Thomson Reuters has announced the launch of Westlaw Business in China and Hong Kong. Westlaw Business will provide China-based business lawyers with a comprehensive legal resource – the first of its kind to serve global legal professionals.
“The economic strength and importance of China has been underscored by the country’s global mergers and acquisitions activity, which has continued throughout the recession,” said Westlaw Business Senior V-P Kevin Ritchey. “China and Hong Kong are leading in this area, pulling other economies forward through cross-border and local deal making. Westlaw Business enables global business lawyers, and those who support them, to better spot issues, perform due diligence, find precedent agreements and draft the documents needed for creating successful business transactions in this important region.”
At the core of Westlaw Business are specialized work centres tailored to the unique needs of business lawyers around the world. The centres include M & A, Securities US, Securities UK, Securities Canada, Islamic Finance, Corporate Finance, Restructuring, Private Equity and LIVEDGAR. The service includes some 500,000 specialized documents that provide comprehensive legal, financial, regulatory and current awareness perspectives of complex legal matters and business transactions relevant to the Asia Pacific market. Business Citator, which is integrated into Westlaw Business centres, provides a deeper understanding of the clients, peers, suppliers, acquisition targets and competitors connected to specific transactions.
“Launching Westlaw Business as a truly global platform reinforces our commitment to supporting lawyers on a global basis,” said Peter Warwick, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters, Legal. “Our ability to develop the right products for practitioners in all parts of the world reflects the unique expertise and resources of our global organisation. We can share our common technology platforms, infrastructure and business models across markets, and effectively tailor products to meet local customers’ needs.”
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Tuesday, October 20
Westlaw opens in China and Hong Kong
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 20 Oct 2009 01:00 BST
Monday, October 19
Wolters Kluwer sells CCH Workflow business
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 19 Oct 2009 12:10 BST
Asia-Pacific online information management source IDE.net.au is reporting that Australia’s e.law has acquired the assets of CCH Workflow Solutions from parent company Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific. Privately-held elaw has emerged as the largest independent player in
the Australian ediscovery market and, according to a statement, the decision to sell the Workflow Solutions
assets “comes following a strategic review of the Wolters Kluwer’s Asia
Pacific Portfolio.”
Dave Lampert, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific said "although the Workflow Solutions unit has been very successful, and we are extremely proud of the market position it has achieved, litigation support is not part of our longer term strategic plan in the Asia Pacific. In reaching this agreement with e.law, we believe that we have arrived at an outcome that delivers significant benefits to all concerned. The customers and staff of Workflow Solutions will benefit from e.law’s understanding of, and long term commitment to, the litigation support business. Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific will be better positioned to concentrate on executing our long term strategy of being the leading provider of information services and software applications to tax, accounting and legal professionals." Allison Stanfield, Director & CEO of e.law Australia said, "We are very pleased to announce e.law Australia’s purchase of CCH Workflow Solutions. We feel both businesses are complementary and look forward to delivering a greater depth of evidence management services to our clients". Formed in 1999 by
Allison Stanfield and Bruce Grant, e.law is a privately owned Australian company employing about 50 full-time staff providing specialised forensics, e-discovery, e-courts and information management advice
and services to the legal profession, corporate and government
organisations. www.elaw.com.au Thursday, October 15
Asia-Pacific news round-up
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 15 Oct 2009 01:00 BST
Two fresh news stories from Australia...
Queensland firm purchases OpenPurchase McCullough Robertson, Queensland’s largest law firm, has selected the OpenPurchase electronic purchase order system from Swerdlove. McCullough Robertson will implement the fully-functional automated purchase order system in order to control procurement costs and make its entire purchasing process more efficient. McCullough Robertson, a long time Swerdlove client, has acquired an enterprise license, enabling all 350 staff including partners, lawyers and support staff to use OpenPurchase for purchase requests, if required or desired. McCullough Robertson previously operated without an integrated purchase order system. In selecting OpenPurchase, the firm sought out fully-functional automated purchase order software that integrated with its Elite Enterprise practice management system. By integrating purchasing technology with the back-office accounting system, purchasing order requests will be linked and considered within the General Ledger budget to improve the firm's purchasing processes and cost management. Survey reveals leverage gap A recent survey of 175 practice managers undertaken by LexisNexis and The Australian Legal Practice Management Association at the ALPMA Summit in August 2009 revealed a significant ‘support staff gap’ between law firms’ ideal levels of resource and those they are actually employing. Over 40% of practice managers believed that their current leverage ratio was 1.5 support staff or more per lawyer. However, a similar amount (44%) believe that the ideal ratio was 1 member of support staff for 2 or more lawyers – a considerable difference that has an important impact on the bottom-line of legal businesses. The disparity underlines the need for comprehensive practice management solutions to reduce complexity and improve efficiency across the legal industry. The findings also revealed that practice managers do not see cost reduction as a business priority currently, preferring to concentrate on improving the efficiency and performance of their processes. Only 10% of respondents noted that driving down costs was their most pressing challenge, as opposed to 30% citing maximising efficiency and a further 20% concentrating on performance improvement. TJ Viljoen, LexisNexis Pacific CEO, commented “With clients demanding efficiency and better performance, we can expect to see a transformation in the way that the legal world operates. It is often said that when one door closes another one opens, and this is never truer than of a law firm in an economic downturn. However, the disparity between the optimal numbers of support staff and lawyers working together in law firms and the true figures is a concern that we must take very seriously. Practice management is an essential part of each and every law firm, and we should be ensuring that each firm has the correct balance of staff to maximise its impact.” Tuesday, October 13
Lexis launches Australia's first consolidated email alert service
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 13 Oct 2009 01:00 BST
LexisNexis has launched Australia’s first legal alert to cover third-party content as well as cases, legislation and journals with real-life editorial selection. Called LexisNexis Total Alerts, and powered by Ozmosys, it deliver one daily email combining the best information from numerous news alerts and daily law updates.
Lexis say Total Alerts 'is not a hit-and-miss alerting service but is true to its name in providing a single, comprehensive update of the day’s legal news, monitored and selected by a qualified editorial team. By consolidating the numerous emails that legal professionals currently receive, Total Alerts is doing away with multiple alerts, adding more time to lawyers’ days while giving them the latest developments ahead of their clients.' Total Alerts covers 32 available topic areas, including cases, legislation and journal articles, as well as the ability to add third-party news or legal information alerts and feeds. Each of the topic areas are monitored by qualified legal editorial teams to ensure high-quality content. “LexisNexis Total Alerts does not replace your preferred individual information sources. For example, if you love a particular news alert from a certain publisher or want to continue receiving case updates from another source you can do this; it is entirely up to the individual. The value of LexisNexis Total Alerts is the consolidation of many alerts and emails into one email alert, plus the benefit of trusted, hand-selected content and summaries from our editorial team, sourced from CaseBase and LawNow Legislation”, says TJ Viljoen, CEO, LexisNexis Pacific. For large firms or organisations with a centralised knowledge management division, the alert can be managed by an administrative tool that allows tailoring to develop the email alert to cover an individual’s practice area, clients and information needs. It allows the knowledge management team to maintain control over the subscription process with third-party sources. Thursday, September 17
Speech recognition adds to the digital dictation experience
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 17 Sep 2009 01:00 BST
Here's an interesting case study that has an unusual spin on the digital dictation versus speech recognition debate...
In mid-2008, Queensland (Australia) based law firm Payne Butler Lang began to look at their dictation processes and recognized the need for a more robust, reliable product to replace their current, aging digital dictation solution implemented four years prior. According to practice manager Malcolm Sinclair, the objectives and requirements were clear. “We were already using a digital dictation system within the firm, but it was very old fashioned technology that we were beginning to outgrow, and the product really did not have the back-up facilities we required. The idea of a digital dictation product with speech recognition capabilities really appealed to us as it would allow us to adequately improve efficiencies within the firm.” But, during the procurement process, the firm spoke to a number of dictation suppliers and discovered that there weren’t many suppliers out there on the market that had the speech recognition component. After a successful pilot period that involved the managing partner and his practice administrator, the Winscribe Dictation with speech recognition was rolled out firm-wide, user by user, with authors dictating using a mixture of Olympus DS 4000 and 5000 digital handheld recorders. Since implementing Winscribe Dictation with speech recognition in late 2008, the firm has seen significant improvements on their previous system. “We conducted some in-house testing that involved secretaries typing dictations with the old system, versus using Winscribe plus speech recognition, and we were surprised by the results. Typing was 50% faster using WinScribe with speech recognition. From a productivity perspective, our managing partner is currently getting around 98% accuracy with the system. Even when we have new people in the firm start using it, they always start off with around 80% and rapidly improve from there as training on the voice profile is improved. Our system is set up in quite a unique way to allow authors to use templates. For example, one of our managing partners currently utilizes pre-form letters through Winscribe’s speech recognition component, whereby he speaks the name of a particular document that he would like to dictate into (he currently has a list of around 80 forms pre-loaded onto the system to choose from); and the document template appears on his screen ready to dictate. This means fewer corrections, when the secretary receives the document and faster output.” Tuesday, September 15
Latest Asia-Pacific News Round-up
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 15 Sep 2009 23:00 BST
More news from the Asia-Pacific market...
• LexisNexis Australia announced that the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) in Queensland has deployed Lexis Visualfiles as its case management solution to streamline the daily tasks performed by the division. The solution is set to improve the ODPP’s efficiency, quality assurance and compliance through structured, automated and configured business process workflow tools. • Aderant Asia-Pacific conference. Our thanks to Marin Sardelic of the Red Rain Corporation – www.redraincorp.com – for filing this report on Aderant's recent regional Momentum conference in Sydney... "In spite of the general financial climate, there were about 80 delegates in attendance plus six sponsor organisations – numbers on par with last year, which considering the environment seems an indication of the quality of content at the conference and the work Aderant has put into the region over the last year or so. The vast majority of Australian user firms were present as well as delegates from firms from New Zealand and this year also from Singapore. Delegates were a good mix of firms of all size with both ADerant Expert (CMS) and interestingly the larger Keystone firms (maybe starting their due diligence on the Expert Evolution). Also of interest was that attendees were a mix of positions as varied as accounts administrators, business analysts, marketing, workflow, IT managers and office/practice management and included a number of C-level management. "There were a total of 36 sessions over two days, sessions generating particular interest amongst delegates included: – Theme of the conference is “Go –Live” with a focus on the recent successful implementations both locally and globally of new firms and existing clients upgrading to the 7.5 Release (now over 160 firms, and 80% of all users on version 7.0 and above) – the future product strategy and development plans interesting points included (a) the continued message that Aderant has an entrenched Microsoft partnership (b) the future: an impending development of a cloud computing version of Aderant Expert for mid tier firms (c) an intro to the Titan release utilising some neat components of Microsoft and the expanded Aderant Framework (d) Starlaw acquisition: What attracted was designed for law firms from ground up for documents, email and records and very tight Microsoft relationship. The acquisition is part of the long term strategy and will not erode focus on practice management but complement. – Some new Microsoft based features demonstrated include the Embedded Microsoft Windows Foundations including the Presentation and Workflow Foundations (very neat and workflow is moving past file opening ), Expert Assistant and the new Time Entry widgets that (all these things) will make fee earners lives easier with one to two click access to much of Aderant Expert functionality. "The overall feedback we received was that delegates were happy with the quality of sessions and the Aderant staff presenting (including about seven product managers from US and NZ who came out) with comments along the lines of Aderant really know how to put together a conference, a much broader range of sessions this year and Aderant development path is very clear to see." Thursday, September 3
Crown Law select Elite 3E
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 03 Sep 2009 23:00 BST
Crown Law, the
principal provider of legal services to the Queensland State Government in Australia,
has selected Elite 3E for its financial and practice management system. “We conducted an exhaustive discovery process to find the right business
process platform because we felt the decision was so important to the future of
our firm and our clients,” said Brett
Greenslade, Project Manager, Information Technology, Crown Law. “It was clear
that 3E will be able to meet our business requirements, including providing significantly
improved business processes through its workflow capability as well as
extensive integration with our existing business systems for a much lower total
investment than with other solutions due to the very flexible nature of the
application. No other solution was able to beat 3E’s value proposition.” Crown Law operates as a self-funded
business unit of the Department of Justice and Attorney-General and
competes with the private sector for much of its business. The firm has grown
to become one of the state's largest Queensland-based law firm with more than
140 legal staff handling 3,500 matters a year. The firm’s 16 legal teams cover
all aspects of government and public sector law. Wednesday, September 2
Latest Asia-Pacific News Round-up
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 02 Sep 2009 01:00 BST
Here's our latest round-up of Asia-Pacific news (a mere 24 hours later than scheduled)...
The big story this week is that the US/Australian systems house Swerdlove (in Australia previously Timeframe) has secured distribution deals for two new products. www.swerdlove.com • Smart WebParts (SWP) has granted Swerdlove exclusive rights to sell Smart Time in Australia. Web-based Smart Time is a new on-demand time capture and entry application which will be officially released worldwide on September 15, 2009. Smart Time is ideal for professionals such as lawyers, accountants and consultants that bill hourly. The web-based software provides timekeepers with a detailed report of their daily work activities, answering the question: “What did I do today and is it billable?” By searching across various network applications which a timekeeper uses throughout an average day, such as Microsoft Exchange, document management systems, VoIP phone systems, and Blackberry Enterprise Servers, Smart Time captures, consolidates and reports on time spent. Then, a journal of time spent is sent to the timekeepers to allow them to assign project or matter codes to time entries, and to export the transaction to the accounting system. Smart Time simplifies the time-note construction process; finding missed or leaked time that may not otherwise get billed. The system actually increases a firm's billable hours and increases profitability, rapidly yielding a total return-on-investment (ROI). www.smart-webparts.com And • PensEra Knowledge Technologies has entered into a partnership with Swerdlove to deliver the TimeKM enterprise suite of products to the APAC region. TimeKM offers an integrated time-tracking environment designed specifically to help the legal profession recover more billable time with less effort. It connects to key law firm business processes and lawyer work habits including systems such as email, mobility and VoIP as potential time capture opportunities, with the landing of time entries in the firm's practice management system. PensEra said a key factor was Swerdlove's experience with top tier practice management systems such as Elite and Aderant. www.timekm.com In other news... • The Orange Rag is now working on an Asia-Pacific version of the Insider top 250 chart and will show the regions largest law firms plus the major legal IT systems they are running. More details to follow. You can find a copy of the latest version of the UK chart attached below. • The Legal IT Asia Conference will take place on 18 & 19 December in Beijing. Speakers we've heard of include Janet Day of Berwin Leighton Paisner and Marcel Henri of Salans. For more details email charlie.gu@greenlinkchina.com or visit www.legalitasia.com • As previously reported on this blog, 70 lawyer M+K Lawyers, which has offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Victoria, has selected 3E as its new practice management system. The firm's chief financial officer Len Methananda said the firm selected Elite 3E because they needed "a practice management system that will easily scale as our business grows and also allow us to meet evolving and unanticipated client expectation." Adding that "We have been constrained by our current system's dated technology and its 'band aid' approach to new functionality." Orange Rag sources say the firm currently runs an old Aderant CMS system but had "stopped speaking to Aderant years ago" and that "the marriage had been over a long time ans it was only a case of when the divorce would be announced."  1 AttachmentsFriday, August 28
Next round of Asia-Pacific news out on Monday
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 28 Aug 2009 15:00 BST
The Orange Rag will be publishing its next round-up of Asia-Pacific news this coming Monday PM (Tuesday AM Sydney time).
Another Elite win and a "better recipe for success"
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 28 Aug 2009 10:02 BST
At a meeting with Steve Beuge, the CEO of Elite, earlier this week at the ILTA conference in Maryland, he told The Orange Rag that, in the wake of the A&O implementation, Lovells was "re-engaging" and back on course with its Elite 3E PMS implementation and now had a "better recipe for success and clearer vision of the final outcome".
Keeping with the culinary metaphor, the proof of the pudding includes the fact that... • over the past 60 days, five more 3E sites have gone live (there are now 24 organisations live on 3E) • and, this month (August) has seen three more 3E orders – one in Australia (an old Aderant site - see below) + one in the UK + one in the US. (The latter two are an Enterprise upgrade and a 3rd party legacy system swap out.) Beuge added that the company was now "starting to think about new products, new markets and possible acquisitions". That Australian win... Seventy lawyer M+K Lawyers, which has offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Victoria, has selected 3E as its new practice management system. The firm's chief financial officer Len Methananda said the firm selected Elite 3E because they needed "a practice management system that will easily scale as our business grows and also allow us to meet evolving and unanticipated client expectation." Adding that "We have been constrained by our current system's dated technology and its 'band aid' approach to new functionality." Orange Rag sources say the firm currently runs an old Aderant CMS system but had "stopped speaking to Aderant years ago" and that "the marriage had been over a long time ans it was only a case of when the divorce would be announced." |
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