Legal Technology

Masters Conference Goes Wide

Brett Burney joined the Masters Conference in Washington, D.C., and found that it had more, better and faster technology than previous years and addressed risk management and security in addition to its usual laser focus on e-discovery. While there, Burney talked legal tech with Clearwell Systems (MOV, WMV), Nuix (MOV, WMV), Orange Legal Technologies (MOV, WMV), Wave Software (MOV, WMV), and iFramework (MOV, WMV).

The Deal on Digital Forensics and Data Security

By Ari Kaplan
Special to the Legal Technology Blog

I spoke with Robert Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of The Lorenzi Group, a digital forensics and data security consulting firm. We discussed the history of the company, the increased focus on digital forensics within the legal community, the potential for a national certification in this area, and the introduction of "holistic" software solutions.

Listen to our interview:

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Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
Ari Kaplan Advisors
(646) 641-0600

Follow Me on Twitter and Join My LinkedIn Group

Legal technology writer and author of the Amazon.com bestseller,The Opportunity Maker:  Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development(Thomson-West, 2008).

Using Technology to Uncover Hidden Revenue in Law Firms

Special to the Legal Technology Blog
By Todd Gerstein, CEO, Smart WebParts

While business development and rainmaking has always been the mainstay of stimulating revenue, there are two huge areas that many firms often overlook when trying to increase their revenue: accurate and complete time capture, and cost recovery, specifically for prints and scans.

Most law firms are continuously leaking revenue and no one really notices or takes the initiative to stop it. They leak revenue in two major ways: by not billing clients for time actually spent on client work; and by failing to recover costs effectively. Fortunately, technology can provide a solution to both of these problems. Read more.

Avvocating: Knowing Your Client's Business

By Mark S. Britton
Special to the Legal Technology Blog

Our Avvocating columns explore the intersection of business and law, typically within the lawyer’s own practice, but what about the intersection of the lawyer’s practice and his or her client’s business? Many lawyers will respond that they are "lawyers" and, as such, they don’t get involved with or try to understand their clients’ "businesses." I mean, if they loved business they would have become a businessperson, not a lawyer -- right?

Well, sort of, but mostly wrong. I have had many lawyers remind me that they are not businesspeople over the years, and I am always perplexed considering that most areas of the law impact business and commerce in some way. Corporate lawyers probably have the greatest impact; but divorce lawyers, estate planning lawyers, criminal lawyers, etc., are all constantly confronted with decisions that significantly impact their clients’ businesses.

One of my first learning experiences in this regard was in my earliest days at Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates). I found myself in a corporate partner’s office, Bob Jaffe, noticing on his desk the latest edition of a newspaper for the waste management industry. After exchanging the obligatory jokes, Bob told me that he represented a large waste management firm, Rabanco (now part of Allied Waste). Bob said, "You know why I read this? Because my clients expect me to know their industry. And even though I never thought I would be getting Waste Management Weekly [or whatever it was called], I read it religiously. It helps me help them." That conversation instilled in me a client-service value that I never forgot.

Once in-house, I came to appreciate that value even more. As general counsel of Expedia, I admired those lawyers who understood even the most basic levers of the Internet and travel businesses. General counsel are constantly trying to balance legal and business interests and, anytime outside counsel could help me in that balancing act by offering legal advice informed by the ramifications on our business, it was an invaluable thing.

Many lawyers will say that they have too many clients to understand all of their respective businesses. That is a load for the aforementioned waste management newsletter -- especially now that the Internet is at every diligent lawyer’s fingertips. Simply putting together industry-focused Google alerts will get you half-way there. If you then read a few industry blogs and sign up for an analyst newsletter, you are likely in good shape. Think of researching your client’s business as a retention-marketing expense.

A more legitimate excuse is that the lawyer has a high-volume practice that doesn’t lead to long-term client relationships. This makes some sense. In the higher-volume practices (e.g., DUI, personal injury, etc.), knowing your client’s business will not be as valuable. Still, it is important to ask in every case whether your client’s business interests are relevant. If they are, you need to understand how the case can impact those interests. For example, could pleading guilty to a traffic ticket or DUI cause extraordinary damage to a client because of their business? Does your plaintiff really want to take a position that could be used against them in their own business?

In the end, this all comes back to practice investment. If you have a valuable client, you need to repeatedly invest in her, him or it. The greater lifetime value of that client, the more investment is warranted. Could you continue to just be a “lawyer” and avoid all of this time-consuming "business" stuff? Maybe -- but why open the door for a competitor who is more interested in your client than you are? Hired guns come and go. Invested, business-sensitive counselors are worth their weight in gold.

Mark Britton is the founder and CEO of Avvo. He is a 17-year lawyer with deep experience in the legal and e-commerce industries. Mark is the former general counsel of Expedia.com and has worked as an attorney in large, medium and small law firms. In 2007, Mark was named one of Seattle’s "Top 25 Innovators" by Seattle Business Magazine. He is also a frequent commentator on financial, legal and other business issues, regularly appearing on programs such as ABC’s "Good Morning America," Fox Business’ "America’s Nightly Scoreboard," CNN "Money" and Dow Jones "MarketWatch."

SharePoint’s point

The point of SharePoint is to share information, not only across the SharePoint platform but also across different SharePoint systems and integrated applications or components. Toward communal sharing, a new technical working group ushered itself onto the scene at the recent Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Montreal, Canada: The SharePoint Interoperability Solution Architecture or SISA.

SISA aims to foster interoperability on the SharePoint platform and among SharePoint products with SISA-compliant products, which promise to exchange information, processes and tasks between two or more different SharePoint systems or components on a standard platform.

The founding members of the group are Danny Boulanger of Alcero, Susan Yee of Active Data Exchange, Larry D. Hunt of Integrated Digital Systems/ScanAmerica, Tony Lanni of Avepoint, Esa Tervo of Neoxen Systems and Mike Fitzmaurice of Nintex.

Bloggers of hazard

The FTC had bloggers worried the other day when the commission issued new guidelines for endorsements and testimonials in advertising, but it's a fact that the FTC is probably the least of a blogger's concern when civil and criminal liability can attach to posts.

Reverse DNS

As Donald Sutherland explained in "Kelly's Heroes," sometimes its good to go in reverse as fast or faster than you can go forward. And like tanks, that can be true for DNS.

DNS Made Easy, a managed DNS service provider, announced the release of a free Web-based tool to assist system and network administrators in configurating reverse DNS. This tool can be found at ReverseDNSTrace.com for free.

Creating Revenue Through Time Capture

By Ari Kaplan
Special to the Legal Technology Blog

I spoke with Todd Gerstein, co-founder and CEO of Smart WebParts, a company creating time capture and entry software, which released its flagship product, Smart Time, on September 15, 2009.  We discussed the genesis of the company, the timing of the release, and the way in which the company seeks to produce software that generates revenue for its users.

Listen to our interview:

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
Ari Kaplan Advisors
(646) 641-0600

Follow Me on Twitter and Join My LinkedIn Group

Legal technology writer and author of the Amazon.com bestseller,The Opportunity Maker:  Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development(Thomson-West, 2008).

Network computing forecast: partly cloudy

With cloud services popping up today faster than dot-com ASPs in the 1990s, it was only a matter of time before the various formations started spinning industry-specific clouds. For example, there is a Legal Cloud for disaster recover and business continuity services. It just licensed FalconStor software to help with that task.

I realize there are many legal-specific applications related to matter management and time and billing, but there are many applications that lawyers use that are not specific to law, such as backup, content management, business intelligence, etc. For general computing needs, your options for off-the-shelf and open source software are legion. And that will be true as computing needs are satisfied by the network and go into the clouds.

To choose a cloud service, the big questions are related to what you get, when you get it, and how do you get your data off of it when you need to.

Did the EU Do Microsoft a Favor?

To an outside observer, without more, the EU's decision that Microsoft enaged in monopoly abuse by tying Internet Explorer to Windows may seem absurd. Like a service tied to a monolithic kernel, a browser tied to an OS may offer the best integration and performance.

Divorce the two and you're likely to get less performance, but better OS security. And security may be the reason that the EU, indeed, helped Microsoft out in the EU -- by having Microsoft unbundle IE from Windows and offering a choice of browsers on installation.

By unbundling IE from Windows, Microsoft may benefit from a more secure OS if they design and relegate the browser to compartments operating separately from the OS. Also, an IE crash would be even more, less likely to crash the entire OS.

With todays dual and quad core systems, just how fast do you need your browser to go anyway? I for one, would opt for a more secure browsing experience and less performance unless you told me I had to do it on an 80486.