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Thursday, April 30
450 go at A&O
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 30 Apr 2009 22:58 BST
Legal Week in the UK reports that Allen & Overy (A&O) has come to the end of its redundancy programme, with around 450 staff set to leave the firm this week. 200 associates and 200 support staff in A&O’s offices worldwide
will leave the firm, with a further 47 equity partners also losing
their jobs. Half of the cuts are expected to hit the London office (around 100 fee earners and 100 support staff). Overall, London will
shrink by 10% as a result of additional staff taking voluntary
redundancy.
The restructuring is expected to cost A&O £44m once redundancy
packages are paid out, with the firm previously stating that equity
partners had been asked to contribute an average of £30,000 each of
fresh capital, equating to around £11m, to help fund it. A&O’s restructuring was guided by a series of principles set out by senior partner David Morley, who told staff that
A&O had considered alternatives such as reduced hours, reduced pay,
sabbaticals, secondments and trainee deferrals, but concluded that none
of the methods would deliver the appropriate level of cost savings
required. • For more info on law firm layoffs globally, check out this site http://lawshucks.com/layoff-tracker/
First UK Elite 3E site goes live
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 30 Apr 2009 19:41 BST
This story seems to have got lost in the aether however DWF has just announced that it has become the first law firm in the UK to go live with Elite 3E.
3E has replaced
DWF’s existing PMS software (as a result of the DWF/Ricksons merger this included Norwel and SOS systems) throughout its offices in Leeds, Liverpool,
London, Manchester and Preston. The DWF roll-out has taken two
years to plan and implement – DWF announced the 3E order in June 2007. DWF managing partner Andrew Leaitherland said "DWF has more than doubled in size in the past three years and our
rapid expansion had resulted in the firm having different
practice management systems in operation. With 3E, we have gained one
state of the art platform from which the entire business can operate,
and which can adapt and grow with the firm." (This announcement was made directly by DWF rather than through Elite.)
Interesting choice of words...
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 30 Apr 2009 14:36 BST
The Australian-based law firm management consultancy Janders Dean has just issued the following announcement "Darkness Falls – Allen & Overy are about to enter their long anticipated dark period before they press the global 'go-live' button for the Elite 3E accounting application. The end of May/start of June is the big date for the firm and we wish them (and the Baker Robbins crew who have been invaluable additional resources on the project) all the best after such a long, challenging and unique project. We look forward to hearing of the successes in June."
Aderant is the lead story in the April edition of the Insider
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 30 Apr 2009 11:13 BST
The April issue of the UK & EMEA edition of Legal Technology Insider newsletter is out now. The digital edition went out about 15 minutes ago and the print edition should be landing on desktops anytime now. The top story is a report on Aderant and the fact the company is poised to become the vendor of choice for larger law firms...
"Although reports suggest Elite is still on track for the 3E implementation at Allen & Overy to go live by the end of May, the big buzz coming out of last week’s Momentum conference in Miami Beach is Aderant has reached the tipping point and is set to become the vendor of choice for larger law firms. There are a raft of upgrades and new orders waiting to be announced, and there are also some interesting new product positioning initiatives waiting in the wings. But, what else was new?
"The new Windows Workflow Foundation-based workflow capabilities within Aderant Expert are being greeted with enthusiasm, with some firms already achieving more with Windows Workflow than they previously managed with 3rd party platforms, such as Metastorm. In fact the workflow message is sinking home to such an extent that in one session, a delegate had what can only be described as a Meg Ryan When Harry met Sally moment. Readers will be amused to hear US firms dealing with workflow for the first time are encountering the same problems (project creep, managing expectations etc ) UK firms encountered in the early days of case management systems project implementation.
"The conference also saw further amplification and explanation of Aderant’s overall product strategy. Essentially, Golden Gate is an ‘iceberg’ or enabling platform that sits on top of the current Expert 7.5 release to allow users to take advantage of next generation tools and applications now on their current infrastructure. Next comes Titan (in effect Expert 8.0), which will bring with it a whole new family of optional workflow enabled applications – but which will still co-exist with existing applications and the underlying data schema. The overall intention, according to CEO Michael Kohlsdorf, is to create a framework that allows users to move forward, based on what their needs are – but without having to reinvest in or implement a whole new system, in the style of 3E or Axxia DNA. In terms of product release dates, we can expect an SP2 of Aderant Expert 7.5 later this summer, with a service pack for Golden Gate early next year and the launch of Titan by late 2010.
"Turning to the longer term, Aderant is researching a number of areas including: virtualisation, Sharepoint, cloud computing, .Net 4.0, data mining, touch surface computing (think the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report) and the Apple iPhone. In fact it was noticeable at the conference just how many people now use the iPhone although most of them also still carry a Blackberry."
• For the record, although total delegate numbers were down, the number of firms sending representatives was up by about 10%. Aderant also retain their reputation for throwing the best user conference parties although the refrain this year was very much "This is a lot better than the zoo!"
Here's Insider editor Charles Christian hard at work conducting research on behalf of readers + a link to a few more pix http://tinyurl.com/csz9t7 to prove the old adage that if you can remember the details of a good party, you can't have been there.
Wednesday, April 29
Lost that contact at Elite?
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 29 Apr 2009 17:21 BST
If you can't get through to your contacts at Elite, don't worry, they haven't run away – all the email addresses now end with @thomsonreuters.com (I know, you'd think a company that big could afford to keep parallel addresses until everyone got round to updating their address books.)
Hobs Legal adds offshore attorney review to its portfolio
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 29 Apr 2009 13:00 BST
Hobs Legal Docs has announced a strategic partnership with California-based Tricom Document Management Inc, a division of Tricom India As experts in e-discovery outsourcing services, Tricom specializes in data management, capturing and processing services including electronic data discovery; indexing; OCR & cleanup; litigation coding and legal process outsourcing. Tricom’s Mumbai office includes a team of qualified lawyers who are employed full-time by Tricom, and trained by a US Attorney who runs Tricom’s LPO division in India.
Hobs Legal Docs managing director Terry Harrison said “I am delighted with this partnership forged from my long contacts within the industry in the USA. There is no doubt that in the effort to reduce the cost of litigation and regulatory investigations for their corporate clients, more law firms will look at outsourcing some part of the review process of large amounts of documents and data. What is important here and a major driver for us is the fact that the reviews are undertaken by qualified and trained, permanently employed lawyers as opposed to paralegals. I see this as an important addition to our services to assist clients needing to look at creative solutions for their corporate clients”
Sameer Sheth, vice president of North America sales for Tricom in the United States also expressed enthusiasm for the deal and sees “the strategic relationship with Hobs as another important step in Tricom’s outreach to law firms and corporations in the UK, USA and mainland Europe, especially in regard to document review outsourcing which can represent 90% of the costs in dealing with electronically stored information in an investigative or litigation context.”
Visualfiles announces a win
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 29 Apr 2009 06:56 BST
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has selected LexisNexis Visualfiles as its case management solution of choice. It will be deployed across the Union in its central legal team and 12 centres in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The NASUWT is the largest teachers’ union in the UK providing legal and professional services to its members.
Upon implementation, Visualfiles will provide NASUWT with complete visibility of all the cases and legal matters it deals with on behalf of its members. Typically, the Union handles in excess of 20,000 member enquiries, of which more than 2,500 become formal cases requiring representation to employers, the General Teacher’s Council and Employment Tribunals.
Tuesday, April 28
New product launch - search engine SDK from ISYS
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 28 Apr 2009 20:24 BST
ISYS Search Software – www.isys-search.com – a supplier of information access and discovery solutions for mining intelligence and corporate knowledge, has announced the arrival of ISYS:sdk 9, the company’s next-generation enterprise search integration kit for original equipment manufacturers (OEM), independent software vendors (ISV) and systems integrators.
ISYS:sdk 9 offers customers several major enhancements, all designed to deliver the performance, scalability and accuracy required for empowering third-party applications with best-of-breed search. Most significantly, ISYS has expanded its core engine’s content mining capabilities using deterministic and reliable methods that help customers better understand their content. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities, thus enabling OEMs to leverage these facets for improved search and discovery.
“Compliance, ediscovery and the continued explosion of digital information have seen information access and integrated search solutions become a high priority for many companies,” said Scott Coles, chief executive officer, ISYS Search Software. “No matter the application, search is a must-have component for today’s leading software vendors. ISYS has long served the embedded search requirements of these organizations, including EMC and HP, helping them deliver superior, best-in-class applications.”
ISYS’ Intelligent Content Analysis identifies characteristics can that can be exploited by OEMs to bolster their applications with greater content mining capabilities, an increasingly critical requirement in compliance and ediscovery applications. Additional ISYS:sdk 9 capabilities include:
• Improved Performance and Scalability. ISYS:sdk handles most search requests concurrently, resulting in increased throughput when compared with previous versions. Additionally, ISYS:sdk 9 offers increased index capacity, allowing for 2TB to 4TB of content per single index. As always, indexes may be “connected together” providing search over practically unlimited amounts of enterprise content.
• De-Duplication. ISYS automatically identifies identical documents and either removes them from the results or visually marks them. This capability is of particular importance to legal professionals conducting discovery work, or any user attempting to conduct analysis of a given content collection.
• Index Biasing. In an effort to expand ISYS:sdk’s tuning capabilities, ISYS now provides administrators with the ability to adjust the relevance weighting on entire or sub-collections of documents. This option enables an organization to further tune relevance to suit specific use case scenarios.
Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Microsoft Office 2007 out now
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 28 Apr 2009 17:47 BST
Microsoft has just announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Microsoft Office 2007. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Microsoft told The Orange Rag the main improvements legal users will notice with SP2, include the following:
• Improved performance and stability of Outlook: Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26% faster than its predecessor on a set of common email tasks and is even faster, 35%, with larger mailboxes.
• Users will experience considerable responsiveness and speed improvements on common, day-to-day operations like launching, synchronizing and searching.
• Better charting functionality in Excel
• Several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors.
Legal Week Spanish event still on
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 28 Apr 2009 12:32 BST
Legal Week has just been in touch to say their fourth annual Strategic Technology Forum is still taking place in Spain on 10-12 June – there had been rumours that it was going to 'do a Legal Technology Awards'. They say 'more than 50 CIOs and IT directors from leading law firms from across Europe and North America will discuss how technology can help create business efficiency, add value and help improve the bottom line.' The forum, which has the theme ‘Strategic thinking in a challenging market – preparing for the upturn’ will be co-chaired by Abby Ewen, IT director, Simmons & Simmons and Simon Thompson, global chief operating officer, Linklaters.
'No' they haven't sent us an invite – but we don't actually care as the dates clash with production deadlines. And 'yes' we'd love to know if they really do get more than 50 CIOs and IT directors to attend.
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