Tech-philanthropy

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.

Introduction to TAPI and USB Handsets

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

Sci tech trends in Japan

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

The Bad Manners BlackBerry

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?

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.

In-house counsel at National Grid get techno savvy

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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/

Probono work

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

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

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

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

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

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“The year of the copyright law suit”

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

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

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”

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/