Lawyers Workstation Conference

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”.

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.

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.