The Law Society Software Solutions Guide for 2007 is due out next week to coincide with the Legal IT Show in London.

While this guide is undoubtedly useful for many firms and the detailed analysis of the suppliers included is to be welcomed, readers should be aware that vendors have to pay a fee of £9000 for inclusion.

Many vendors estimate the total cost for inclusion is well in excess of this when the cost of time and effort spent attending and travelling to meetings and demos etc is also taken into account.

What this means in practice is that many suppliers, even large established suppliers, to not get included because they are not willing to stump up the money or spend time on the inclusion process. It also means that many of the smaller but perhaps more innovative suppliers do not get included because it is simply  uneconomic for them to go through the inclusion process.

A new service from www.sdlt.co.uk allows you to submit SDLT forms online and have them automatically validated. For £5/form you know that once submitted the form cannot be rejected.

The system works offline allowing you to prepare forms whether or not you have a current Internet connection. The system will store up the forms completed and then submit them when you go online.

The system will also product:


No other case management or other software is required to use the software although it can integrate with a number of popular case management system.

At Legal Tech New York LexisNexis have announced integration of CaseMap and Concordance with their Total Litigator Platform.

Both Case Map and Concordance were recognised as leading tools in own right before the acquisition by LexisNexis last year and both have a big and loyal user base in the USA. The products are less well known in the UK although some practices have been using the products for a number of years. Interest in CaseMap in particular has grown recently as it is a unique product which brings immediate benefits to litigators.

By seamlessly linking these key tools, litigators now have a single platform enabling them to research, analyse, plan and manage litigation more strategically and efficiently as well as very cost effectively.

Leading USA firm Foley & Lardner with more than 1,000 lawyers in 17 U.S. and two international offices, have selected LexisNexis to host their primary data center, using their own data center as back-up.

The LexisNexis Data Center in Dayton, Ohio is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world, serving businesses in over 100 countries and boasting greater than 99.99 percent availability.

Click here for more information.

This represents a further development in the "Total Practice Solutions" approach of LexisNexis in providing not just legal information and softwre applications/tool for lawyers and law firms but also providing an outsourced infrastructure through which to provide these and other services.

Last month Gartner, the leading analyst group scaled back estimates for the growth in IT budgets in 2007 compared to 2006.

While they originally expected IT budgets in 2007 to be on average 6% higher than 2006 this was scaled back to 2.8% indicating the IT spending this year is going to be tighter than expected.

In the professional services sector specifically the growth is expected to be 2.5%.

The highest level of growth is in the media sector where it is expected to be 6.9%.

Gartner puts this down to the rising cost of supporting other core business operations with little being left for IT innovation as a result.

For anyone interested in the results of the UK 2007 Legal Technology Awards held last night you can find the details on Charles Christians blog.

The results of the American Legal Technology News Awards will be announced on 29th January in New York. You can find the shortlist here.

Case Management software specialist, Eclipse Legal Systems, will be unveiling the latest incarnation of its Proclaim® system at the 2007 Legal IT event (stand 40, February 7th and 8th, Islington).

Proclaim® v3 has been re-engineered to provide a completely new user interface and Web Services compatibility as standard.  This Web Services functionality provides end-users with advanced development options for integration with business partners and third parties (case referrers, financial institutions, etc).  Building upon existing Proclaim® strengths such as instant document production, automated workflows, advanced reporting and fee earner / management information, v3 also provides an overall deeper integration between Case Management and Accounting functions – providing seamless and swift navigation of relevant Practice Management data.

New v3 productivity features include:


Further developments to screen, field and menu flexibility, allowing fee earners to tailor their own individual on-screen workspaces to a huge degree

Proclaim® v3 will commence rollout in early Q2 of 2007 and is free to all existing Proclaim® users, under their standard maintenance agreements.

LexisNexs Visualfiles (previously Solicitec) are launching a range of new and enhanced case management products at Legal IT 2007.

The most exciting of these is an enhanced range of case management products which operate within Microsoft Outlook. Based on the M2 matter management system introduced by Solitiec in 2005 the new system adds Case Plans to matters automatically according to the matter type. A case plan is a collection of extra database descriptions, documents, forms and business rules. A given matter can have many case plans
added to it.

Customers thereby get the benefits of generic matter management provided by the M2 application along with the benefits of matter and document automation provided by the case plans. All of this within an Outlook environment which is the place where most fee earners like to work.

At the show LexisNexis Visualfiles will also be launching:

The London Gazette, first established in 1665, can now accept information concerning legal notices direct from in XML format direct from case management and other legal systems.

The Gazette is encouraging solicitors to communicate electronically by reducing the cost of submissions. As from January 2nd 2007 solicitors could save £15 (plus VAT) by using electronic submission. This can be by web form, Word 2003 template or XML file  submission. However to use XML file submission your legal software system must have a compatible interface.

Currently Linetime are the only supplier know to have integrated their case management system with the Gazette.

The Gazette was first published in 1665 because of two momentous events: the Great Plague and the decision of King Charles II to remove his court to Oxford. The London, Edinburgh, and Belfast Gazettes are the official newspapers of record in the United Kingdom. Several legal notices, including insolvency notices, are required by law to be published in them.

Visitors to Legal IT 2007 will be able to see demonstrations of three new Linetime products as follows:

• Liberate Express – working within Microsoft Outlook, Express provides all the benefits of case management without the rigid approach of traditional procedure based systems

• Integrated Digital Dictation – Linetime has integrated the popular nFlow software within Liberate Express. The software is fully integrated into the Liberate Express document creation process as well as providing facilities to automate time recording for dictation as a work type

• HIPs Production – The Liberate Conveyancing system will allow users to develop their own HIPs package, irrespective of what the government finally decides should be included, as well as automating the whole HIP request process.

At the Legal IT Show 2007 in London next month DPS software will be demonstrating their latest software featureing XML document assembly and a new look client interface. This is a complete rewrite of the uer interface giving the an 'oulook' and Microsoft CRM look and feel to the products.

Also on show will be the latest version of our Team Talk Digital Dictation system with it's full telephony interface.

In conjunction with case management developer Linetime, digital dictation developer nFlow announces the launch of a joint solution.
 
The integration will enable seamless working practices for fee-earners, removing the need for multiple data entry and ensuring the process of document production is fast, easy and accurate. This key functionality will be demonstrated on Stand 19 and 50 at the upcoming Legal IT 2007 tradeshow at the Business Design Centre in London at the beginning of February.

The Legal IT show marks the beginning of an exciting new year for nFlow, with a record number of law firm clients and an unprecedented level of new product developments in the pipeline.  As one of the leading innovators in the market, a number of new features, available within the latest release of its digital dictation product, will be on demonstration at the show. These will include such things as nFlow’s pioneering advances in quick matter tagging of dictations.