BigHand today announced that it has successfully rolled out its award-winning BigHand3 Digital Dictation software at business law firm Osborne Clarke.

As a direct result of the software rollout, the firm expects to achieve efficiency gains in excess of £2million over the next five years.

Key quantifiable benefits for the firm include:


The system will also enable the firm to pool resources across offices to provide a more efficient service for fee earners, particularly with regard to supporting corporate transactions in the London office

On 11th July Microsoft ended support for Windows 98, Windows 98SE and Windows ME.

Technical support and updates (including security updates) are no longer available for these products although existing support documents on the website will remain available. At the end of 2005 analyst firm IDC estimated that 13% of Microsoft's customers were sill running Windows 98 in some shape or form.

Support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 ends on 10th October 2006. Most firms should now be running Service Pack 2 due to the security enhancements in this release. Firms with a premier support contract can get support for SP1 if planning to move directly to Windows Vista.

With the proliferation of USB memory sticks, mobile phones and other devices which enable users to quickly and discretely transfer large amounts of information which can then be taken out of the firm; a mechanism is required to prevent, limit and control what users can do with such devices.

Software is now coming on to the market to let administrators set policies which allows data to be copied only to authorised USB storage devices. For example, only certain users or groups of users may be allowed to transfer data to USB devices. Alternatively all USB storage type devices may just be blocked with other USB devices such as printers being allowed to operate normally.

Where the copying of information to USB devices is allowed, the IT department may want to monitor and log what is being transferred. One thing to watch out for when purchasing this type of software is how it manages laptops. If a user takes their computer home you may still need to prevent them being able to copy sensitive data off onto their USB devices.

Case Management software provider, Eclipse Legal Systems, has teamed up digital dictation workflow provider, BigHand.

Eclipse has long supported an “Open Systems Union” ethos with complementary third party providers – this latest move is designed to expand the functionality of Eclipse’s Proclaim® software to integrate the latest version (BigHand3) of BigHand’s award-winning digital dictation solution.

The two companies will work together to develop and implement integrated solutions at mutual clients.  Currently over 400 law firms globally use Bighand software while Eclipse have over 300 clients using their software in the UK.

Wake Smith, the Sheffield law firm that recently merged with Benson Clegg Solicitors, taking the number of employees to over 180, has commenced the roll-out of the WinScribe digital dictation system using the new Olympus DR-2000 handheld microphones. The solution is being deployed by SRC, the UK’s exclusive WinScribe Platinum Partner.
 
Wake Smith is the first law firm to select the new Olympus DR-2000 handheld microphones as its preferred input device. In May 2006, WinScribe announced that it had become the first digital dictation system to integrate with these new generation Olympus Directrec devices. Uniquely, this provides full control of the WinScribe interface from a handheld microphone without requiring any additional software or device drivers, making deployment simple.

The DR-2000 is a digital dictation device which is operated using a slide switch – a familiar interface for those who are used to analogue and top of the range digital machines.

Dell are recalling 4 million laptop batteries which have the potential to catch fire.

Click here to see one go up in flames at a Japense conference recently.

Seems this may reflect a wider problem with lithium-ion batteries.

From the Dell web site as follows:

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Dell has identified a potential issue associated with certain batteries sold with Dell Latitude™, Inspiron™, XPS™ and Dell Precision Mobile Workstation™ notebook computers. In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and other regulatory agencies, Dell is voluntarily recalling certain Dell-branded batteries with cells manufactured by Sony and offering free replacements for these batteries.  Under rare conditions, it is possible for these batteries to overheat, which could pose a risk of fire.

Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries:

• Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810
• Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705
• Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90
• XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

In addition, these batteries may have also been provided in response to service calls. The batteries were shipped to customers between April 1, 2004 and July 18, 2006. The words "DELL" and "Made in Japan" or "Made in China" or "Battery cell made in Japan, Assembled in China" are printed on the back of the batteries. If your battery does not reflect one of these markings it is not part of this recall, and you may exit the site.
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Although most of these batteries are believed to be in the USA, around one million are believed to be elsewhere.

Dell are offering a free replacement if you have one of these batteries.

Amongst firms and organisations which archive electronic copies of documents and who use proprietary formats to do so, there is concern over how easy it will be to open and read these documents again in many years time.

Given that most law firms use Microsoft Word and the popularity of Word one would expect support for it to be available for many years to come. However, there is no guarantee that Word or Microsoft will be around in 20, 30 or 50 years and given that Word uses a proprietary format to store documents, there is no guarantee that there will be software around to read these documents.

For example, in the 1980s there were a wide variety of other word processors in use some of which have now disappeared into oblivion. Firms with documents in these formats will have serious difficulty reading them if they are unable to obtain or run the original software.

To address these concerns and others arising from the proprietary nature of Microsoft Office documents, the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was established.

The ODF is an open document file format for saving and exchanging office documents. It was created by an industry consortium, is based on the XML format originally created for OpenOffice and is publicly accessible.

The ODF format was approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in May of this year.

Because the standard is public it can be used in any solution without royalties. It is the first editable document format to be approved by a recognised standards organisation.

The ISO recognition is likely to make this format very attractive to software developers. The ODF Alliance now has over 200 members including IBM and Sun.

Support is growing for the format with Belgium, Denmark and France governments voting to require open standards for the storage and exchange of documents. ODF is currently the only option for this.

In response to the pressure from ODF Microsoft have announced that they will work with partners to develop a "Translator" which will act as a means to save Word documents in to ODF format and to load ODF documents into Word. A prototype of this can already be downloaded with the full version expected with Office 2007 later this year/early next.

Microsoft still plan to retain their own proprietary formats which they believe offer advantages in terms of performance, rendering of documents and support for disabled users.

According to a report on the BBC website a security researcher has created a game of noughts and crosses for the popular Blackberry device which contains malicious code which turns the device into a backdoor into corporate networks to which the device is connected.

The author of the malicious code is planning to release it more widely later in the month.

The threat of malicious programs such as these can be minimised by not downloading software via email and/or ensuring that the device is locked down by the IT department to prevent users installing their own software.

Metastorm the leading workflow and process automation firm have released a new version of their product suit which integrates the technology acquired through the purchase of rival CommerceQuest.

The new business process management (BPM) software allows organisations to automate, control, and improve critical human and system-based business processes by creating a single process layer across multiple systems, databases, and people and closing the gaps that so often create process inefficiency.

The key change is the ability to integrate system based processes into the solution, with the product in the past having been focused on processes that are people centric (e.g. client/matter inception, conflict checking etc).

Google is now presenting people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute spyware or other harmful software.

Google, PC maker Lenovo and Sun set up the StopBadware initiative in January 2006 to identify dangerous software and the websites that try to trick people into installing these malicious programs.

More at StopBadware.org

Hummingbird Ltd, one of the leading providers of document management and content management systems to the legal profession has entered into an agreement under which it will be acquired by Canadian rival Open Text Corp.

The acquisition is subject to shareholder approval and some other conditions but is expected to be completed by early October. Full details can be found here.

Historically the Hummingbird/PC Docs software dominated the market for document management solutions within law firms. This changed during the last 6 years as iManage/Interwoven became an equally dominant player and appeared to have the edge until recently when Hummingbirds latest line of products seemed to be grabbing back some of the markets attention.

Open Text has always been a niche player with the legal sector having a relatively small number of installed sites compared to Interwoven and Hummingbird, particularly among the mid to large sized firms.

This is despite the fact that Open Text is generally regarded as having an innovative product set, the ability to deliver and a lower price tag than either Hummingbird or Interwoven. Many firms have put it on their short list only to go with one of the more established vendors in the sector at the end of the day.

With the recent consolidation in this sector and the likelihood of further changes over the next few years, choosing a document management system or content management solution for a law firm is not the same simple choice that it once was. I wider casting of the net and understanding of the changes afoot in this market place is now called for.

Nuance has released the latest version of its popular Dragon Naturally Speaking software claiming that it is the first speech recognition software to work out of the box without training.

However, the software still learns and improves over time.

Most law firms will be very skeptical about this claim if they have had experience of similar software in the past. As with most advances in speech recognition technology it will be another case of try it and see if works sufficiently well to meet your requirements.