes is the rise of Java. “With more mobile devices than PC’s, the opportunity for dedicated and clever software for social networking on phones will be interesting.”

Mark finishes off. “We are in an area where people are re using and abusing code but people need to know there are lots of risks, there are security risks and pricing risks if acquiring or being acquired. They need to be aware of this and adjust their products or code accordingly. “We now speak to a lot of developers who are concerned about going to market using other peoples code.”©

www.palamida.com

This first appeared in www.citytechmag.com

Interview with a tech purchaser

2007-12-01T05:04:00.000-08:00

Nathan Hayes

Head of Infrastructure and Technology

Nathan Hayes is head of IT and Infrastructure at Osborne Clarke where he is celebrating his tenth year working in legal It. Based in Bristol, he heads up a team of fifty to run the day to day operations of what has become a multi centre law firm with around seven hundred staff.

Strangely he started off in architecture and theatre, completing studies as a stage designer. As he sought a career path, he was taken by developments in the artificial reality space which later evolved into an interest in technology allowing him to use his Science A levels and draw on his personal interest in IT.

His first tech job involved application translations for a global distribution company with a £100 million turnover, hundreds of staff and around thirty offices. He had to manipulate the screen interface to accommodate different languages which he says was a simple process using a standard forms interface. This coincided with Microsoft NT being unleashed onto the world so Nathan eventually took on responsibility for implementing this and Exchange. “I morphed into a wider role and also took on responsibility for BBS (Bulletin Board System), a forerunner to the internet.” He helped develop the BBS (dial up access to the mainframe) for software distribution so customers dialled in and accessed software on line. Nathan says of this point in time. “They had a mainframe which ran the financial and distribution side of the business but no email or office tools, it was back in 1995.” He built an IP network with NT4 and Exchange to give users access to the internet and email which was rolled out internationally.

Eventually the excitement of jet setting around the world paled and Nathan looked for a role that would allow him to invest more time in his personal life. He found the position at Osborne Clarke in 1997 and joined expecting his work life to simmer down but says: “I was wrong. It was on the cusp of law firms really taking IT to heart.” He started as network manager with a single employee with two hundred and fifty people, two offices and the big news was a new office opening in London.

He took on the role of head of IT about seven years ago, then three years ago also infrastructure which means taking care of the buildings the firm occupies. Nathan comments “The synergies between the two were growing so we simply integrated the teams. I don’t think a good working environment can be achieved in isolation, the two work in harmony.” He says it brought benefits in terms of internal co-ordination, for instance if there were queries about placing air con or MFP (multi function peripherals) within the building it meant his team had the answers. “Everything is relatively complicated in terms of procurement and contract management and drafting so we train our people on procedures and use a third party company called Amethyst to co-ordinate our tender process. They provide benchmarking on costs.”

Osborne Clarke has offices in the UK, Germany and the US: Bristol, Reading, London, Munich, Cologne and Palo Alto and the firm has a strong technology law bias. “The US is a conduit to bring work into our European office.” Says Nathan. “Although following difficult tech markets in the US in early 2000 we diversified into other areas like banking and property. We are an opportunistic firm; if we see a market not being well served we will leap into it.” Osborne Clarke recently hired a property team from Clarke Wilmot to build their property department.

Of the fifty staff he manages he says twenty two are pure technology and Nathan spends most of his time on delivery and developing strategy. “We have globally centralised IT and continually evolve, although also have significant points and goals to aim for. We run IT in line with the firm strategy and ambitions which at the moment is to elevate ourselves into the “silver circle” which reveals names like Travers Smith Braithwaite, DLA and BLP within it. “It is something we aspire to.” Osborne Clarke were just featured in Legal Week who reported that their profits per equity partner surged by a fifth to reach £511,00 up from £425,000 last year. Fee income rose from £74.1 to £82.8million. Nathan says managing finances has its problems. “I have to be on the ball and make decisions to purchase ahead particularly in growth phases but the balance is not to overdo it or it affects the bottom line. It would be easy to haemorrhage money.”

As we are on talking about financial issues I ask about budget. Nathan says the firm assess IT proposals in the first quarter of the year otherwise outside of this they have an “Expenditure Request” process every quarter where meetings are held with the COO and Managing Partner but this is for emergencies only or where a real opportunity arises. Decisions are made by Nathan and a steering group made up of stakeholders that include the Managing Partner and COO. Vendors are asked to tender for work and the first stage will be down to Nathan to compile a vendor short list which he does via industry peers and using knowledge internally. They then send out a request for information with a proposal and go through a 3 to 4 week tender process but this can stretch to six months on large projects. “We follow a well documented trail so that we don’t drop the baton.” Budget is 3% which is on the low side in the industry but Nathan says it rises to 4% in investment phases. “One of our key performance indicators is to keep spend below 4%. I want an above average service for below average cost delivered to the business.” Products and services under review are Workshare, video conferencing and e- discovery and over the next year or so Exchange 2007, Live Communications Server and MS Unified Communications; Office 2007; SharePoint 2007 in terms of Intranet development ; Enterprise/Federated Search ; High Availability Systems incorporating Virtualisation/Centralisation and a global, fault tolerant, MPLS WAN with dual fail over Data Centres.

Like Chris White at Ashurst, Nathan isn’t keen on in-house development preferring the off the shelf solution. “We aren’t a software house so don’t do it ourselves, it’s too expensive. If we had £80mill then it might make sense. I think ready made software gives the best bang for your buck.”

When he arrived at Osborne Clarke they had an in house developed DM system which he binned in favour of Interwoven (it was iManage at the time). He says he chose Interwoven because it was more in tune with Microsoft than competitors. They also had two separate networks so he introduced a period of new developments including InterAction; replacing Norwell with SolCase and moved to Thomson Elite. “It took us to a few years and we are still adding new systems.” Osborne Clarke just signed with Metastorm for BPM. They did review competing FloSuite but decided to go for the larger sized vendor for business safety reasons. “Also although there were technical advantages to FloSuite, Metastorm have pods that are prebuilt which helps with rapid application delivery.” Says Nathan.

Another project Nathan is keen to talk about is their file and DM project. “We reengineered the document lifecycle, from inception through to archiving, image review, file and doc review and records management. We are using Interwoven around the matter centric filing then we’ve put together technologies like eCopy, MFP’s, interwoven, records management, archiving and connected processes in between to encourage use of our software to ensure users work how we want because its easy and to increase productivity. “We are seeing some benefits but have had to put some things on hold because of e filing technical problems with interwoven. Osborne Clarke bought the systems through Phoenix who are “doing a good job and getting the job done.”

Nathan says he is really looking forward to seeing more opportunities grow from this project. “It won’t be just about storage reduction but storage movements dropping.” I ask about eCopy as some law firms have been a bit sniffy about it suggesting that a scanner and computer can do the same job. “eCopy is a very good product. Trying to see the screen on an MFP to do the same thing is laughable. You just can’t see it. We want to reduce the barriers for knowledge workers not increase them. With eCopy you log on and it picks up info’ about who you are and it scans into interwoven. We have to make life as easy as possible. Otherwise people won’t do it.”

So the run down on technology is ThomsonElite, Tikit/Interaction, Metastorm, Visualfiles for case management, Interwoven, Mimecast, Kvault and Lightspeed security. Osborne Clarke unusually don’t have cost recovery. “We built the cost into hourly rates and decided managing a cost recovery process didn’t make sense. Although we do keep reviewing it.”

Of the best product Nathan has seen Blackberry wins the day. “It’s the best thing out there although I do think once Microsoft get a grip in the next three years that Windows mobile will be a tough competitor. InterAction took the longest to implement because of the cultural re engineering required. “We have given fee earners targets like focusing on their top 100 clients to speed the process up although network mapping technology may prove a useful tool for helping staff work out who knows who more quickly.”

Of events in the sector, Nathan says he really enjoys attending them. He is off to the Incisive Media Portugal event, plans to go to Informa Turnberry event in the autumn and “would like to go to ILTA USA.” He says Portugal was very interesting when he attended last year because it focused on strategy.

Highlighted vendor: Global Crossing, big network provider, much cheaper than BT.

Osborne ClarkeOne London WallLondon EC2Y 5EB

Direct dial: + 44 (0) 20 7105 7666 Direct fax: + 44 (0) 117 917 3147

<http://www.osborneclarke.com/>

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

David Fryer, CEO, BigHand digital dictation tells us how things are going one year after the management buyout

2007-11-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Karen Jones interviews David Fryer, BigHand CEO, who was previously Managing Partner at law firm Taylor Walton

Buyout mania has hit legal tech in the last few years with tech vendors being snapped up as though hot bargains in a sale at Harrods. But one management team which consisted Stephen Thompson and Gordon McAlpine who sold their interest in, BigHand Digital Dictation weren’t devoured by hungry venture capital shoppers: it was taken over by it’s own staff.

In a deal that took more than a year to complete, the new BigHand team and their backer (LDC) took ownership of 400 clients, a 57 percent of digital dictation market share and annual sales of over £7million. And from July 2006, they really had just one job – ‘don’t drop the baton.’ The buyout team, which consists David Fryer, ex managing partner at law firm Taylor Walton as Chief Executive Officer, Simon Lewis, who developed the software as Development Director, Steve Butterworth who now continues as Sales Director and similarly Jonathan Carter – Client Solutions Director, who all have equal shares. LDC say they have a ‘significant share holding.’

Although sheer speculation and figures are private, I estimate the deal must have looked something like 40% management team to 60% LDC with Gordon and Stephen Thompson leaving with a couple of million each. As David Fryer, who attended law college in Chester, comments. “It was a major negotiation and fortunately we stayed on very good terms with both Gordon and Stephen.” Which does say something about the four staff who undertook the MBO: it is rare to be anything but exhausted and resigned to your fate after a deal of this magnitude. The champagne would have flowed when final documents were signed.

Of all the vendors in the legal tech space, BigHand is one the success stories of the legal sector. Founded in 1996, the then founders Stephen and Gordon had done well and started toying with the idea of selling up in around 2004. They were fortunate enough to have David Fryer in their sights. David, who was a phenomenally successful managing partner at Taylor Walton, who sit below the Top 100 on the law firm charts, had got the firm ship shape and was looking for a new challenge. In 2004, David took a leap of faith, resigned and awaited fate’s calling card. It arrived in the shape of Stephen and Gordon.
“I took Stephens role really” says David, who in his managing partner role had taken on the technology purchasing, amongst others projects and had got a firm handle on the issues. “I joined to run the company and processes and although I only realised later on, this allowed Stephen to get their MBO process underway.”

Gordon and Stephen were advised to leave the deal ‘clean’ in other words walk away once it was done, which David, who is originally from Grantham in Lincolnshire,
Says. “Was pretty easy. I was doing Stephen’s job and Gordon dealt with the top twenty law firms in the market which meant relatively little selling to do and it wasn’t difficult for someone new to take over.”

David takes us back in history to show us pretty much how everything evolves: by seizing opportunity. “When the company started out it was focused on speech recognition and called VoiceWrite.” He says. “It was nothing to do with digital dictation.” Although he wasn’t involved, it sounds like it was a bit of a thankless task selling the concept. He says that a typical pilot of ten staff had similar results each time. “One would love it, eight couldn’t wait to stop using it and one would have muddled through using it because they had been told to by the boss.” We both laugh but we have the benefit of hindsight and BigHand’s obvious success to erase what must have been a difficult early start for the company. BigHand got no roll outs so in ’99 frustrated they did a review, spoke to clients and clever old Simon Lewis sat down and wrote the first version of ‘Total Speech’ which at first blended speech and digital dictation.” It didn’t take long for BigHand to scrub the speech and focus 100% percent on digital dictation and as they say the rest is history: Total Speech 2 launched as pure digital dictation. “Workflow is the clever bit though.” Says David. “It’s all so much better than analogue because work is visible. It stores in Outlook so support staff can look at a screen and see work needs doing and what work has been sent around to other staff.”

David says initially secretaries were wary of the software and suspected they would lose their jobs but in reality, late nights getting urgent reports out became a thing of the past because work was suddenly available for everyone to see. Gone were the days where you didn’t dare ask a stroppy support person to help. “It also highlights how many minutes of work are on each item so support staff can choose items dependent on how much time they have available.”

It sounds like an ideal system to start causing some mayhem with secretaries in terms of how much work they are doing but David squashes any attempts to see BigHand software as a measurement tool. “Some instructions might be 2mins in size but have a whole days work on them. When we asked clients about this, they said the system mirrored what they knew already in terms of how staff were working.”

Developments in digital dictation now include Blackberry integration and in the future David sees the return of speech and increasingly using their software over the telephone. Already you can speak instructions into the BlackBerry, click send and it sits in the workflow queue ready for assistants back at the mother ship to action or type. The server has a 4 digit passcode but that is the only block between fee earners and getting work done.

Which is also some good news for smaller firms (and increasingly bad news for device vendors), the move to the Blackberry (BigHand also works on Windows mobile) has meant it isn’t essential to buy devices anymore, Dictation can happen on the Blackberry with a press and a ping into workflow. “It’s really for more complicated dictation that devices will be needed. Which is something to do with the breadth of legal language. Apparently lawyers use something like 30,000 words compared to the medical profession who use 5,000. BigHand charge an additional fee for mobile use.

The next phase for BigHand is ‘unleashing into the public sector’. “Property and accountancy are also looking promising areas.” Says David. Surprisingly accountants dictate a lot less than lawyers do with a 80/50 ratio and private client lawyers dictate the most.

There are eighteen suppliers in the market but many offerings are connected to practice management software so may not be so obvious. Top choices it seems are BigHand, Winscribe and nFlow with BigHand and Winscribe having a similar pricing policy. “There is plenty of market out there for everyone and we don’t talk about competition mainly because we believe our software is better, easier to put in and we are fast at doing it.” Says David.

So its all good news so far, I wondered what can go wrong? David is honest and upfront. “Whilst every organisation should prepare to become obsolete, we do see some resistance from firms who have lawyers with good typing skills. They can’t see why they need it. Fortunately we are seeing firms who have made that kind of decision in the past to reduce overheads come back to us. It’s an error to think its all just about typing. It’s not, it’s about work and instructions flowing easily through the system. A large part of dictation is instructions and in a busy, volume practice this software eases work burdens.” As well as this David thinks a move to proprietary software would be a wrong turn. “Buyers are choosing and they want software to do everything easily. Also areas like images could take us down the wrong path. Its easy to get distracted.” David thinks SOA (service orientated architecture) has been the successful route for them. “Anyone can access us through SharePoint and we work with big players like Metastorm, Visualfiles, Interwoven and OpenText, which is where most of the demand is. It’s good software and people like to use it.”

BigHand have opened in the USA and have found a fresh, bountiful market. “Analogue use was plentiful in its day and for some reason, digital dictation just didn’t get on the radar for firms, they went from analogue to typing with nothing in the middle. Says David. “The US is well ahead of the legal market on its own issues like VOIP because of the size of the country and e-discovery because of litigation but they are behind on these types of software because they assumed it would die out.” The whole team are spending a lot of time pinging back and forward to the US and Steve Butterworth the sales director has now relocated there. ©

www.bighand.com

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

Baker Robbins on their Thomson takover - “We needed to grow”

2007-11-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

Karen Jones interviews David Baker, Chairman, Baker Robbins & Co, technology consultants on the Thomson buyout in January this year.

Two years after the purchase of Hildebrandt, Thomson set their sights on another stalwart consultant in Baker Robbins completing both purchases in the month of January but with a two year time gap. (Hildebrandt Jan 2005 and Baker Robbins Jan 2007).
Although there is much speculation that Baker Robbins won’t be able to remain independent in this corporate structure with a host who has many products to sell to law firms, market commentary confirms that Hildebrandt, who were acquired two years before Baker Robbins, have successfully managed this task.

David Baker, Chairman at Baker Robbins, is undoubtedly one of the worlds tech brains and would make great company for a night of beer and in depth tech discussions. You just have to mention DM, WANG, mainframes and PC’s and he is off talking passionately about his past and the tech world and problems law firms are facing.

He started life as many of you did in a completely different area: architecture. In 1973 after finishing a degree in architecture he started work in a government office using his quantitative skills for drafting but soon became interested in the tech side of the business. To set himself off on a new career he went back to school and took another degree in architecture, biased toward computer science. This led to him later becoming part of the first team that developed a CAD (computer aided design) system.

David joined Arthur Anderson in 1980 and became their lead tech consultant advising law firms. He says, “The key issues then were practice management and word processing which was dominated by WANG. There was some software that still concentrated on image processing as well which later, in a fire sale, became the Windows image viewer written in WANG code.” We digress a moment to talk about WANG’s disappearance which has become as legendary as the Titanic sinking. “Their downfall was pushing into the PC business without realising that there needed to be standardisation and that margins would be small. They concentrated on proprietary projects which ended up unravelling them financially.”

David says back then the big PMS supplier was a company called PSS based out in Phoenix, USA. They dominated the top 100 law firm charts with law firm accounting and litigation support. “They later sold out to Infomatics.” Says David. PSS were good for larger firms providing automation of processes but went the way of WANG. They made several attempts to create a next generation product but all failed. Half the problem is that even though academic studies show we only use 10% of our computer capacity, vendors are burdened with producing complicated things to market which often aren’t used.”
A break through for the legal sector came in 1987 with the development of Elite, by Alan Rich, who now concentrates on capital investment for tech vendors. “It was a family business who managed to successfully turn their software into a market leading product. Infomatics couldn’t keep their software fresh but Elite did and have continued to do so.” Says David.

Continuing David confirms that Baker Robbins & Co never take money from vendors for recommendations and this will continue with the Thomson tie up. Although he concedes. “Our relationship is a symbiotic one with vendors: we rely on them to provide technical help and have to work closely with them. It’s the subtle art of co-operation which is essential.”
Also back at this time, the 1980’s, David says he was keen to get PC’s on to desktops. “I like to look at ways to apply technology in different ways and knew this could make a real difference.”

Of the Baker Robbins business David explains their methods. “We focus on evolution of the business but have realised that in doing so we create more problems. For instance once we had got PC’s on desktops, PC networks ended up forcing the fee earner to manage their data. It meant a document management problem to address.” In 1998 he he sat down with a company called Soft Solutions in Utah, to come up with the concept of document management software. “Others supplanted it in the end.” Says David. “Because it couldn’t scale up but even new vendors like iManage (now Interwoven) brought new problems for record retention and litigation hold (preserving all papers including digital in one space pending a litigation).

David says there has been over engineering and categorisation of systems which married with best practices altering over time has caused what he calls “perfect storms” – times when there are great opportunities for vendors to sell products. This naturally leads me to ask if Baker Robbins advise vendors but David is reticent. “We try never to favour anyone and work with them all. Its part of our core belief that we need to keep a level playing field.”

With around a hundred staff at Baker Robbins, David says he took a year to complete due diligence on the transaction with Thomson. “We had to vet the concept of remaining independent.”

Before the buyout Brad and David owned “more than fifty percent” of the company with a “dozen or so more shareholders” which included key staff selected because of “leadership and business development qualities.” In the new entity neither have any shareholdings but David says they have been incentivised to do well.

He says of his reasons for the buyout were that he realised they would eventually hit a plateau. “All organisations do. We knew it meant we would have to do something different or change the model we were working with.” Continuing he says. “People are our assembly line. Our best approach to business development was getting seasoned individuals in front of clients to show them we could make their pain go away. It held us in one spot and created a dilemma, we needed new skills to work out how to grow. We were always resource bound, although a hundred staff sounds a lot, we needed more people to do things our way and didn’t believe in sub contracting. Thomsons involvement allows us to attract more of the right staff with their balance sheet behind us.”
Critics say that as law firms become more sophisticated over the generations of their software, advice from organisations like Baker Robbins was becoming less necessary, something that may have caused them to worry about the future, which may be another reason for the sale. David disagrees. “Things that occur for the first time like DM are more labour intensive and law firms definitely develop more experience and business trails off. It wasn’t a problem though, we have a look ahead mentality and are students of the industry. Looking ahead, tells us that solutions create new problems which helped us re cast our practice many times over the years. We could have just kept doing this.”

Of the forward momentum in the company, Brad and David continue to be in charge but report to David Hanssens, President of Consulting Services for Thomson. David says of the change that it’s “early days” to make any judgements but that David was at Bain Consulting previously so understands how change works. “He integrated West professionally and with understanding. He was also able to articulate the need for professional services and underline how important they would be in the implementation of products for Thomson. He realised this and brought Thomson to Hildebrandt to gather strategy and process skills. He did the same with us to bring in technology and process expertise. It all helped that we had a previous alliance with Hildebrandt and had been working with them for some time.

As we have an expert in our midst I ask him for his top three things that he thinks will change our landscape, we get onto topic one and no further as it expands from a comment to a chapter. “I think Microsoft will become a challenger to third party software suppliers particularly in the records and DM space. Before the Vista launch, Microsoft were working on a Vista file service but pulled it because they realised it would change everything that existed so far, including long standing partnership agreements.” He reflects for a moment. “It would have been like something HP brought out called “NewWave” some years ago. It would have a development language on documents that would trigger actions for workflow with wizards to show fee earners how to proceed with information embedded in the documents. With NewWave this was possible but with added horse power from Microsoft it could start to take over search functions, DM, litigation readiness and KM. It could upset all the current relationships and systems in the market today. It’s hard to know where they will go with it now or what the implications will be.”

http://www.brco.com/

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

Bindmans, a hundred user law firm, tells Citytech about their tech plans and latest SharePoint intranet implementation

2007-11-26T01:19:00.000-08:00

Kambiz Jahanshahi, joined Bindmans, who have 100 staff, this year in April after a career spanning IT consultancy and a media company called the GB group, where he ran the IT and websites. “I left there in April then joined Bindmans.” Says Kambiz. “It was an interesting time to join because they were undertaking a substantial review of technology. They wanted to digitize their workflow. One of the big projects underway was the launch of an intranet system based around MySQL. After a review, I didn’t think it was user friendly from an admin or end user point of view. It was using the TYPO3 content management tool whilst the firm is moving down the .NET and SQL route. It didn’t really fit in with forward motion.” Kambiz took time out to consult the management committee and canvass opinion within the firm to see what they wanted to achieve with the intranet. “It seemed SharePoint ticked all the boxes so we stopped work on the system we had and bought SharePoint instead.” He says he’d used it before at GB Media so was comfortable with how it worked. “It’s user friendly and it’s the same sort of interface that people are used to with Windows. It was a no brainer for me.”

Although there are many champions for SharePoint in legal, there are some detractors who still believe it’s too complicated for smaller firms to undertake, so I ask about buy-in from the staff. “We have an ongoing training process and at first people are intimidated. They think it seems complicated with a lot of features but people get excited once trained and jump on the band wagon very quickly.”

As to how they manage the content, Kambiz says they spread the work load throughout the firm. “We have two people acting as content editors in their spare time and individuals in different departments have been happy to take charge.” He confirms that he does any technical work and keeps an eye on consistency. As to resources taken up with the project, Kambiz says. “We haven’t allocated any extra resource to the SharePoint intranet, it is not labour intensive.” He adds that Bindmans previously had an intranet “for updating news and policy” but says they didn’t have the same interaction as they do now. “It was a much smaller scale project.”
So the next logical step usually for those implementing SharePoint is to bring other software components into it to allow staff to benefit from everything in one interface and reduce complication. Kambiz says this is likely to happen. “We are looking at CRM systems at the moment. The purchasing hot list includes AiM’s marketing module because Bindmans use their practice management system along with Laserforms. “We are also reviewing Microsoft CRM, Goldmine and there are some others in the mix.” Says Kambiz although he does confess that Goldmine is not a hot favourite.

As a new entrant into legal, the CS Group took over AiM in dramatic style in the last year, so I ask for his view of AiM. “We are very happy with the performance of AiM despite the change in company management. I constantly find new features to work with. It’s great.” He says.
Kambiz explains that Bindmans is in the process of implementing a DM solution based around INVU who were not a vendor I’d heard about. “They are big in the financial sector, user friendly and easy to get to grips with. We launched our test systems last week and it’s integrated into AiM and pulls matter centric documents in. We are looking at INVU to build internal workflows to move documents around.” He adds that this may be a candidate for a SharePoint connector utilizing software like Handshake. “We want a single area where everything is accessible. With INVU if we pass the trial we will go ahead and implement the connectors with their DM system. We want to cut the use of paper everywhere.”

So were the bigger DM vendors considered? “When I joined, both Interwoven and Open Text had been reviewed but to go that route meant a large investment and we would have had to change our working practices.” He echoes a theme that is rising like cream with many IT staff. “I would rather bring a system in to work the way we work, not to force the way we work around it. INVU seems to deliver that.”

Kambiz, who has been in the IT world for seven years, used IT consultants, Concentra for the SharePoint project and is happy to sing their praises. “They seemed to know where we wanted to go.” He says. “Everyone was really impressed by what they were able to offer. We just told them what we wanted and they built it for us. We knew from internal meetings what features we wanted then leveraged their knowledge of this type of project. We were very happy with them.”

And to the elastic topic of implementation times? “Start to finish SharePoint was about a month.” He explains the speed. “Before I started we went through what we needed, then refined the system, we had a consultation and went through with stakeholders about what was required. So in was pretty much done in three weeks.”

Of his move into a partnership structure, which can often take newcomers by surprise, he says the transfer into a law firm was pretty easy. “In media, like law it’s also about managing information, so it’s a very interlinked industry. We worked with a wide variety of media which included video. Law firms will have the same challenges. Everyone is moving away from documents and it’s all going digital. It’s more about managing the volume and enabling users to consume it effectively.” As VM ware is the new big thing, I wonder if it’s on Bindmans agenda? “We are looking at VM ware because we have a number of small servers working on sole tasks taking up space.”

Other projects on the list for review are diary management systems, core infrastructure changes whilst the office is under renovation, remote working and consolidation of current systems. “We have a large number of small servers taking up space that we would like to lose.” Kambiz says extranets for clients are also a goal for next year. “We want to publish bills, have clients see progress on matters and accept documents by secure intranet linked to the DM.”
So in the big is beautiful but smaller is more agile does Kambiz think that SharePoint is helping smaller firms lift their status? “I think SharePoint is really helping us raise our game. Its extremely powerful and if you wanted to have it custom built it would cost a fortune but off the shelf, SharePoint does what you really need it do.” His peer support group from his media days includes developers at Westlaw and Sweet & Maxwell “I get to meet their tech guys and get information on how other firms are doing things.” He says, then makes an important point for legal aid firms. “There are changes in legal aid which mean law firms are having to be more efficient. We can use technology to bring overall operation expenses down. It will take away chunks of cost for archiving information if everything is stored in digital libraries. I think law firms are realizing it’s a route they have to go down. Smaller firms have to be as efficient as possible.” He adds that Sweet and Maxwell are looking into digital paper solutions including sending resources out to fee earners on the road for downloadwithout a laptop with links into DM systems.

As to the tech team at Bindmans, there are two staff which includes Kambiz on the implementation side and a second member who runs the support and help desk. “We call on some of the PA’s and IT responsible staff in the firm to take on support, then we have team leaders here who are senior content managers.”

For firm wide ITprojects, decision making starts with Kambiz, then goes to a working group to identify requirements, a spec’ is created and the partnership get final sign off. Although smaller schemes don’t need to run this route and day to day, as you would expect, decisions are made by Kambiz.

And a final word on SharePoint? “Staff morale has really improved because it’s given everyone a chance to contribute to something within the firm. We are in the middle of an office renovation but our office manager is keeping the office updated about improvements with photos and work information. It’s making people happier and they feel more connected.”
Www.bindmans.com
www.invu.net/
www.concentra.co.uk/

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

Maitland Group: law, trust, accountancy and corporate services firm tell Citytech about their latest Lexis Nexis InterAction purchase

2007-11-26T01:17:00.001-08:00

Paul Kerins is Head of IT at the Maitland Group who are a recent ‘win’ for Lexis Nexis InterAction. Maitland are a law firm with trust, accounting and corporate admin groups and have eleven offices around the world.

Paul Kerins started his career with the group working on IT systems in1998 with a past history as IT and project manager.

Paul tells us why they chose Lexis Nexis InterAction. “We were looking for something the entire group could use and because we were multi site, it had to be web based. We wanted it to integrate with Outlook and Exchange so started off looking at a variety of systems.” Here John Finch, Project Manager at Maitland joins the interview to fill us in on the technical details. “I had specific responsibility on the IT side.” Said John. “I managed the process; systems we looked at and internal documentation. We went the traditional route of looking at a shortlist of products and in fact went a long way down the line with Sage MME and SalesLogix.” John says they also looked hard at Microsoft CRM but felt the online offering was outstripped by other products.
John says between the two main choices, Sales Logix and Interface he felt the SalesLogix was a stronger product, but the stumbling block was lack of web functionality. They then reviewed Sage MME and were going to choose it but on a pilot were trying to map entities with contacts and found it was being pushed out of it’s comfort zone.

John tells us about past CRM efforts at the firm. “We’ve attempted CRM before on an office by office basis but never tried to get something running at group level. We wanted a system to cover the eleven offices we have and from the IT perspective, wanted to consolidate our databases. He concedes that cultural issues may arise but is pragmatic. “You always have problems with systems of this type. We have a certain amount of buy in from people who’ve already used CRM systems. Marketing are heading up the roll out and have a training programme in place that should address this and will bring big dividends.” Paul nods in agreement. “The issues were mainly geographic and we needed to bring information together. As John has said Lexis Nexis InterAction met our requirements.”

As to other technology within the firm, Paul confirms that they have KM, an intranet and online libraries across their four operating divisions which are: legal, trust and corporate administration and accounting. They also have specialist software for the groups. Products used internally include Microsoft, GENI, Jobstream and Immediacy which is web content management software . “We go for best of breed.” Says Paul.

IT support runs out of the Isle of Man with IT staff in London, Luxembourg and South Africa. Paul says there is a problem finding vendors because of the firms sheer geographic dispersal, so they tend to have different vendors in different locations and standardise what they do. “For instance choosing one hardware supplier like Dell.” Says Paul. Language problems can also be a problem, so he sticks to English language software but concedes: “It can throw up issues for us.”
Picking his brains, I ask about trends he is seeing. “The need for ever more connectivity, more bandwidth and email becoming all consuming.” He says before adding. “The sheer number of servers needed for technology is incredible. It used to be one server, now its twenty or thirty.” He confirms, like most, that he is reviewing virtualisation software to save on office space.
Paul says Maitland stick with dedicated suppliers and says of the vendors they deal with, Lexis Nexis InterAction get the thumbs up. “They were good to deal with.” I ask about vendors generally. “We do get sales calls every day but we just handle it as part of the business.”
The plan with InterAction is a big roll which will then integrate into core systems like Jobstream, a specialist trust billing and accounting system. “We are pushing integrated systems.” Paul takes a minute to tell us about Jobstream. “It’s in the top two software suppliers offshore and is a niche company in the Isle of Man. There are very few bits of software that does what it does. It has everything you need for the trust business: client accounting, portfolio management, time recording, billing and fund administration.”

In the IT department Maitland have ten staff. “We are about right in size.” Says Paul. “Although we’re having to recruit more IT staff. There are some things you just can’t do remotely but we try and use remote relationships in each jurisdiction as much as we can.” He adds. “We travel a bit between offices.”

Finishing off, Pauls says the IT budget is four percent of turnover “ It will vary depending on what we are doing. It can be lower if no software purchases are made.”

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

“The world is flat.” Off shoring

2007-11-26T01:14:00.000-08:00

Ian Prince was a former IT director at JP Morgan and Deutsche bank before deciding at forty five to set up his own consultancy: Prince OMC. The OMC doesn’t stand for anything but was a way to set the company apart on web searches.

Prince OMC is a strategic consultancy dealing with off shoring or outsourcing projects for banks and law firms (captive or non captive). Their notable deal in the legal sector was with Philip Rooke, Head of IT at CMS Cameron McKenna, who earlier this year signed a deal worth £10million for a five year contract to outsource a number of areas (data centre support, network, security and managed desktop services and application development, support and management) to a company called HCL who have offices in London and Chennai, India. Cameron McKenna now have employ forty staff emloyed using this method.

Philip Rooke was unavailable for comment, because of a trip to India, but silicon.com says this move resulted in twenty staff being made redundant and ten moving to work for HCL. A more flexible and skilled work force along with cost saving were said to be behind the deal. This undoubtedly was a tough people decision for Philip Rooke, as it would be for you, but for CMS Cameron McKenna it was a no brainer: reduced costs means more profits at a time when firm benchmarks include embarrasing profit per partner articles in publications like Legal Business if profits are down.

Ian says he gathered experience of the offshoring model when at JP Morgan. “JP Morgan acquired shares in a bank called ICICI in India, then later took them over.” Ian agrees that there are problems in dealing with out sourcing abroad. “Mainly it’s cultural.” He says. “The British over assume and Indians oversell. It means you need to take this into account before signing any contract.” Despite this he says the off shoring model is proven and effective particularly for IT/application support, business processes, knowledge process outsourcing and legal research.

Jack Diggle also works at Prince OMC and has a similarly impressive background spending time at ABN AMRO and Goldman Sachs outsourcing middle and back office functions to organisations like the Bank of New York. He says that time in Africa in his teenage years also planted a seed of interest in outsourcing. “ABN AMR have been in the top ten percent for using this model.” He says. Eastern Europe is now rising up to compete with India for this work which Jack says suits different clients for different reasons. He also adds that different jurisdictions are best for particular expertise: “Russia is good for programmers and the Philippines for accountants because of the educational focus in the regions.”

I wonder about reputational damage, which is becoming an increasing problem as the media ‘bust’ organisations on a daily basis for inethical practice in other counties. Ian is quick to dismiss this as a problem. “Depending on the type of work we undertake which could be setting up another arm of your law firm in India or attaching an outsource company to your law firm, both have involvement with HR and best practices for employees and employee rights are in place. He adds that data protection requirements are also inbuilt in their strategy.”

Jack adds a comment. “Where we see this benefiting law firms is in taking on more work than they’ve previously been able to deal with and in retaining experienced staff. If you have good staff doing basic work, they aren’t going to stay.” Ian agrees. “Firms can ramp up and ramp down depending on work flows.”

In terms of who this model works for Ian suggests that Magic Circle benefit most but that law firms with around a 1000 staff will also discover practical benefits. “Firms will save around thirty percent on their wage bill but other cost reductions will also arise naturally.”

The top five reasons you should review Prince OMC:

Specialist in law firms following the CMS Cameron McKenna deal
Prince OMC bring experience of thirty years from global institutions and “can move quickly.”
Breadth of offering: IT, BPM, LPO (Legal process outsourcing) and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) as third party and on or off shore
De risking. “We have done the reseach and take the risk out of this model.”
A solid relationship with the managers at companies they use abroad

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

Interwoven update

2007-11-26T01:12:00.000-08:00

Interwoven had their recent annual event at the Hilton in the Edgware Road in London, I caught up with two of their key figures to get their views and updates on the industry and Interwoven.

Neil Araujo who was a founding member of iManage, which through merger became Interwoven, is a Citytech global top 100 leader with sixteen years industry experience. kicks off the interview by running through some recent achievements from Interwoven. “We’ve just started in the accountancy space to expand our market which is currently running at one new law firm deal a week.” This he says is a combination of gravitations and new clients.
The battle for talent was something that rose out from the two day event, Neil, who is based in Chicago and is VP of Marketing, tells us why. “Firms want the best talent they can get, so increasingly need to be ‘desktop ready’ for the new keyboard generation, who are up to speed with the Microsoft template when they arrive. It’s about consumerisation of the desktop and meeting their expectations rather than making life complex and perhaps losing them to another firm.”

Neil says search is at the top of the agenda for everyone although concedes that the web and Google experience has not made it into many organisations yet. He tells us why. “Google can afford super computers, which are out of the scope of most of us, but the notion of one type of data is really only relevant for the web. Most firms have disparate data everywhere so applying one rule is complex and a difficult job.” He mentions managed and unmanaged data which refers to organised data like document management and then mass unorganised areas like email boxes. “We are making sure with our new search software ‘Universal Search’ that we work across all of these areas and archives.”

The Interwoven Universal Search tool, which launched at the end of September 2007, is like Google with a one box window and many other additions to improve information searches. “It automatically categorizes taxonomy on the fly.” Says Neil before adding in the usual Interwoven punchy style. “We are confident it will knock out most other search vendors and have made it the core search engine on Worksite.” He highlights its usability. “If our clients can use the web, they can use this.”

Mobility is still at the top of the can-we-work-faster-list as well and Neil says there is a big emphasis on performing effectively, even if fee earners are at the mercy of slow internet facilities or dial up whilst travelling. “We want people to be able to work in all sorts of conditions.” Something that many of us will relate to if you’ve ever needed to get an urgent report done whilst in a hotel that doesn’t consider internet a priority. “Firms are so global.” Says Neil. “We want to work on these types of issues.”

Email management processes continue to be the not-new-at-all-big-thing but Neil says as an information management company, Interwoven will keep an eye on this fire ball. He also highlights risk as a key issue and says it comes back to hiring. “Firms have got to hire the best people and also have information hygiene as part of their normal practice.” He tells us why. “If you are ordered by the courts to provide data and your systems are all over the place, it has obvious consequences and at the very least will cause internal panic, tempers flying, higher costs and red faces. Information these days must be easily accessible and organised or your reputation is at stake.”

Neil thinks internet technology is moving forcefully into law firms (and enterprise in general) and says it’s all part of the ongoing consumerisation of the desktop. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve seen.” He says. “And it’s coming whether firms like it or not but the great thing is that much of it will be simple to implement; just like flipping a switch, which will be great for IT directors.”
Ben Kiker, who is SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Interwoven, joined last year and also offers his thoughts. “The last year has been about reviewing where we needed to be to accelerate. We’ve invested more into marketing and it’s leadership team with twenty five more staff hired, bringing us up to sixty five in total. “We are making it a priority to get around to customers who include Singapore Airlines, to really understand what they are doing.” He says. “We have found that firms are investing in IT to grow and because business models are changing.”

Through big deals Interwoven has done with government bodies, they’ve identified themes like the battle for talent. “Baby boomers are leaving industries in droves as they reach retirement and are taking serious knowledge with them and just walking out the door. It’s causing a significant squeeze on staff. Then you have children born at the keyboard who want to access Wiki at work and want more creativity.”

As we alight on Wiki’s, I ask how Ben thinks marketing staff should protect themselves from this surge of un authorised content which can have a negative impact and included a recent US assistant solicitor posting a derogatory song about his law firm online. “Marketeers have to realise that they can’t control their brands anymore particularly with user sites like TripAdviser which just reveal bad bits about hotels in a minute if they aren’t on form. Life is more about transparency now. We are using podcasts, blogging and RSS feeds to develop our Interwoven community and be more open.”

Of the tech world, Ben thinks the general conversation about technical IT has moved on. “Techies now want to talk about broader topics and many roles are diversifying. He mentions an Online Experience Director role at Singapore Airlines and says that most line managers and tech directors are increasing internal collaboration. He adds that people are looking at their web presence a lot more now than ever before. “Ten years ago websites started with marketing then went back into IT but are now firmly back in marketing again.” Says Ben. “There is a lot of investment going into online offerings and people are analysing how purchasers use their websites. Clients like Tesco are introducing lifestyle areas and online forums to invite people in and show them their brand. We’re also investing in our public facing image because we think it’s critical for attracting talent and clients. The online canvas is an incredible opportunity.”
Finishing off Ben says. “DM is the majority of our revenue but the stars are aligning in other areas. People are spending again and the tech investment cycle is in the right place. We’ve had successive growth over fourteen quarters and want to expand and interact with customers more. Community is important to us and we want to help be a facilitator between areas like IT and marketing. We are also broadening our appeal into areas like search because research shows that this is what clients want more than niche operators something that may make life difficult for specialist vendors.” ©

This first appeared in http://www.citytechmag.com/

Its all about ‘B’s this year.

2007-03-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

Its all about ‘B’s this year. Blogs.

Blogs (or blawgs if you are a legal blogger) are something that I’m sure many of you participate in or even casually read as you search the internet highway or Google as its now become known.

Justin Patten of Human-law.co.uk, has just launched a consultancy to advise corporate’s on how to get the best out of blogs and warns: there is much tricky ground.

His background is employment then intellectual property law but he surprised himself by getting a blogging IP infringement case quite out of the blue and has become hooked on the topic ever since. He says “I initially started off being interesting in technology, but have now decided that it will be a large part of my business.”

Pegged as “Social media” his consultancy plans to advise corporates (including law firms) on how to use these ‘new age’ tools for marketing and internal communications. He confirms “social media covers: Blogging, wiki’s, the importance of RSS, Vlogs (video blogs), podcasting and instant messaging.” Instant messaging is tipped as the ‘new big thing’ for 2007 with some predicting it will become bigger than email. Which means, I’m afraid, you have little choice but to pay attention. Justin comments “all these topics relate to IP (branding) and employment law, essentially its all about communication with staff and customers. Organisations are really going to have to open up to using these technologies.”

Justin says that doing his own blog and getting a client on the back of it, shows that the web and blogging can link you up to anyone, but warns, it can have a serious downside. He says” There was a case with a bike lock company. Someone posted a video of a bike-lock being picked with a plastic pen. The company chose to ignore it: but you can see this type of video could represent defamation and brand damage.”

He comments further “The problem they had was: what was their recourse? If you threaten to sue, you get backlash blogging.” Balancing his view, he adds, “Fundamentally it leads to more truthful business practice, because anyone can be exposed easily these days.”

He cites an example “last summer one of the biggest global law firms, took a preventative strategy for a client. Before the football (soccer) they acted for a company who worked for the World Cup. They sent letters to people saying ‘please don’t infringe our clients TV rights, we will be watching websites and will take action.’ They sent this to a well known blogger company (one of the biggest weblogs in the world, run by a set of individuals.)

Justin continues “The bloggers didn’t like the letter so posted it on their website. They then linked it to a high-profile, negative story on the firm.” He illustrates the consequences: “If you search the law firm in question, all their ‘good’ marketing comes up, but this bloggers letter and story is now number four on any Google search, which means bloggers are able to influence Google profiles. The result is that any new, existing clients and staff will have the story highlighted daily.”

Justin continues “In the old days law firms could send aggressive letters. Now there is no recourse.” Then adds “There is another element. Part of the way bloggers operate is with an anti corporate bias. The bloggers in this incident, did research on the law firm in question and the client. They discovered the client had mentioned a high profile business school on his CV. When they checked, he hadn’t completed an MBA, as they supposed, but an expensive, short course. The bloggers added this to the letter and negative story link.”

They linked to anyone else covering the story including Technorati.com, a search engine for blogs. Justin says “visit that site, and you will see you can easily link to anyone with similar stories.” He finishes “the law firm in question would have been unwise to take legal action, it would have done more damage to their reputation.”

Justin mentions another worrying example of a blog affecting a corporate brand “A guy from one big telecoms company posted a racist weblog The telecoms company were eventually forced to suspend the employee because it was negatively impacting on their brand.”

He cites another case briefly “In an employment law case, a jury member put on a blog that the defendant was ‘an idiot’. The prosecution appealed the case because of the blog.”

Justin suggests though that most damage is not done to organisations with formal blogging policies. He says “staff usually say positive things about firms.” But adds “The biggest damage is individuals who blog on their own time, who can easily be picked up on search engines.” He continues “They could say anonymously that their boss is having an affair.”

Justin says that companies can protect themselves from these kinds of threats adding “I have links with, Simon Rogers at Market Sentinel, who offer online monitoring.”

Despite all this worrying news, Justin doesn’t believe that blogs will be about reputational damage but more to do with productivity and communication. He says “blogs can have a major impact.” Then going off topic for a moment says “What happened after the dot.com crash was a range of new applications like movabletype.org and typepad.com. They allowed anyone to reach a global web audience at zero cost. As most are Opensource they’ve leapt past corporate IT capability.”

He continues with his productivity message “People are much more effective if allowed to use wiki’s and blogs in research or to communicate”. He cites an example “One telecoms company is estimated to have saved a million dollars on the back of using internal blogs. Because staff and clients are pooling information that everyone can read, it is bringing people more up to speed without having to have meetings.”

He says that one law firm leading the way in this area is Allen & Overy’s, Ruth Ward who is head of KM (see FT article on this link http://www.ft.com/cms/s/182fa894-14df-11db-b391-0000779e2340.html). Ruth has implemented blogs, wiki’s and social tagging.” Justin illustrates the point. “As an example, if you are reading five weblogs about zebras, social tagging allows readers to group all the information, then allows others to link to it. Saving everyone time on multiple searches.”

Justin warns would-be bloggers “Be aware of copyright infringement with the ‘copy and paste’ function. One of the things prevalent in the ‘blogosphere’ (blogging world) is that’s its worse to have your articles copied without a name than with one.”

How is Justin planning to help in this heady new world of social media? Justin warms to his theme “I can offer legal help, but think consultancy advice would be more positive. I can assist in how best to work with new media to humanize companies.” He continues “The benefit is that it allows junior staff to have a voice. It also flattens corporate structures and makes people feel more connected to their organisations.” Then adds “I can offer research on company blogs that both clients and staff can input into.”

I ask about guidelines for blogging staff. Justin says “Microsoft, don’t have guidelines but have blogsmart which offers a code of conduct.” He continues “It asks users to respect their contract of employment and respect the debate. Microsoft has got better relations with clients and around ten percent of staff to blog. Its humanised their company. Then adds a cautionary note “its important not to be too oppressive. You can add a moderator to filter content.” And finishes “Microsoft’s, Robert Scoble who left the company last year did a lot to humanise the Microsoft brand.” □

Word up

2007-02-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

Its all about Word at the moment. I guess their new versions hitting the streets are creating noise but it was interesting talking to Liam Flanagan at Tikit about the problems Word has. Based on binary code he says it was never designed for the size of documents that law firms have these days. Coupled with support staff having inadequate training and zero resources being dedicated to the application, it is in serious trouble in most law firms. He says "spaghetti code" is the problem and recommends the Chicago ER - a hospital for sick Word documents.

UK firms are starting to get the message with investment now trickling into Word and IT directors taking time out to attend Microsoft courses in the US.

Changing times in legal IT

2007-02-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

New people are emerging in the UK legal IT world and they are cleverer than ever before. They are working out what we /you want and how to trot out compelling sales messages before we know whats hit us. Those dropping in from abroad have partnered with strong UK players (TimeKM with Copitrak) and those striking out in new careers like Paul Longhurst at 3Kites are also keeping their ears to the ground to gravitate in established US players like DTE and their time capture software DTE InHand.

In the past, UK law firm purchasers could say "why don't US vendors research the market and understand what they are doing before they waste our time with demo's?" Now this objection just got swept well and truly under the carpet.

As well as this another new show has popped up to compete with Legal IT Islington (the main UK trade show) which was purchased last year by Informa Group. Their first year in the saddle they've had a whipper snapper show (LawShow 2007) at their heels and this new group are keen to please. Despite lacklustre reports from their first shot at Birmingham last year LawShow 2007 are playing hard and worming into affections with ease.