North West corporate law specialists Taylors solicitors have last
week purchased Seneca CM from emis intellectual technology.

Taylors is a progressive 6 partner commercial law firm based in the North West. It is recognised nationally for its Intellectual Property team’s groundbreaking work in copyright infringement disputes.

The procurement will cover usage by every one of the firm’s 42 staff and manage
activity from reception through to the accounts, marketing and personnel teams.

The firm will use the entirety of Seneca’s functionality which includes digital dictation
and accounting as part of the standard purchase price. The system will be used in both their Manchester and Blackburn offices. emis will also be ensuring that the system works with the firm’s existing Novell infrastructure and technologies creating a highly integrated environment.

Tony Catterall - Head of Intellectual Property says:

“Seneca will add a further competitive edge to the firm giving us greater document
control particularly in handling complex long running disputes where document
management and CRM functionality is critical. It will add value to both the firm and
more importantly our corporate clients for whom time is always of the essence in
high value transactions .”

Chris Spencer – Solicitor and Development Director for emis added:

“This is an indication of the flexibility and quality of Seneca CM. Last week we were
announcing our delight at winning an automation driven 16 user boutique firm. This
week we are talking about a client for whom no one matter is the same and where the
business drivers centre around the sort of functionality the profession once associated
with best of breed DMS systems. We’ve worked long and hard on Seneca CM to
ensure that it really does do everything and our strategy seems to being vindicated. “

Seneca CM provides case management, legal accounts, document management, CRM and digital dictation as a packaged solution. Well established in the health sector, they have been in the legal market since 1999.

Linetime has launched a range of added value products to compliment its award winning Liberate legal software system.

Bulk Conveyancing Client Verification

When engaged in bulk conveyancing and re-mortgaging work it is often extremely difficult and time consuming to accurately verify the identity of each client. The standards recommended by the Law Society, the legal requirements of The Proceeds of Crime Act and other related government legislation are exacting, especially when one considers that the work is being done remotely from the client. To help solve this problem Linetime has launched a solution based on the integration of a product known as CallML within its Liberate suite of legal software. The Liberate user can now contact CallML directly from their desktop requesting verification of the identity of one or more clients. CallML feeds the client details into their system and use over 16 different datasets to confirm or otherwise the client's identity. Once completed the results are emailed back to Liberate which automatically includes them within the client history file as an integral part of the firm's risk assessment and due diligence process.

Address verification

Another new added value product from Linetime is the integration of the AFD Postcode Validation system into Liberate.

The problem that many firms experience when taking in debt recovery cases, whether in bulk or individually, is that the address information is not always complete or indeed accurate to 'letterbox' level. If the debtor's address is not correct valuable time may be lost as letters go missing or get returned, increasing costs and reducing the likelihood of a positive outcome. The solution is to validate the address prior to commencing any proceedings or other related activity – this is precisely what the new Postcode Validation system does and it does it automatically from within Linetime's market leading debt recovery system Liberate DebtimeSQL.

Document management provider WorldDox and digital dictation provider Verdatum have announced a technology partnership which tightly integrates the companies products so that a fee earner can profile and manage their dictations from within the document management system.

With digital dictation becoming common place in law firms, many are looking at how they get the most from this technology.

Using it to streamline business processes and make workflows more efficient is a logical step and this often means integrating  digital dictation solutions with other systems in the firm.

Firms that are not looking at exploiting digital dictation in this way are missing significant opportunities for productivity and other money saving efficiencies.

For many digital dictation vendors this will be the way forward if they want to prosper in this market place. Standalone digitial dictation is simply missing the point.

More details here

Students at a law school in the States made history when they competed with law school teams on the other side of the world in the first international virtual moot competition.

William and Mary Law School joined four Australian law schools—University of Melbourne, Murdoch University, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Canberra—for the competition that took place through videoconferencing enabling students to get a feel for the latest court room technology.

More details here

Winscribe, one of the leading providers of digital dictation solutions for lawyers have announced integration with firms VoIP (Voice over IP) systems.

This has the potential to significantly reduce the costs associated with a digital dictation deployment by allowing firms to use their IP telephones or PC based soft-phones to make dictations rather than having to purchase hand held digital dictation devices or other microphones.

It can also reduce the telephony costs associated with dictations being sent back to the office on dial-up connections or dictated remotely using telephone dictation packages when lawyers are away from the office.

I suspect that some lawyers may be wary of using IP telephones or soft-phones for dictation, particularly if they are used to the more traditional digital dictation handsets. These tend to be purpose designed and user friendly for lawyers whereas IP telephones may lack some of these niceties. However, the cost savings from this type of integration are significant, not just in terms of reduced capital expenditure but also in terms of the reduced support costs which arise from having less hardware to support and an overall simpler solution to manage.

For firms with IP telephony in place or those looking at IP telephony this is a move to take note of.

Since installing BigHand Digital Dictation software, leading Legal 500 law firm George Davies has dramatically improved its ratios having recruited 12 fee earners whilst only taking on one additional secretary. Since the firm-wide roll out of the software a year ago ratios have improved from just over 1 fee earner to 1 secretary to nearly 4:1.

Not only has George Davies strengthened its fee earning capacity whilst minimising costly administrative overheads, it has increased the amount of work being produced and is turning it around more quickly than when the firm relied on old tape systems. The BigHand process of dictation and transcription has also brought the entire client billing cycle forward, thereby improving cash flow within the firm.

The system has actually proved most popular with George Davies secretaries as they can see exactly what dictations have been submitted, and by what day and time they need to be transcribed. Efficiency has improved to such an extent that secretaries are now asking for more work. Fee earners have also greatly benefited from the installation, as they can see exactly where their dictations are; which secretary is transcribing, and are getting work out faster as a result.

Case Management software specialist, Eclipse Legal Systems, has announced results for its financial year 2005-2006 with news that turnover and profit levels have reached record highs.

For the year ending June 2006, Eclipse recorded a turnover of £3.2 million with profits exceeding £1/2 million.  The firm now employs over 50 staff and boasts over 300 client firms (representing 6,000 individual users).  Recent client wins have encompassed a huge variety of organisations, with notable firms such as Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) investing in Eclipse’s Proclaim® Case Management software in readiness for the ‘post-Clementi’ legal environment proposed by the Legal Services Bill.

Eclipse is reporting over 25 new client signings during the summer months, encompassing, high-street firms, new start-ups and commercial organisations.  Examples include:

 Jacksons Solicitors (Macclesfield): high-street practice implementing a 20-user system
 Property Law (Woking): specialist start-up investing in a 15-user conveyancing system
 Portmans (Esher): new start-up firm investing in a departmental PI solution

Open Text, the content management vendor that recently acquired Hummingbird have announced that they are to cut 500 jobs and close a number of offices as they integrate the two companies and refocus their strategy.

More information at Information Week.

Open Text are expected to announce their new road map at the Live Link Up Conference in Arizona 13th-16th November. This will provide customers with more detailed information regarding their strategy for integrating the Hummingbird and Open Text products.

Early talk suggests that the Hummingbird products will be used as front-end tools linking to the Open Text back-end systems. Integration with Microsoft SharePoint is also planned.

Meanwhile IBM have completed their acquisition of FileNet in the last few days.

This makes IBM a very big and significant player in the enterprise content management market space.  Firms  looking for stability as well as a more complete content management offering combined with appropriate options for scalability and integration may be attracted to the IBM/Filenet offering as opposed to that offered by the smaller vendors such as Open Text.

Although Open Text and the other smaller vendors can compete on price, given the unstable nature of the content management market there is something to be said for putting your money into a company/solution that is unlikely to be the target of an imminent acquisition.

As discussed in my previous post Microsoft have now release Internet Explorer 7 and if you have automatic Windows updates switched on you will get it by default next month.

There is a lot of noise about IE7 on the Net but one of the best reviews I have seen can be found at www.computerworld.com

Although they recommend it as a no-brainer upgrade I would be more cautious, particularly if you have mission critical Internet/Intranet applications or any bespoke/customised browser based applications. The problems should be minimal but there have been reports of incompatibilities.

Thompson Elite have made a couple of new appointments to their executive team.

Legal Files have release a major new version of their case and matter management system based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and with tight integration to Microsoft Office. Although not very well known in the UK market, they have been significant players in the US market for 15-20 years and this product puts them at the forefront of case/matter management development.

The press release outlining the major new features follows:

Legal Files Software, Inc. today announced the general availability of MyLegalFiles 4.2, its web based case and matter management system for legal professionals. Considered the company’s most significant release to date, MyLegalFiles 4.2 includes several new features that were designed to increase staff productivity and automate business processes and reporting.

One of the most notable new features is the integration with the Microsoft Office suite of products. Users can now save e-mail, contacts, appointments, documents, spreadsheets and presentations to a case/matter stored in MyLegalFiles directly from the native MS Office application. The integration utilizes HTTP and XML technology that provides a much faster and more secure data transmission to the server over traditional FTP methods. Additionally, customers do not have to integrate directly with their Microsoft Exchange Server eliminating additional security and performance concerns.

The second major new feature of MyLegalFiles 4.2 is the Document Automation/Assembly component. Designed to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to create letters, contracts, court documents, or virtually any document that gets re-used time and again within a customer’s organization, Document Automation eliminates the need to copy and paste or re-type case/matter related information into standard documents. By using a web service built on Microsoft .NET technology, users simply select the document they need to create while working in the case and MyLegalFiles will automatically merge all case specific data into the document and deliver the generated document back to the user.

“This is the most significant release yet of our web-based product initiative,” according to Legal Files Software, Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Greg O’Connor. “We gave the development staff a very tall order to fill and they have definitely delivered. This new version virtually eliminates the functional differences between our traditional client/server and web product lines.”

MyLegalFiles 4.2 also includes enhanced Workflow functionality that automatically creates custom task lists, deadlines, schedules and alerts based on industry best practices or a customer’s internal procedures. Workflow provides customers with the assurance that activities are being completed on time, deadlines are being met, and their internal procedures are being followed. The automated alerts can proactively notify other parties to changes in a case’s status, or when a new case has been opened in the system.

Another important new feature to MyLegalFiles is the new advanced search and reports component. A simplified advanced search makes it extremely easy for non-technical end-users to create and save their own search criteria for flexible reporting from the system. A .NET based reporting service has also been created that allows users to schedule the execution and delivery of reports throughout the organization. User’s simply specify the report they wish to run, optionally specify a frequency such as daily, weekly, or monthly, and indicates the individuals that should receive the report output once it has been created. The N-tier architecture of MyLegalFiles allows the reporting service to be installed on a completely separate server to ensure overall system performance is not impacted in installations with high volumes of reports.

“We built the MyLegalFiles application with our largest customers in mind,” said Jon Stearns, Chief Technology Officer at Legal Files. “That meant that the system must be scalable to support thousands of concurrent users while providing web based functionality that is typically only found in desktop applications. The user sees very little difference running MyLegalFiles over a dial-up Internet connection versus their normal network connection.”

The MyLegalFiles application runs on a standard Microsoft IIS Web Server and does not require software to be installed on individual users’ workstations reducing the administrative cost of the system. The system does not rely on browser plug-ins, applets or ActiveX component, which dramatically increases the security and overall performance of the system. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption is fully supported for all components utilizing MyLegalFiles.

Orange suffered a major outage with their broadband service this week with many customers unable to access the Internet between Monday and Wednesday. For businesses that depend on the Internet this would have been a major problem.

When choosing a broadband service it pays to look at their reliability record and perhaps more importantly what others are saying about their reliability and customer service on the web. For example it appears that Orange took some time to acknowledge the problem and the scale of the problem. This is even worse than taking 3 days to fix it.

Very few firms can afford to be without email or general Internet access. For smaller firms I would recommend:

a) choose a provider with a very high level of reliability AND customer service
b) use surveys, Internet blogs and other sites to check what others are saying about them
c) make sure you have a redundent dial-up connection availalbe

Larger firms should have multiple connections to different providers and/or access to the Internet from different offices in their networks to eliminate such problems.