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”.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

]]> http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=71 0 http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=72 http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=72#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 04:10:27 +0000 simon http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=72 Cisco boss John Chambers was in Sydney this week for CeBIT.  He said:       

]]> http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=72 0 http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=70 http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=70#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2007 03:23:53 +0000 simon http://www.quispiam.com/sinch/wordpress/?p=70 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.”

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.