Strategic Legal Technology

Fellow blogger Joy London of excitedutterances and I have updated out list of Outsourced Legal Services. In addition Joy, offers an interesting analysis of the market to outsource legal services in India. 

Our list now has almost 30 entries, a mix of companies known to be doing work in offshore locations and companies, primarily in India, offering a range of service including legal research, document preparation, secretarial support, and patent support. For those interested in the trends (jobs and dollars), Joy’s post is a must read.

Mark your calendars for a very promising legal technology conference. Marcus Evans is organizing its first LawTech Forum in NYC November 3-4. The program looks excellent. 

Topics include

• Benchmarking & Quantifying the Value of IT & Technology
• Effectively using Technology to Increase Productivity
• Using Technology in E-Discovery: Developing an Efficient but Comprehensive Approach
• Navigating the Challenges of Information & Record Management in a Digital Age
• Achieving Competitive Success by Leveraging Your KM

Speakers include Thomas Barnett, Special Counsel, Sullivan & Cromwell; Pamela Martin, Manager IT (Legal), Du Pont; James Michalowicz, Litigation Program Manager, Tyco International; Stephen Roberts, CIO , Covington & Burling; and Michael Stevens, Manager IT (Legal), Cisco Systems.

I will moderate a session called Leveraging Technology to Enhance Your KM Capabilities. The panelists are two of the leading in-house practitioners of knowledge management: Phil Crowley, Assistant General Counsel, Johnson & Johnson and Amy Comeau, Assistant VP, MetLife Legal Affairs.

For more information on the conference and to obtain the detailed program, click here.

By way of background, Marcus Evans focuses on creating events that provide business leaders with critical know-how. Its 31 international offices produce hundreds of events per year on strategic issues that include corporate finance, technology, capital markets, human resources, and business improvement. Some readers may have attended or be familiar with the company’s Legal Technology Summit, which provides both educational tracks and opportunities for law firms and vendors to connect.

We in the legal market know about the e-discovery explosion. The shock waves now reach outside legal. 

MetaLincs Debuts Discovery Software in the 8/22 issue of eWeek magazine describes new e-discovery software. I’ve been reading eWeek for years and recall only one or two prior feature story on discovery software. Interestingly, the featured product is new to me (other interesting search tools are described here and here)

The article notes that with “more and more enterprises finding themselves under intense scrutiny due to regulatory compliance mandates and litigation pressures, e-mail and document discovery is fast becoming a labor-intensive proposition laced with inconsistency and a small margin of error.” eWeek describes the company’s software as including features for “indexing, processing, search, review, reporting and production.” Visual displays are a key aspect; the company CTO explains that the “software presents customers with a visual representation of the relationships between people, time, documents, events and communication patterns based on appropriate context and search criteria.”

More information at the company web site.

I could not be at the ILTA (formerly LawNet) conference in Phoenix this week, to my regret. My friend and business partner, Shy Alter, CEO of ii3, however, is attending and provides a “highlights” report. 

Shy writes:

Microsoft is in the house: Looking at the program, many tracks are conducted by leading vendors in the space. These educational tracks are provided by vendors such as Hummingbird, Aderant, and a relatively new but fast growing presence – Microsoft. In fact – measured by the number of tracks, Microsoft out does all other vendors. When MS decides to move into a space – well – they don’t beat around the bush – and the CIOs I talked to are definitely taking notice.
Integration, integration and some more integration: I met and interviewed four CIOs on Monday. One interesting common theme emerged when I asked about the future of business applications in the firm (e.g. DM, CRM etc.) – and whether there’s appetite for more – all of them said that the issue is not new applications, but how to make those that they have “talk” to each other.

Shy is attending ILTA in an official capacity, to produce ii3 TV segments for ITLA. He is interviewing numerous conference attendees and will assemble a video segment (details on availability of this to come). For those who would like a preview of his considerable substantive and production talent, go to ii3 TV for two 15-segments on knowledge management topics.

The August Corporate Legal Times reports on ways to reduce litigation costs. Technology plays a big role and one of my favorite approaches - decision trees – is featured. 

GCs Offer Strategies for Reining in Litigation Costs reports on a recent general counsel roundtable. The sub-title is “Decision Tress Play a Key Role in Settling Complex Cases.” My former colleague and now law professor David Post and I explained the basics of risk analysis and decision trees in a 1990 article (the concepts have not changed since then) and I recently wrote about software for doing decision trees.

A sidebar to the article lists “Controlling Costs in 10 Easy Steps” by FMC general counsel Jeff Carr. Two involve technology: (1)"Require that your law firms create a decision tree or other early case assessment within 90 days of retaining them.” (2)"Once you are in litigation, use an artificial intelligence engine instead of people to triage electronic documents for discovery relevance. Seek to reduce the documents people need to review to the important ones as opposed to using people to review documents to determine which are important.”

And two of Carr’s steps relate to knowledge management techniques: (1) “After it’s all said and done, do an ‘after action’ or a ‘lessons learned’ review.” (2) “Remember the whole process is circular… learn from the process to avoid it again.”

I recently visited DC-based 60-lawyer Spriggs & Hollingsworth, which built an innovative case management system that illustrates how knowledge management can be embedded into a process.  

To to support the firm’s complex litigation practice, a substantial portion of which involves pharmaceutical product-liability claims and which involves claims of many plaintiffs in serial and multidistrict litigation, partner Marc Mayerson (who leads the firm’s national practice representing policyholders), CTO Todd Haley, and Director of Litigation Support Jeff Slater supervised extensive customizing of Legal Files, a case and matter management system.

The firm embedded significant know-how about managing cases in a sophisticated set of menus and corresponding screens with many fields. These screens systematically walk a lawyer through collecting relevant data about a plaintiff (e.g., counsel, nature of the claim, and details of product usage). The software not only helps efficiently prepare for each plaintiff, it also helps manage the entire portfolio. And in the future the system will support an all-digital file for each plaintiff. (Those attending ILTA’s upcoming conference can learn more; Todd is presenting Thursday, August 25th at 2pm about the firm’s work.)

Most KM discussions focus on precedents, document retrieval, or experience location. Here, the KM is about best practices, specifically for handling a class of cases. It is a relatively uncommon - and highly valuable - way to make explicit know-how that typically remains tacit (i.e., capture process know-how of lawyers and litigation support professionals in software). I suspect that any firm that handles a volume of complex matters could benefit from this approach. Doing so would require more collaboration among lawyers, knowledge managers, and lit supp professionals than is typical.

BigLaw is not famous for innovation. Some forward thinking BigLaw CIOs advocate change but meet resistance. One explanation is lack of diversity in law firm management. 

My friend Eric Mankin is a business innovation expert and writes a regular column on his web site about innovation. His July 25th piece, Optimizing Diversity, provides important insight about decision-making and diversity: “Innovation thrives on diversity. Not diversity based on gender or ethnicity, but rather diversity of experience.”

Though the power of diversity is well-documented, most teams remain insular because “given a choice, most people would prefer similarity over diversity.” Similarity supports smooth communication but squelches the disagreements that spawn innovation. Too much diversity, however, can lead to so much friction that failure ensues. Eric captures the tension with a nice graphic:

He concludes that “For those charged with improving the quality of innovative efforts, one of the challenges is to encourage the tendencies for diversity in environments that tend towards homogeneity.”

It strikes me that even law firms that promote diversity suffer from the lack of multiple perspectives that Eric describes. Skin color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, and other characteristics may vary, but the funnel to partnership often drives a certain uniformity of thinking.

Advocates of change inside BigLaw will likely gain insight from Eric’s analysis. Acting on this insight, however, is a challenge!

I have suggested that law firms should provide RSS [really simple syndication] feeds for their alerts and updates. This way, clients can pick and choose what they want to read, eliminate excess e-mail, and help reduce information overload. Yesterday, a Canadian law firm announced that its updates are available via RSS. 

Vancouver-based Clark Wilson yesterday announced that the firm “is now offering topical RSS Feeds for our firm’s publications. By using RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) feeds, those with interests in specific legal subject matters will receive immediate notification as soon as alerts and articles that match their interests are posted on our website.” (List of feeds here.)

Steven Matthews, Knowledge Services Director of the firm, explains in a blog post at Slaw (a co-operative weblog about Canadian legal research and IT, etc.) more of the background on this. Among other benefits, the firm will be able to track hits - how many print publications or e-mailed alerts provide this automatic feedback?

Law firms have many options to “touch” clients digitally: blogs, RSS feeds, Webinars, streaming video, and podcasts. It surprises me that more firms are not opting to experiment with these. Given that firms already generate a lot of content, the marginal cost to distribute in channels other than print and e-mail that might be more appealing to many readers (including clients and prospects) is relatively low.

Update (8/25): Spotted on Larry Bodine’s Legal Marketing Blog, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr is offering RSS feeds for content on its web site.

Update (8/22): From an 8/22/05 press release: ”Stark & Stark announced today that it has made available fifteen separate RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds specific to various firm practice areas through its New Jersey Law Blog. The addition of these customized feeds allows subscribers to receive instant notification of new developments in area(s) of law most important to them. Links to these newly available feeds can be located within the ‘Blogs’ section of Stark & Stark’s website.”

The current issue of Law Office Computing (Aug/Sep) asks “what is the big challenge when implementing new technology in a large firm?” My answer, appearing in the Asked and Answered column> is below. 

Until recently, making new technology work properly and efficiently was difficult. Today, the bigger challenge revolves around two aspects of change management: new features or new work habits.

Learning new features, typically from software upgrades, is fairly easy. The changes are usually incremental, so a memo, e-mail notice, or laminated “tips and tricks” sheet, along with optional training, suffice to make the transition. Users might grumble and some might stumble, but they no longer resist the inevitable and necessary upgrades.

No single formula insures success in changing work habits. Elements of effective programs include strong leadership from firm or practice-group management, measuring conformance, and providing feedback. Positive feedback includes formal evaluations or simple incentives such as a Starbucks cash card for good performance. Other feedback can include mild public opprobrium (e.g., e-mail from the senior partner saying “I can’t believe you sent a message asking this before checking the firm’s knowledge management system") and negative performance evaluations.

“IBM plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler “keyword” searches” according to a press release. This could have implications in the e-discovery market. 

An IBM spokesman notes that major players such as Google and Yahoo have stayed focus on searching the Internet, not the enterprise. Now “IBM plans to openly offer other software developers its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts”. Some fifteen companies, including Attensity, Inxight, and ClearForest plan to incorporate the UIMA framework. UIMA will be available on an open-source basis.

It’s not clear what impact, if any, this will have on search in e-discovery, but it sounds promising. IBM has spent 4 years researching this framework. After the ABA TechShow in April, I spoke to an IBM spokesperson who said IBM had no interest in the e-discovery market. But by opening up the technology, e-discovery vendors will have access to it. (For more background on UIMA, see my prior posts here and here.)

Separately, for law firms running WebSphere, this announcement also has potential knowledge management implications: “IBM is also offering its WebSphere OmniFind software for helping users perform searches on unstructured data in a variety of formats or languages, be they located in databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video images.”

Update, 1/25/06: Articles: IBM releases UIMA source code as open source; IBM Turns Over Search Project To Open Source Community
Update, 8/11/05 at noon eastern: Some additional detail at this eWeek article

Ten days ago I wrote about some interesting articles. This summer is proving to have more than the usual number of useful legal technology articles, including an intriguing report in Information Week about e-mail visualization software that could help in e-discovery. 

E-Discovery. Revealing E-Mail’s Secrets in Information Week’s August 1 issue describes a new visual analytic tool for e-mail from Spotfire. “Spotfire Inc. this week will introduce a tool for uncovering patterns and relationships in information extracted from E-mail messages that will be as useful for anti-terrorism efforts as it will be for analyzing business data.” The money quote for e-discovery, citing a senior manager of CIA-funded In-Q-Tel:

‘We identified Spotfire as a leader in the visualization.’ market, he says. That market is important because it’s a place where visualization hasn’t yet been used. ‘E-mail has become an increasing part of electronic discovery.’

At least as of the time of this post, I could not find reference to e-discovery on the Spotfire web site. Those of us with a history in litigation support know that many interesting discovery tools emerged from the intelligence world, so this bears watching.

In other news….

Online Legal Services. Spotted at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices: Why going online is better for everyone by Richard Susskind, describing a new online service by Eversheds that sets “the pace for the next generation of employment lawyers” by generating a range of documents. (The service is based on DealBuilder by Business Integrity - I was very impressed by this tool when I saw a demonstration of it recently. To call it just document assembly is probably too limiting.)

KM. Spotted at excited utterances: From laggard to leader? How the legal sector is finally embracing KM has interesting insights about KM at Baker McKenzie, Blake Cassels, and Freshfields.

Blogging. Spotted at Adam Smith, Esq.: Order From Chaos Via RSS (also from Information Week, August 1), a good overview of how corporations are using Really Simple Syndication (and a good follow-on to my recent Follow-up on Enterprise Blogging and RSS post).

The Ark Group USA is organizing KM for the Legal Profession in October (at which I will co-conduct a workshop). 

The conference takes place October 4-6, 2005 in Chicago. Complete information is here (PDF); sessions include:

• “Strategies and tactics for successfully implementing a KM initiative in the law firm environment” by Browning Marean of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary US
• “The Human Factor: Addressing the cultural and structural elements of KM for the legal profession” by Jason Marty, Global Director, Knowledge Management, Baker & McKenzie Global Services LLC
• “Meeting the work product retrieval and content management challenge” by Tania Daniels, Senior Consultant, eSentio Technologies and Peter J. Ozolin, VP Enterprise Solutions, Practice Technologies, Inc.
• “Expertise location: Enabling enterprise-search systems to identify potential knowledge brokers within the firm” by Brent E. Kidwell, Chief Knowledge Counsel, Jenner & Block LLP

Day 3 of the conference consists of two in-depth workshops. The first is “Making KM Client Facing", presented by Joshua Fireman of ii3 and me. The second is “Developing Matter Centric Taxonomies to Support Enterprise-Wide Business Initiatives” presented by Tania Daniels and Mark Horne of eSentio.

Book by August 15th to receive a 20% early bird discount.

I recently suggested that Enterprise blogging and RSS (really simple syndication) could have interesting knowledge management implications. Here is some follow-up. 

RSS Goes Corporate in Red Herring (July 18, 2005), spotted at LawLibTech) describes the market for and players in enterprise blogging. The article reports that “enterprises are starting to realize that the strengths of RSS [really simple syndication] are great fits for the corporate environment. Email, web browsers, and databases often fall short when an enterprise wants to send a message to hundreds of thousands of global employees, to measure buzz about its products, to filter industry news for relevancy, or to synchronize employee’s web needs between work, home, and travel use. “ The article lists several companies offering enterprise aggregators. So far, the focus appears to be on providing aggregation features plus some content to the enterprise.

Separately, a blog post NewsGator Enterprise Server in beta! (which Rick Klau pointed me to) describes Newsgator Enterprise Server. According to the post, this product emphasizes managing content for the enterprise and distributing that content efficiently to multiple platforms.

Two comments to my original post provide additional perspective. First, forward-thinking people in the trenches are also considering enterprise RSS. Toby Brown of the Barchives.org blog commented “The Utah Bar has met with a librarian for the State. We have talked about an enterprise aggregator for Utah government. My goal is a government site where lawyers can subscribe to content by subject. We’re still working on the idea, but it will be a while before anything happens.” And second, Lars Ploughman of the mind this blog notes that Rojo provides social tagging for blog entries. Following up to his post, I found on the Rojo site: “Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends.”

These items suggest a still-evolving effort to resolve basic functionality of managing RSS feeds and content at the enterprise level but you can see how a new framework could eventually support added functionality for knowledge management.