nFlow have announced another specially designed licensing option for law firms of all sizes. The new option is designed to assist firms that have identified that they could benefit from a digital dictation solution but do not have the IT budget designated to do a full digital dictation deployment.

Firms can now rent the system over a 3 year period, avoiding an upfront capital expenditure. As well as delivering a method that is more sympathetic to the cash flow of a practice this option also lends itself to more favourable tax treatment than a straight capital purchase. At the end of the period, firms will have the additional option of purchasing nFlow digital dictation outright through one final additional months payment.

nFlow Sales & Marketing Director, Rob Lancashire commented, ‘We have been testing this licensing option for some time now and whilst it has not suited the way everyone would like to buy digital dictation it has provided a very useful option for a number of firms who spotted the competitive opportunity nFlow digital dictation could give them but had not put DD in their budget for this year.  It is well established that digital dictation can deliver significant costs savings for a practice so when coupled with the tax advantages and the minimal impact on cash flow a firm that takes up this option could quite easily be a lot better off over the 3 year period. I believe this makes the case for nFlow digital dictation even stronger.’

Open Text on Monday said it would offer law firms a content management system based entirely on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The new product, unveiled at the ILTA legal conference in Orlando, Fla., would combine Open Text's expertise in lifecycle management of legal documents with the collaboration and content management capabilities of SharePoint. Open Text currently sells its own product for the legal market called LegalKEY.

SharePoint is used by law firms for broadly used intranet, extranet and collaboration capabilities, while Open Text technologies have been tailored to specific law firm processes, Open Text officials said. Under the combined offering, SharePoint could become a firm's central content repository, and lawyers and staff could use its interface to access Open Text's practice-centric views of content and virtual file cabinets.

The integrated product is expected to help firms manage new business and potential conflicts of interest, establish ethical walls separating client cases, and provide records management and archiving that meets compliance requirements. In addition, users can perform federated searches across matters, and automatically assign metadata to allow correct classification of documents and pre-population of relevant content. The single point of content management through SharePoint also means that firms can apply retention schedules across repositories in a consistent and centralized manner.

Open Text two years ago launched an initiative to combine Microsoft productivity tools with its enterprise content management software and vertical-market expertise. Earlier this year, Open Text launched software integrated with SharePoint for managing U.S. Department of Defense-certified records. The company also launched a joint SharePoint-Open Text product that life sciences companies could use to manage documents that meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirements.

The latest integrated product is scheduled to be fully available to law firms by early next year. Pricing was not disclosed.

 nFlow, have opened an office in Glasgow to held enhance their existing presence north of the border.

With a dedicated Scottish Office in Glasgow they continue to build relationships with key groups including the Law Society of Scotland, an existing nFlow digital dictation software customer.

Currently nFlow are running a campaign offering members and firms of the Law Society of Scotland the
opportunity to invest in the nFlow digital dictation solution at a special 20% discounted rate.

Axxia have announced London Borough of Merton Legal Services has purchased Axxia DNA to provide a complete practice solution and to replace their incumbent time recording system. The decision will see Merton take on the prestigious position as a ‘centre of excellence’ for Axxia DNA for all the London Boroughs.

This move will see Merton work in partnership with Axxia to develop industry best practice.
The decision to select Axxia DNA followed a review process over an 8 month period. The criteria for selection centred around product functionality and company credentials with Axxia DNA, gaining support as a technically strong and flexible solution, predominantly a result of the underlying Workflow / Business Process Management system.

The 40 user Axxia DNA system incorporates all the functionality required by the practice including case
management, time recording, key performance indicators, conflict checking, Capella reports for management reporting and workflow and legal business process management. Additionally, Axxia DNA will integrate with existing systems including the Council financial system already in place. Having recently announced partnership with DocsCorp, Axxia now have the ability to provide pdfDocs, a feature Merton will be taking advantage of to deal with electronic case bundles.

With DNA Axxia have taken a big leap forward in terms of their offering in the practice and case management arenas. With its powerful graphical workflow module DNA competes with the likes of  Metastorm e-Works and FloSuite from Infograhpics, yet it also has the pedigree of being a fully featured legal accounting and case management system. It is one of the few systems on the market that offers the potential for law firms to automate (or partially automate where appropriate) virtually any process within the business, both legal processes and non-legal processes. Being able to do this with one system rather than multiple systems offers significant business advantages.

Although Axxia are well established and one of the main players in the legal software market their products have generally been seen as fairly conservative. This is no longer the case. DNA is a big leap forward and puts them at the forefront of the market, particularly for firms looking for a fully integrated solution. For any firm of 30+ users looking for a case/practice management system, DNA is a solution that should be investigated.

Case Management software specialist, Eclipse Legal Systems, has announced record results for its financial year 2006/7.

For the year ending 30th June 2007, Eclipse’s turnover hit £4.25 million – an increase of 33% over last year’s (2005/6) record high of £3.2 million. Pre-tax profit reached an all-time high of £1 million; double last year’s figure of £500,000.

This announcement comes at the end of a period which has seen unprecedented demand for the firm’s Proclaim® software solution. Eclipse’s Founder and Technical Director, Steve Ough, comments:

"The stability and resilience of Proclaim®, teamed with its ability to be rolled out in very short timescales, mean that we can simultaneously keep Support overheads low and expand our development R&D. Minimal wastage in providing the system to new clients allows us to maintain an impressively full order book with fast turnaround of implementations, ensuring that our turnover and profit trends remain very much on an upward path."

Highlights from the last 12 months include:

- Seventy-one (71) new client signings, ranging from new start-ups through to national heavyweight firms such as Blakemores, ASB aspire LLP, Fletchers Solicitors and Thomas Eggar

- Client referral and word-of-mouth accounting for almost 50% of these new sales

- Proclaim® user licence sales up by 60% on 2005/6’s figure

- An end-user count of around 7,200, representing over 350 individual firms

- Staff headcount reaching 60, with ongoing plans to further expand across all areas

Eclipse’s Sales Director, Russell Thomson, comments on the firm’s record trading year:

"The level of interest we have enjoyed over the last 12 months has been nothing short of phenomenal. Recent years have seen Eclipse become established as a major player in the Legal IT arena, fuelled by a pro-active approach to winning new business and a strong client care ethos. Our orderbook for 2007/8 is enviably strong, and we look forward to welcoming onboard many more new clients across all sectors. By this time next year, our end-user count will surpass 8,000."

Burness LLP, a leading Top-250* Scottish law firm, has completed its rollout of BigHand3 digital dictation workflow technology to 180 users across its Edinburgh and Glasgow offices.Interwoven Worksite 8 integration, a key factor in the decision to go with Bighand, will follow later as a separate phase.

Axxia have announced DocsCorp Partnership status, a strategic move by Axxia to extend the capabilities of
their Axxia DNA product.

DocsCorp is an innovative global software company that helps corporations, financial
institutions, governments and law firms create, manage and store business-critical documents and forms in
PDF—a format that is safe, secure and universal.

David Woolstencroft, DocsCorp Managing Director commented “We are pleased to welcome Axxia to the
DocsCorp partner community and are looking forward to them working as a reseller in the UK legal community.
pdfDocs is a proven solution and will be an excellent compliment to Axxia DNA.”

Axxia have been one of the leading PMS vendors to have partnered DocsCorp emphasising the approach Axxia
takes towards product strategy. “We are constantly monitoring the technology market so we are aware of the
latest technology developments. We look to identify niche products that compliment our solution. Furthermore
we want to ensure that we focus on developing new technology rather than re-inventing the wheel, as is the
case with DocsCorp,” said Doug McLachlan, Axxia Marketing Director.

The relationship adds a crucial product offering to the Axxia suite. pdfDocs is an affordable, integrated solution
that allows for the creation, management and secure control of PDF documents. Some of the key applications
for the solution are court bundling, editing, automatically emailing PDFs as secure documents and redaction.

As the relationship develops Axxia will look to expand their DocsCorp offering. This will include the newly-released
pdfDocs compareDocs product, which uses the world’s leading document comparison technology to efficiently,
effectively and accurately compare any two documents irrespective of document type.

Axxia have spent the last 3 years developing their Axxia DNA solution which they continue to enhance and
develop through partnerships and product development.

ISYS Search Software (www.isys-search.com), a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for business and government, have announced the development of a connector that enables advanced search support for Interwoven WorkSite Server.  Through this new capability, users can now incorporate Interwoven content in their document collections, all of which can be searched simultaneously via a common web-based interface, such as a corporate intranet.

 

With only a few clicks, administrators can install ISYS and configure it to index information from a variety of sources, including Interwoven WorkSite, while ensuring security policies remain enforced.  As a result, customers can now apply best-of-breed search across databases, file systems, websites and knowledge contained in Interwoven WorkSite. 

 

“Given our strong presence in government and legal markets, Interwoven is a critical tool for a large portion of our customers,” said Ian Davies, founder and managing director, ISYS Search Software.  “Together, ISYS and Interwoven offer a complete information access and collaboration solution that enables everything from rapid retrieval to sophisticated mining, analysis and discovery.”

 

ISYS searches WorkSite knowledge bases in concert with Active Directory user permissions to provide end-users with secure searches and ‘single sign-on’ capabilities. Only documents that users have permission to view are returned by ISYS searches, ensuring existing organizational security policies.

 

Additionally, ISYS’ Interwoven support offers enhanced metadata capabilities that extend beyond WorkSite’s 30 document property fields to include supplemental metadata.  ISYS complements Interwoven-specific functionality -- enabling the creation of indexes based on Search Folders -- while also ensuring that critical elements of the WorkSite system are adhered to, such as they system’s use of audit trails.  All of these capabilities are complemented by ISYS’ core features, including On-The-Fly Categorization of results, ISYS Entities detection, ISYS SearchTrends reporting, multiple query methods, and broad file format and language support.

 

Customers are already using the ISYS solution for Interwoven WorkSite.  Additional information regarding one such implementation can be found at:
http://www.isys-search.com/company/pressreleases/2007/careyolsen.html.