Several of America’s oldest law firms have turned to Litéra for better ways to administer document lifecycle management, workflow and client data protection. The latest deals are:

    •    Davis Polk LLP (founded in 1849) was recently named the most innovative law firm in the United States by the Financial Times. The firm purchased Litéra’s Change-Pro TDC, Change-Pro for Excel, Change-Pro for PowerPoint and Innova.
    •    McCarter & English LLP (founded 1851 and in continuous operation for more than 160 years) has over 400 lawyers and offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and three other cities. The firm has selected Litéra’s Change-Pro TDC and Metadact.
    •    Ropes & Gray LLP (established in 1865) was named by US News & World Report in rankings released Nov. 1 as Law Firm of the Year for hedge funds. They have invested in Litéra’s document comparison tool Change Pro and Change Pro for Excel, both of which offer comparison of imbedded objects, numbers and formulas within cells.

The 2011 Clio Apple in Law Firms Survey results have been tabulated and 763 people participated, 80% of which were practicing lawyers and 20% of which were law students or non-lawyers.  76% of respondents were lawyers at firms with 10 attorneys or less. Many of the survey respondents were relative Mac newcomers: 25.3% of respondents had switched to Mac within the past year.
 
Co-sponsored by MILOfest, this year’s results show that Apple products are going strong and gaining ground with small firm lawyers at the expense of previously dominant legal technology players, such as Research in Motion.
 
Widely-used products in the survey included iPhones, used by 60.9% of respondents; Dropbox, used by 25% of respondents; iCloud, seeing high adoption at 15%; and Android phones with usage at 13%.  Evernote, a note-taking app not included in last year’s survey, debuted at 14% usage.  OpenOffice had gained 2 percentage points since last year, showing that open source technology is appealing to solo and small law firms.
 
Why are lawyers continuing to “go Mac”?  46.5% of respondents said they chose Apple hardware over PC options because the technology was more reliable and secure. Usability was next on at 33.8%. Familiarity due to home use of Apple/Mac products was 9.8%, and surprisingly aesthetics and design came in fourth at only 3%.
 
76.5% of law students said that when they graduate, they plan on choosing a Mac platform for their office.  his statistic shows that Mac has a bright future in legal, since the new generation graduating is heavily Apple-oriented.
 
“This is the second year Clio has conducted this Apple in Law Firms survey to benchmark the degree of adoption of Apple products and other emerging technology in the legal industry,” said Clio CEO & Co-Founder Jack Newton. “Apple hardware and devices - especially the iPad and iPhone - continue to capture the attention and dollars of lawyers, cloud-based applications have won attorneys’ confidence and gained more traction. With the majority of law students planning to use Mac apps in their law practices upon graduation, we can reasonably predict a longstanding trend toward continued expansion of Apple products within the legal industry.” (Clio’s parent company Themis Solutions Inc is based in Vancouver, British Columbia)

All legal professionals and law students were invited to participate in the survey, regardless of size and location. The survey aimed to determine to what extent lawyers and law students are now using Apple products, and whether there is clear evidence of an increasing trend of the legal industry “going Mac” in the future. 
For more information on the 2011 Clio Apple in Law Firms Survey or to receive the complete survey results, email info@goclio.com


Recommind's third annual IT-Legal survey shows increased focus on social media, internal investigations and regulatory requests. In contrast with last year’s study, this year’s indicates that the two departments are forging a more productive relationship as they work together to manage the most sensitive data in the enterprise.

According to this year's report, which surveyed senior IT managers at enterprises averaging 17,500 employees, technical knowledge of ediscovery is improving across the board, and legal and IT departments are coming together to solve new dilemmas posed by internal investigations, regulatory requests and the skyrocketing use of social media.

The state of the relationship
Overall, the survey suggests that the state of the relationship between legal and IT is holding steady, with 52.1% rating it “good” or “very good,” compared to 54.5% in 2010. Drilling down into the details, however, respondents reported a number of positive trends.
 
Both IT and legal are making ediscovery a higher priority.

    •    66.9% report that legal and IT are meeting to collaborate or strategize at least once per quarter, compared to 48.4% in 2010.
    •    Only 26.3% said IT considered ediscovery a "low" or "very low” priority, down from 39.1% in 2010.
    •    Only 17.6% said that legal rated ediscovery a "low" or "very low” priority, compared to 29.1% in 2010.

IT staff are increasingly confident in their own grasp of ediscovery technology, as well as that of their legal colleagues.

    •    66.1% of respondents said they understood the technical requirements of ediscovery "pretty well" or "very well," as opposed to 52.4% in 2010.
    •    43.7% said their legal department understood the technical requirements of ediscovery "pretty well" or "very well," compared to 35.3% in 2010.
    •    Only 21.8% said their legal department understood the technical requirements of ediscovery "not at all" or "not too well," as opposed to 35.3% in 2010.

Nevertheless, "not understanding/respecting the technical complexities of e-discovery" remained by far IT’s top frustration in working with the legal department (35.9%), as it was last year. And tellingly, asked what the legal department would pinpoint as its top frustration when working with IT, respondents most often said, “trying to influence decisions traditionally made by legal” (26.7%). Last year’s top choice, “lack of legal knowledge,” ranked only fourth out of five this year (17.2%).

Why IT and legal work together
A new section of the survey focusing on areas of IT-legal interaction revealed social media as a clear up-and-coming priority.

    •    30% of respondents reported that the IT and legal departments at their companies collaborate on “ediscovery involving social media” at least once per quarter, suggesting that despite its novelty, social media is already playing a significant role in ediscovery at many large organizations.
    •    34.7% of respondents said IT and legal collaborated on "crafting or implementing social media policies" for the first time in 2011, and 24.5% cited "ediscovery involving social media"  — the number-one and number-two results, respectively.
    •    Looking ahead to 2012, more respondents expected to collaborate for the first time on social media policies (26.9%) and social media ediscovery (26.9%) than on any other activities.

Company-initiated investigations were the top overall reason for IT-legal collaboration — a result possibly linked to labor disputes, which tend to increase in times of economic turmoil. 

    •    58.2% of respondents said they collaborated on “ediscovery for internal, company-initiated investigations” at least once per quarter, surpassing ediscovery for active litigation (49.1%), other regulatory compliance (46.4%) and crafting or implementing data retention policies (42.7%).
    •    24.5% of respondents cited internal investigations as the second-most-common new reason for IT-legal collaboration (tied with ediscovery involving social media).

“The financial crisis of 2008 was a watershed moment for many companies, in terms of increasing awareness of information risk and the need for information governance,” said Recommind VP of marketing Craig Carpenter. “At that point, the IT and legal departments had to figure out how to work together — there was no other option. While the IT-legal relationship has sometimes been rocky, our third annual survey found encouraging signs that it’s improving. That said, the two will need to do even better over the next few years. Not only will corporate data continue growing at an exponential rate, but the two departments will face new challenges around social media and internal investigations that will force them to be quicker and more proactive than ever before. Advanced ediscovery, governance and early case analysis software can lift a great deal of the burden off their shoulders, but ultimately there’s no substitute for effective collaboration between IT and legal staff.”

The Frayman Group, a leading provider of new business intake and risk management software for law firms, has just announced the appointment of Ms Meg Block as Senior Vice President of Risk Management Consulting. Ms Block will be joining Frayman Group in January 2012.

With over twenty-five years of experience consulting to the legal community, Ms Block specializes in business process reviews and the design of enterprise-wide risk management programs. For the past eighteen years, Ms Block has been a managing director with HBR Consulting LLC, previously known as Baker Robbins & Company and Hildebrandt Baker Robbins. Ms Block will be heading up Frayman Group’s risk management practice and continue to deliver value to the legal community by providing in-depth risk management process reviews and tailored system designs. Ms. Block will also be forming a consortium of risk management leaders in the legal industry to explore the dynamic challenges of managing information securely and effectively.

"Meg is a great addition to our team as she brings a tremendous amount of business intake, conflicts and risk domain expertise and best practices," said Yuri Frayman, President & CEO at Frayman Group. "We are looking forward to extending our consulting practice under Meg’s guidance, and leveraging her deep domain expertise to further enrich our risk management platform."

“I am very excited to join Frayman Group,” said Block. “The combination of my expertise and Frayman’s business intake workflow, conflicts and confidentiality management solutions will set the standard for how to define and deliver to a law firm’s risk management requirements, maximizing its return on investment.”

A couple of American-themed stories now looking at the steady march of the Android platform into the legal IT world...

• Smartphone-based digital dictation more than doubles in 2011
BigHand today announced that the end-user adoption of its smartphone-based digital dictation applications for the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry platforms has more than doubled in 2011, with over 40% of lawyers on BigHand now using it on their smartphone. Recent firms to incorporate the application on their Smartphones include Cranfill Sumner & Hartzog LLP (Raleigh, NC), Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis LLP (Nashville, TN) and McCarter & English LLP (Newark, NJ).



Sam LaRoche, IT Director of Cranfill Sumner & Hartzog said "BigHand has been a tremendous success. The ability to deploy a dictation solution on our lawyers' Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry Smartphones has saved our firm tens of thousands of dollars. Just as important, the lawyers love being able to dictate right onto their phone from anywhere and at any time, often resulting in a finished product before they even return to the office. When it comes to dictation, being able to deploy BigHand on a smartphone qualifies it as a game changer."
 
Dana LaRieal Wilson, Project Manager in the IT Strategic Projects Department at Waller Lansden, said the new ways lawyers are using the BigHand application at the firm are increasing attorney mobile productivity. "BigHand pretty much sold itself once we got it into the hands of lawyers, including younger lawyers who did not traditionally dictate. We let them use it how they felt comfortable and, to the firm’s benefit, they have come up with some new and creative ways of leveraging the application. They use it for submitting time, sending instructions to their assistants, working when they are in traffic and have to be hands-free, as well as recording long depositions that need transcribing at a later date. Instead of voicemail, they use BigHand. Word has spread and we continue to receive requests from users across the firm for the BigHand application."
 
Beth Thompson, US Director of Sales for BigHand, said "Initially, the convenience of being able to submit recordings from anywhere on a smartphone without plugging into a PC, and no longer having to carry multiple devices, was a ‘nice to have’. However over the past year BigHand has become a 'must have' for many firms due to the tangible cost savings, efficiencies and productivity gains they have realized. We all speak faster than we type and we’re even slower typing on a smartphone! Even ‘non-dictating’ lawyers can attest to the fact that it is more efficient to verbalize tasks, documents, and instructions than thumb their way around a Smartphone. Lawyers can now quickly offload administrative tasks to office-based support staff, such as entering billable time, so that they can focus on servicing client needs and business development."


• Android joins iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch apps for Black's Law Dictionary 9th edition
Thomson Reuters is now offering an Android app for its Black's Law Dictionary – the 9th edition is already available as an app for the Apple iOS (iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch) platform. Commenting on the move, Chris Parton, vice president, Academic, Thomson Reuters, said "The Apple app for Black's Law Dictionary 9th edition is in the  top 10 highest grossing reference apps on iTunes, which means touch-of-the finger legal reference tools are essential. Expanding to the Android platform was a logical step for our mobile plan."For more information visit the Thomson Reuters Westlaw Store www.store.westlaw.com/mobileapps

Thomson Reuters Elite has just announced the outright purchase of the UK legal IT systems supplier Pilgrim Systems? Full details to follow but essentially Pilgrim is being bought as a going concern with its LawSoft system being positioned as the UK + EMEA + APAC equivalent of ProLaw for the mid-tier law firms market.

Long-established California law firm Rutan & Tucker LLP has selected the Compliguard Protect ethical walls system from the Frayman Group for information governance, confidentiality management and activity monitoring. The firm, which has offices in Orange County and Palo Alto, will be leveraging Compliguard Protect to secure sensitive content in business critical systems including iManage Worksite, iRM, DTE Axiom and Aderant, as well as content stored on network file shares.

"Compliguard Protect was better value for our firm compared to all other products we looked at, as it is a full-featured enterprise ethical walls application at a very attractive price point," said Dave Crunkleton, Director of IT at Rutan & Tucker. "Our team loved the simplicity of the user interface, the extensibility of the application and its .NET-based architecture."

Commenting on the deal, Alp Hug of the Frayman Group told the Orange Rag "We are finding increasingly that our competition is attempting to charge significantly higher price points for the same functionality as in our product to mid-size law firms. As a result, we are winning deals more frequently, as with all other things being equal (product functionality, referencable customers, proven company, domain expertise), price now plays an important role. The Rutan win is a perfect example of this. The firm thought two vendors had great products, both had great references, one vendor had a much better price point, a shorter implementation cycle and a significantly cheaper implementation timeline – and you can see the result of this equation."

The December 2011 edition of the American Legal Technology Insider newsletter (issue No #41) is out now.

Top stories include: Litera headhunts R&D chief from arch-rival Workshare + how Tempus-Rex is putting time in the sky. Also we ask why more vendors don't reinvent themselves like Microsoft?

The next issue of American Legal Technology Insider will be published on Thursday 12 January 2012 – deadline 5pm (EST) Tuesday 10th January. Click on the link below to download your free copy as a PDF. To have a copy sent direct to you in-box just send your email address to altisubs@legaltechnology.com

And here is our Flash page-turning edition (and yes we know it doesn't work on an iPad)...

Open publication

by Louis Hayner*

In the legal industry, it’s important for all personnel – be it an attorney, paralegal, court clerk, etc – to efficiently handle their demanding client base and manage the necessary functions required of their day-to-day business. Time constraints associated with tasks such as managing case files, subpoenas, and other matters, make it important to have the right technologies in place that will allow personnel to be accessible, anytime, anywhere.

A cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) solution can help streamline legal practices and business operations in firms of any size. The solution helps reduce costs and minimize delays to assure faster interaction with anyone important to the firm, even if they are not physically at the same location. This collaborative technology is a key investment for any organization striving to increase productivity and response time, as it improves office efficiencies and even enhances legal compliance in an organization.

Law firms can take advantage of the various features of UC, referred to as the Nine Cs...

1.    Cloud-based.  Many lawyers have multiple offices in several locations, because it’s important for them to have a local presence in the communities they serve. A cloud-based product unifies satellite locations across one hosted UC platform, allowing these locations to act as effectively as if the firm were operating in just one location.

2.    Convergence.  A truly hosted UC environment is the convergence of your voice and data networks, taking your basic business based technology like your voice communications (IP phone) and combining that with office communications (instant messenger, video conferencing, desktop sharing, telepresence, etc.)

3.    Collaboration.  With UC, users can make a phone call or send an instant message and then overlay desktop sharing or video seamlessly. With SharePoint, lawyers can easily create collaborative workspace sites to share and manage information or to review a client contract or written deposition simultaneously with a colleague or client.

4.    Chat.  Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) allows users to find and communicate with the right person, right now, via the applications they use most (instant messaging, presence, audio-video conferencing and web conferencing). OCS provides users the ability to IM while on the phone. Rather than hanging up the phone mid-call to research an answer to a caller’s question or ask your assistant to pull a client’s file, you can send an instant message to a colleague via OCS without breaking the continuity of the phone call. This increases productivity and office efficiency tremendously and also vastly improves responsiveness to clients.

5.    Conferencing.  Web and video conferencing provide a virtual meeting experience that integrates data, content, applications, video, voice, media, and text to enable real-time communication and collaboration whenever you need it. When you need to be face to face, simply start a video conference with the click of your mouse. Lawyers can save on travel time and logistics by handling depositions via video. Some hosted UC solutions can potentially incorporate themselves with other video system equipment (Tandberg, for example) as long as it follows an open platform currently in existence.

6.    Connecting.  Presence enables real-time status of employees (based on calendar information, login/activity status, and user preference) to be displayed across the firm and/or selected colleagues to enable users to contact the right person the first time using the best communications method. By connecting to the main office through presence, you are able to see what other people around you are doing via a 365 view of your office. 

7.    (Tele)Commuting.  Many people figure out ways to work from home – lugging heavy paperwork and files home, sharing their home or cell phone numbers with coworkers and clients and calling into their voicemail to check it every hour. However, when working with cloud-based solutions all that thought and planning is no longer necessary. Hosted solutions allow lawyers to telecommute seamlessly from a home office, from the courthouse or from the road, thereby running his or her business as usual without incurring extra costs to the firm. Employees can access email and client information, view and edit documents, manage calendars, and collaborate with coworkers as if they were still in the office. Clients, other lawyers, judges, etc. will be unable to recognize that you are working from a remote location since inbound callers will not change their calling patterns. For example, if a client calls your office line, the call can be automatically routed to your home office or cell phone – making it appear that you are still in the office, available and ready to help. Outbound calls can be made on a cell or home phone but appear as though they are originating from your desk phone on caller ID.

8.    Continuity. In the event disruption, the business continuity aspect of the cloud ensures that lawyers can always maintain their billable hours via phone, video, and other communications methods.

9.    Cost Savings.  When buying a premise-based solutions there are many different cost components including installation, configuration, hardware, maintenance agreements, software upgrades, site visits, additional ports,  voice circuits, data circuits, carrier fees... the list is endless. It is estimated that a cloud-based solution cuts deployment time by 75 percent, management time by 90 percent and TCO by 25-30 percent over a premises-based solution. It also brings the costs of new systems from $2000 a user down to $250-$350 per user over a premises-based system. Hosted solutions can be deployed, managed, and monitored in less time, for less money.

* Louis Hayner has over 10 years of management and entrepreneurial sales experience in telecom services. He is currently the Executive Vice President & Chief Sales Officer at WVT Communications Group, where he is responsible for all sales and marketing for the company and its subsidiaries, Alteva and USA Datanet. Louis can be reached at l.hayner@wvtcg.com

And, finally, Norm Thomas of Litéra adds his comments on the Microsoft Word Compare debate...

In nearly a decade and a half at Microsoft, the two most common laments I received from enterprise customers consistently dealt with its licensing complexity and Microsoft Office’s proverbial “gap.” The “gap” lament goes like this: “Office (in general) and Word (in particular), gives us 90-95% of what we need. When will Microsoft finally close the gap and furnish the remaining functionality required to run our business?”

The answer? Probably never.

Here’s why:

• There are 600 million users of Microsoft Office and it’s hard to imagine that closing the gap will add many more. Microsoft is heavily focused now on Azure, Office 365, Dynamics and the next version of Windows, all in an effort to compete better with Apple and Google.

• Tallying all legal-related professionals worldwide and rounding generously upward, I once estimated about 11 million current Microsoft Office users would benefit from closing the gap. I was politely reminded by Office product managers that this represents less than 2% of all Office users. (Our itals)

• The level of effort and specialized expertise needed to close the gap is enormous. Litéra for example, has one patent plus several pending and 11 years’ investment in perfecting the software needed to provide professional grade capabilities that attorneys require to have confidence in their content.

In effect, complaining that Microsoft Office meets only 95% of attorneys’ needs is like scorning British Airways for bringing you all the way from Heathrow to JFK but not to the New York Hilton.  

There is an entirely different mode required to bridge the gap. There always will be. The same Word functionality my 14-year old daughter uses in school isn’t intended to be sophisticated enough to support crafting and comparing documents on which vast sums – and reputations – rest.  

So impatiently drumming our fingers and waiting for Microsoft is missing the point. The challenge with debating “native” Word’s sufficiency in the meantime is that it mistakenly begins and ends with tools and technology instead of with end users. This creates a kind of echo chamber of huckstering vendors rather than paying attention to what law firms actually need.

A few examples:

• In 2008, Clifford Chance published an authoritative study on the adequacy of native Word 2007’s new tri-pane document comparison. Their conclusion presented in London on 27 February by Darshna Dave was that the gap remains. (Besides a bug-fix in comparing footers, no improvements were made in Word 2010.)

• In just the past eight months, 10 law firms out of the Global 50 migrated to Litéra when tossing out their legacy application, instead of running “native” Word. They did so in part because they wanted to fill the gap with technology that easily compares the full gamut of embedded objects including Excel, Visio, photos and Chemdraw diagrams, among others.

• Common user scenario: An attorney drafts an agreement in Word, converts it to PDF, emails it to a client and receives a signed fax in return. Does the fax match what was sent, letter for letter, number for number? Using Word won’t address this and isn’t intended to.

The real challenge for us in legal IT is not that Microsoft is too big or that we are too small. The challenge is to innovate processes and then develop the best technology to support the innovation. As respected fellow travelers in the industry, software vendors can fuss over their respective new features and functions endlessly. Meanwhile end user attorneys are still performing their work essentially the same way they did over a decade ago.

The sometimes pedantic business of meeting attorneys’ needs means envisioning what they could be doing differently tomorrow rather than debating the relative capabilities of what’s available today. The point here is how to expertly compare documents, not vendors.