May 28th, 2007
For those seriously considering Outsourcing as a result of Anthony Townley’s talk should look at recent blog entries by Ron Friedman in his popular Strategic Legal Technology blog. His extensive posts were live from the Legal Industry Outsourcing Forum (May 23, 2007, NYC). Notes and comments were real time with minimal editing and posted as a session ends.
Blog topics included:
- The Future Of Legal Outsourcing
- Legal Outsourcing Return On Investment: the Myths, the Methods and the Means
- Contracting and Legal Issues: Navigating the Negotiation Process in Legal Outsourcing
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- Next Generation of Outsourcing: Offshoring High-Value Legal Services To India
- Outsourcing Law Firm Support Services
- Outsourcing Trends and Issues
Ron was a panelist for The World Is Flat: What You Need To Know About Effectively Outsourcing Legal Services. In his presentation, Legal Outsourcing - Overview, Opportunities, Issues, he suggested that outsourcing and offshoring is just another step on the delegation path. A co-panelist and recognised ethics expert, “explained that with appropriate supervision and disclosure, outsourcing and offshoring are ethically permissible”.
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May 22nd, 2007
Inform Solutions Pty Ltd, the makers of Precedents Conference sponsor Informs is rolling out a new website called FamilyCourtForms.com.au. It is a free DIY site that utilises their recently developed Informs’ BackOffice technology where consumers complete intelligent questionaires for free and have completed forms in either PDF or Word format emailed to them.
This adds to the growing trend towards consumers using the web for basic legal research ahead of selecting professional help. Opportunity for firms kick in when the consumer finds they require assistance or decide DIY isn’t for them. They can then call on one of the sponsoring firms for help. This means sponsoring firms will find themselves in the online loop without having to develop and market their own web systems.
With DIY sites like this (and others in the pipeline), smaller firms without the resources for developing online systems will increasingly find new leads and enquiries drying up.
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May 7th, 2007
Appropriately on World IP Day, Precedent Automation Conference speaker Noric Dilanchian recently produced the 100th post of his
Lightbulb law blog. His blogs are not one-liners, but are often short articles where thoughtful analysis abounds.
One of his most popular posts was “I’d like to thank my lawyer” — the story of how he convinced a client to not invest in a tax-driven commercialisation venture and how in appreciation the client introduced him to the glory of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz.
In the practical style of his “Kalashnokov precedents” described at the Conference, he stuck together two A3 sheets of paper. In his words:
“Onto the sheets I then added lines in various colours going up and down each side. I joined the entities with these colour lines to respectively illustrate the flow of legal rights, legal obligations, put and call options, and payments of advances and royalties. The graphic became and remains the most complex business structure I have ever drawn in my legal career. I’ve kept it as a historical memento and I use it as a training tool for young lawyers.
And then it suddenly hit me! The thought came quickly, though the reading and drawing had taken days.”
Again the value of the whole process of providing visual support. Ultimately, it serves to protect us from those who choose to hide behind complexity.
I pioneered the use of ‘interactive graphics’ in major prosecutions 15 years ago, as outlined in this ancient article. The importance of how and why visualisation should become part of routine legal analysis and documentation, and the clear explanation of both, has been emphasised by speakers such as Kate Greenwood, Michael Perkins, Tim van Gelder and Zoe England.
Courts, and clients need, and are now increasingly expecting more of it.
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May 4th, 2007
I have made a point of keeping a longstanding eye on Jamie’s excellent Pactum blog, I only recently noticed that since the Precedents Conference, the Exari guys have added a document assembly blog. In their words:
“For a while now we’ve been writing a blog called Pactum, in which we wax lyrical about contracts, agreements and all the fine print in between. Pactum deals mostly with news items (good and bad) which are relevant to people who spend their days writing, negotiating and managing contracts.
With the Engine Room, we’re taking a different approach. We’re blogging about a technology known as document assembly, with a particular (some might say shameless) focus on our own product, Exari.”
As the Conference audio attests, Jamie enjoys indulging in shameless focus on his product, but in a very enlightening way.
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May 4th, 2007
Tim van Gelder who wowed us with Rationale, has announced that version 1.3 has been released.
This version allows you to learn with integrated online exercises; share resources on the Rationale Wiki; and drag and drop files from the browser on to your workspace.
The Rationale Wiki has been launched since the Conference. It is where you can share Rationale-related stuff - ideas, maps, templates, plans. If you do have legal-specific material, please also let us know. The Wiki contains a case study showing how Rationale can be used in a simple legal matter involving GST HERE. A PDF of the Rationale map is HERE.
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May 4th, 2007
Cisco boss John Chambers was in Sydney this week for CeBIT. He said:
“I did a US$3.2 billion … acquisition (of web conferencing and collaboration service-provider WebEx) in eight days that would have taken 45 days before. …This time, we did it virtually in the data room. It wasn’t physical, it was virtual. We interfaced with investment bankers and others and announced it to their employees using web tools.
When we used to do acquisitions, we would have a data room piled high with paper, investment bankers, my top people, their top people and lawyers.”
It means that next year, instead of doing one or two takeovers, he is doing 15. While John seems bent on changing the world, he has built a legal team which is changing their environment. They are not shy about saying so when recruiting. Not some crusty old law journal for Cisco; instead Craig List.
“Would you like to work in a dynamic in-house legal department that is using technology to transform not just its own legal department but how law is practiced around the world?”
The results can be seen here and here. John Chambers also predicted that Singapore would be the first with networks with 10G at the core and 1GB of bandwidth at the desktop to facilitate video. Singapore has been working for some time on removing the legal system as a barrier to business, as I outlined here.The full story can found in The Australian.
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April 9th, 2007
Precedent Automation Conference speaker Marc Lauritsen is interviewed for Law Practice by Mark Tamminga who co-authored the ABA’s book “The Lawyer’s Guide to Extranets” with Doug Simpson who spoke at our recent Online Legal Services Conference. One of Marc’s interests is Artifical Intelligience (AI) which is “quietly showing up in commercial products.”
As to what will soon emerge from obscurity to play a role in law practice, he said:
- e-lawyering - the delivery of legal services over the Web (He co-chairs the ABA’s eLawyering Task Force with Richard Granat);
- “lightweight, yellow-pad-like devices will … emerge before long and reshape our legal computing behaviour” (Lawyers Worskstation Conference speaker, the TabletLawyer would agree);
- “intelligence augmentation” (IA)–a catch-phrase for methods that use people in large numbers to perform tasks that computers are’t good at yet, like recognizing pictures and answering questions in plain English.
He went on to say that “Maybe we’ll pay hordes of lawyers in the developing world a fee for spotting arguments in draft briefs that fail the laugh test.”
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March 26th, 2007
Tim, recently did a CLE session with a large Oz firm. His blog lists some of the benefits for lawyers of mapping arguments. These benefits touch up issues which include quality, efficiency, resoning skills and communication. A comment by Ed Darrell adds a risk managment concern of the lawyer being hit by a bus taking all their arguments with them in their head. See HERE Tim is speaking at the Lawyers Workstation day which is all about smarter lawyers.
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March 7th, 2007
Canadian legal computing pioneer, Doug Simpson has launched a new business (BackDraft Systems) to provide consulting services and software tools relating to the development of legal practice systems. He is developing a set of tools called BackDraft that will assist developers in rapidly developing and deploying systems. These will be used to complement existing document assembly systems such as HotDocs.
He also recently announced an affliation with Capstone Systems, a world leader in legal practice system development. Captstone President, Marc Lauritsen spoke at the 2006 Precedent Automation Conference.
Doug is speaking on both March Conference days.
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March 7th, 2007
Stanton has become increasingly aware of the need for a re-think in the process flows that underpin technological systems. Consequently, he has also founded Biopod, which is in the process of developing innovative work stations and systems to change the way we interact with our technology.
Whilst enormous resources continue to be poured into every-increasing advancements in our office tools, scant attention has been paid to the need to change office arrangements to suit these new ways of working.
In fact, not much has changed in relation to the physical office environment since the days of typewriters. ?Most of us still sit at a square desk, perched on an upright chair. We have given no thought to the need for a new process flow to suit our changed work habits.
The cost of these oversights is enormous not only to the bottom line, but to the health and well-being of those who work in these ill-conceived work spaces.? A lawyer’s workstation should be much more than software. Hence, Stanton will be speaking on the 30th March.
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