Strategic Legal Technology

Who needs an office? Law firms believe every lawyer does. But BigLaw is increasingly out of synch with corporate America in this view. 

Rolling Out The Instant Office in Business Week (5/7/07) reports that about “60% of the office space that companies pay so dearly for is now a dead zone of darkened doorways and wasting cubes. The age of on-demand projects is creating a need for on-demand offices.”

The article suggests that office space management today will follow worker management in the 80s and 90s: outsourcing and temps. Technology enables huge flexibility in where people work and managing occupancy. “The idea of the office as a static thing is crumbling.”

Law firms have yet to hear this message. A move to working virtually, however, would save occupancy costs while also making lawyers’ lives easier. This can translate to higher profits via lower turnover. Working virtually does not necessarily mean at home. It can mean suburban satellite offices, which also offer significant business continuity benefits.

If you live in the UK, now you can get low-cost advice from lawyers in India. 

A Bob Ambrogi blog post alerted me to UK-based Expert Legal Advice. Consumers buy chunks of time in advance and receive advice by e-mail. The company offering the service is English but the lawyers are in India. Nothing I found on the site suggests that lawyers licensed in the UK supervise the work. (The terms & conditions page was not available when I visited the site.)

I don’t expect to see a service like this in the US as it would probably be the unauthorized practice of law (UPL).

With this post, I introduce a new blog category, “Vendors Speak.” Some explanation and then interesting commentary on dealing with audio in e-discovery. 

Vendors sometimes send me thought-provoking messages. I have been too cautious in sharing these. Vendors often have deep insight into the issues lawyers face. I will exercise editorial discretion and disclose any self-interest when I post vendor comments. My posting is not a product/company endorsement nor an independent vetting of the vendor’s facts or analysis.

I was prompted to start this category by a message I received from David Fishel, Esq., Senior Director - Technology Counsel at NEXIDIA. Click “more” below to see his interesting comments about audio recordings in e-discovery and my response to him. For those interested in this topic, David is doing a webinar next week with Mary Mack of FIOS (details here). He is also writing a white paper on the topic; to get a copy when it’s ready, contact him ( ediscovery at nexidia dot com).

(more…)

In this roundup: enterprise relationship discovery software gains ground in AmLaw 100 firms, document assembly updates, an e-discovery caution, and “cool stuff: Google voice queries." 

Enterprise Relationship Management - Discovery
Legal Technology Insider (UK, #197, April 2007) reports that large Spanish firm Cuatrecasas has purchased ContactNet software. ContactNet identifies connections among people, automatically, by analyzing e-mail traffic and contact lists. Unlike CRM, enterprise relationship management (ERM) is passive. You don’t have to enter information; the software mines existing data. It is useful for marketing, business development, and cross selling. LTI reports ContactNet has “won business from 15 AmLaw top 100 firms, including Wilson Sonsini, Skadden Arps, Mintz Levin, Duane Morris and Sheppard Mullin.”

Document Assembly
Rees Morrison reports in two blog posts on document assembly. Law firms help law departments develop rule-based drafting systems notes that three large law firms (2 in the UK) are using Deal Builder to automate documents for clients, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Amazon. I suppose it’s no surprise that tech companies would lead in using document assembly.

Separately, Additional resources for law departments interested in document assembly reports on 4 new Australian document assembly software products (courtesy of Simon Lewis of Sinch).

E-Discovery
Craig Ball explains the potential e-discovery perils of Vista in Microsoft Brings an Altered Vista to EDD (Law Tech News, 3/14/07). In it, he explains that Microsoft Vista (the latest operating system, intended to replace XP) maintains multiple versions of files, logs user activity, can strongly encrypt files, and makes other changes with potential major implication for e-discovery. He concludes: “For lawyers and litigants who feel like EDD has crept up and kicked them, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Vista et al. paint a broad new horizon over rough seas.”

Cool Stuff
Bob Ambrogi posted Search Google - By Phone. He explains “dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and a voice takes your query and reports the results [by voice].” I’ve tried it a couple of times and it’s pretty cool. I’ve already put it in my cell phone speed dial and can see using this. How long before Google adds the ability to get directions from where you’re calling?

Corporate Counsel magazine named the General Electric law department as best of the year. Home-grown technology was a key factor the editors considered. 

All Systems Go (Corporate Counsel, 4/18/07) reports that the GE law department has developed many interesting applications, including a web-based questionnaire to help select outside counsel, deal rooms, work flow systems, systems to share work product, and digital dashboards. The article does not detail the underlying technology.

The article also focuses on processes GE uses, particularly Early Case Assessment. ECA, along with alternate dispute resolution (ADR) and tracking case cycle times “have resulted in a dramatic drop in litigation and fees over the last four years. GE says its litigation costs fell from $120.5 million in 2002 to $69.3 in 2005.” That’s a big savings: $50 million, over 40%.

Two comments:
(1) I’ve previously written about ECA, especially litigation risk analysis with decision trees. It would be interesting to know how big a role (if any) decision trees play in GE’s ECA.
(2) I can’t tell if the enormous cost savings are a result of ECA+ADR+tracking or merely correlated with them. If this is a causation and not correlation, then other companies should rush to adopt these approaches.

A new National Law Journal (4/19/07) article profiles the Cisco law department and general counsel Marc Chandler. The article reiterates many interesting legal technology applications at Cisco. I was most struck by Chandler’s comment on document review in e-discovery. 

Using Technology to Cut Legal Costs quotes Chandler:

“The discovery process in litigation can be very, very expensive. We have built electronic tools that mine all the documents that exist in the company, collect them and eliminate the stuff that is not responsive. Most outside counsel embrace that. Some still prefer to do everything by hand, using armies of associates. We have not seen quality differences between those two models, but there is a giant cost difference.”

I’ve written previously that the choosing the best document review approach - US contract lawyers, offshore lawyers, or software - is an empirical question. Chandler adds anecdotal evidence that computers do better than humans, at least considering cost.

The rest of the article is well worth reading to learn more about other Cisco legal department innovations.

If I ask the titular question, you’d rightly think me odd. But if I ask “how’s e-discovery going?", what’s the problem. Do names mean anything? 

For centuries, the horse and carriage was a key way to get around. It took years before the horseless carriage moniker faded in favor of cars (or autos, SUVs, etc.).

The name “e-discovery” suggests something special, that there is some other kind of discovery. Sure, paper may still play a supporting role, but with the newly amended FRCP, E has the lead role.

At some point - maybe now - we need to lose the E. Dropping E might help de-mystify the new electronic world and signal that the fantasy of non-digital discovery must die. (Even if not all discovery is quite yet E, lawyers better know about it. See Conrad Jacoby’s Separating E-Discovery Myths from Realities at LLRX.com for more on this point.)

Law.com has released a new search tool, specific to legal web sites. This will likely be a useful tool for lawyers and legal professionals. 

Law.com Quest lets you search two sources:
(1) “the Law.com Network of sites, including the New York Law Journal, The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, Law Firm Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court Monitor, and more publications and resources from ALM Media” and
(2) the “legal web” which includes #1 plus “hundreds of hand-picked law firm websites and prominent legal blogs.”
Users can suggest to law.com additional sites to include in the search index.

I’ve recently experimented with niche legal customized searching using Google. Quest is a welcome and more powerful addition, though I’m still intrigued by creating well-defined, discrete searches (click here for three examples of niche legal searches).

I am intrigued to see that Quest offers faceted search results (especially after my post yesterday about Endeca) but in my initial testing, this does not yet work quite right, at least for me. I am sure, however, that any initial kinks will be worked out quickly enough.

In this Roundup: New York Times article on high-end jobs flowing to India; Defense Department using Endecca faceted search; and Morrison Foerster being “green” in its information technology. 

Outsourcing
India’s Edge Goes Beyond Outsourcing (NY Times, 4/4/07) reports that “increasingly the jobs of Western white-collar elites in fields as diverse as investment banking, aircraft engineering and pharmaceutical research have begun flowing to India and a few other developing countries… As Indian back offices become more sophisticated, Western companies are finding that large parts of their work, even high-end tasks, can also be done from India.” The article does not mention lawyers (or legal technology consultants for that matter!), but the implications are clear. Beyond tapping Indian talent, companies increasingly see India as a huge market for their products and services, which also drives the move there. In my view, that would be true for lawyers but for restrictive rules in India.

Concept Searching
I’ve been involved with full-text and concept search for over two decades. Most of the interesting software comes out of the defense and intelligence sector. So it was interesting to read that the Defense Intelligence Agency is using “Endeca Technologies’ Information Access Platform to search 20 sources of intelligence gathered by agents in the field. Weeks from now, the search engine’s reach will be extended to intelligence gathered through the interception of radio and other signals, news feeds such as Reuters, and “message traffic” from the State Department, such as e-mail, instant messaging, and file transfers.” Intelligence Agency Boosts Search Capability (Information Week, 3/26/07). DIA is particularly interested in faceted search.
Update (4/24/07) - An Endeca press release (3/14) reports “LexisNexis has selected the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) to power the legal business development solution”

Greening IT
MoFo IT Gets Its Green On (Law Tech News, 4/4/07) describes several steps taken by IT at Morrison & Foerster to reduce energy consumption, including replacing CRTs with flat screen monitors, server virtualization, and recycling. I hope that the units the firm is buying have a power saver mode. It has always driven me nuts to walk around an office seeing numerous CRTs left turned on, a double waste, consuming electricity plus extra AC to counteract the heat.

Is e-discovery the tail wagging the dog? 

Consider the stages of EDD, each costly:
1. identify sources and custodians,
2. preserve data,
3. collect data appropriately,
4. convert data into usable formats,
5. review data for responsiveness and privilege,
6. produce data to opposing parties, and
7. manage the overall effort.

Previous posts have discussed reducing review costs with offshore lawyers or more reliance on software. A better way is re-think the steps leading to review (identifying, preserving, etc.) Doing so is a double win: direct cost savings for those steps plus indirect savings by ending up with fewer documents requiring review.

Enter corporate records management (RM). Companies seek RM solutions that simplify tracking digital data and help prepare for litigation. I’ve suggested such convergence (E-Discovery Convergence at Hand? and Compliance and E-Discovery: Long Term Convergence?). Now, The Forrester Wave™:Records Management report (Q1 2007), available courtesy of CA here, observes that litigation is the “hot driver” of records management (RM). Forrester writes that today

“RM vendors do not have the capabilities necessary to truly solve the eDiscovery challenge. In an effort to claim a portion of the lucrative eDiscovery market, look for RM vendors to first partner with — and then buy — Discovery pure-play vendors such as Attenex, CaseCentral, MetaLINCS, Stratify, and ZANTAZ.”

If the leading RM vendors (the top three the report identifies are CA MDY, Open Text, and IBM FileNet) succeed in expanding their reach, then e-discovery becomes cheaper and easier. For example, one person operating a console can replace armies of data collection technicians; destruction and retention occurs in real time, reducing data volumes; integrated tools enable selecting relevant documents during collection rather than afterwards; and loading a review repository occurs with a few mouse clicks. Separately, automatic policies to enforce litigation holds reduce the risks of spoliation and sanctions.

In this world, RM will become the dog and EDD merely the tail.

My thanks to Peter Pepiton II, Esq., Discovery Product Manager, CA, Inc. for helping educate me on the corporate perspective and his comments on a draft of this post.

Legal technology worlds collide: online legal services meet records management and e-discovery. 

E-mail archiving solution vendor Fortiva offers an online tool (”Policy Builder“) to generate a corporate electronic communication policy covering topics such as acceptable e-mail use and records retention. The tool is free; registration is required.

The interface of this web-based document assembly system is easy. It displays a detailed table of contents; you can edit or move any policy section. Most sections just let you edit default text but some contain business or legal logic. The tool generates a nicely formatted, customized PDF policy suitable for circulation. It covers a lot of ground; I suspect that a fair bit of lawyer time went into it.

Vendors may see a better business case for online legal services than do law firms. Vendors spend significant sums to establish credibility and generate sales leads. A free policy tool is innovative marketing. Given a choice between no policy, paying legal fees to write one, or using this tool, I can see that many companies/prospects would opt for the tool.

Marketing is a major corporate expense. Maybe this policy builder is a harbinger of a new technique: free policies in exchange for registration information. I see no threat to BigLaw yet. But BigLaw should ask whether the economic return on a free online tool is better than, say, a Wall Street Journal ad campaign?

Two respected publishers now offer e-discovery (EDD) help, both supported by advertising. 

Law.com (ALM) offers its e-discovery roadmap and Findlaw (Thomson) its Electronic Discovery Rule Wizard. The former is organized by stage of EDD processing, the latter by the FRCP. Both have interesting interfaces, offer some substantive content, and link to advertisers.

I recently wrote about how technology may change traditional legal publishing. Neither of these appear to offer sufficient depth to threaten traditional research, but they may reflect yet another new legal publishing model.

A Harvard Law legal tech study about which I posted last November has been published. Gene Koo of the Berkman Center for Internet at Harvard Law School wrote New Skills, New Learning: legal education and the promise of technology (PDF), a study with interesting findings about technology and law practice. 

Highlights I find interesting:

• Law School = La-La Land: The opening sentence: “A large majority of lawyers perceive critical gaps between what they are taught in law schools and the skills they need in the workplace, and appropriate technologies are not being used to help close this gap.”
• Skills Taxonomy: Koo identifies three skills attorneys must master: “knowledge-generating, techno-social, and metapractice.” Nice taxonomy. Personally though, I would distinguish social and tech skills.
• Knowledge Management on the Decline?: “the advantage of KM may be shrinking due to increasing information available freely online. Several analysts question whether some firms have over-invested in KM, given the lack of evidence supporting its benefits. Additionally, several of the legal technologists interviewed predict that the advantages provided by internal KM systems will erode over time because lawyers’ work product is increasingly available on the Web. For example, attorneys can search the EDGAR database to find other firms’ merger and acquisition filings.”
• Working Virtually: Of the surveyed lawyers, 3/4 work on one or more teams. Of these, 2/3 work on teams that “involve at least one member located elsewhere than the respondent’s office [and] 21% of the teams had at least 1/4 of the team located outside of the office.” This supports my prior arguments that actual data likely shows that lawyers don’t need to be in the office as much as you might think, in part because their team members are elsewhere.
• Lawyer Tech Skills: “Today’s lawyers possess skills adequate to practice, according to the vast majority of people contacted for this study, including law school deans and managing partners.” The study notes that some dissent on this point. I dissent: show me the data. Direct measurement is more reliable than observations of those who may well be techno-phobic themselves.

This is an excellent step in bringing some academic clarity to the role of technology in law practice and legal education.