Legal Commentary

Deadline Extended for LTN Awards Submissions

Posted on December 03, 2010
Good news: We are extending the deadline for entries to the juried 2010 LTN Awards to Monday, Dec. 13 (11:59 p.m. EST), to allow a bit more post-holiday time for folks to enter. It's a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on our community's top IT leaders and projects! Too often, these folks and projects are behind the curtain -- it's time to celebrate their successes...

Pick Your Poison

Posted on December 02, 2010
What's worse -- your pet project is killed via one loud elephant-like stomp or nibbled to death by ducks? Steven Levy, principal of Seattle's Lexician consultancy, says you can avoid both. Managing change is key, says Levy, who had a long stint at Microsoft heading its legal technology efforts...

Orbit One Ruling Challenges Montreal Pension

Posted on November 30, 2010
Mistakes Will Be Made: U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis IV, of the U.S. District Court, Southern District, New York, has issued an electronic data discovery ruling that is already the talk of the EDD community. In the November 19 ruling in Orbit One v...

Tick Tock!

Posted on November 29, 2010
Accolades from your peers not only help your own career, but reflect well on your law firm or law department. So here's an opportunity to spotlight your achievements: Submit a nomination for our eighth annual juried LTN Awards. Winners will be honored at LegalTech New York 2011...

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Thanks Giving

Posted on November 24, 2010
On behalf of the entire Law Technology News team, we wish you a healthy, peaceful, refreshing Thanksgiving holiday. And thanks to our wonderful legal technology community for your continued passion, drive, thoughtfulness, story ideas, feedback, compliments and gentle critiques, commitment to quality, pro bono work, and spirit...

Much ado about little?

Posted on November 23, 2010
Last spring, CBS News created quite the ruckus when it ran a story about used copiers that were, in its words, "digital time-bomb[s] packed with highly-personal or sensitive data." The blogosphere went just a bit bonkers, including yours truly, but Richard Melville, litigation support manager at Maynard Cooper & Gale, decided to run a few tests to separate "[t]he sensational from reality...

Darwin Watch: TR Acquires Pangea3

Posted on November 19, 2010
Thomson Reuters reports that it has acquired Pangea3, a legal process outsourcing provider that serves corporate law departments and law firms worldwide. As usual, the terms of the deal were not disclosed. With dual headquarters in Mumbai and New York, Pangea3 has 650 employees at its delivery centers in Mumbai and New Delhi...

Nirvana @ Georgetown

Posted on November 19, 2010
Thursday's opening sessions of the Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute were pure bliss for e-discovery professionals, featuring the top judges who are shaping the development of EDD with their landmark decisions. The opening keynote featured the Honorable James Holderman, chief judge of the U...

George's Town

Posted on November 18, 2010
I'm headed to D.C. to participate in the 7th annual Advanced E-Discovery Institute, Thursday and Friday at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., which has a reputation of drawing the creme de la creme of the magistrate judge crowd. We are all looking forward to hearing from the authors of so many opinions that have obsessed us during the last year...

Soothsayer Season

Posted on November 16, 2010
With the anticipated aroma of pumpkin and turkey already distracting everyone, and annoying Christmas advertising in full tilt on television, vendors are beginning the annual ritual of predicting the future. One of the first out of the gate is Mountain View, Calif...

Sneak Preview of Microsoft Lync

Posted on November 16, 2010
Microsoft will hold both a virtual and a bricks-and-mortar launch party Wednesday to introduce Microsoft Lync, the latest upgrade of its unified communications software. The company says the Lync line has been a hit with law firms, for its ability to track calls to reduce unbilled hours and lost revenue...

Copy Cat

Posted on November 15, 2010
Some of the most interesting technology toolseem to be emerging from the intellectual property battlefield. In the November issue of Law Technology News, consultant Michael Barr discusses how new technology can help legal professionals "automatically detect copying of copyrighted software source code, even if it came from open source packages...

Bench Press

Posted on November 12, 2010
Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie report that their "Judges Guide to Cost-Effective E-Discovery" is hot off the cyber-press, just in time for next week's Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute. Kershaw is president of the nonprofit eDiscovery Institute, the publisher of the handbook that is available online at www...

Channeling John Lennon

Posted on November 11, 2010
The word "revolutionary" is the 2010 buzzword of the year; about 95% of the press releases we receive at Law Technology News use the word to describe a company's new product, service, or version 6.725x maintenance upgrade of a legacy product. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one person who can use "revolutionary" with a straight face: Steve Jobs...

Just Do It - Reprise

Posted on November 10, 2010
Bad news arrives from our colleague Vivia Chen, via The Careerist blog, regarding the 2010 survey from the National Association of Women Lawyers, which documents absoluty no movement of women into equity partner posts ? it remains at 15%, the same rate it has been for the last five years...

Compliance Looms

Posted on November 08, 2010
MergerTech, a San Ramon, Calif.-based investment banking firm that targets small- and midsize technology companies, has established a new practice area dedicated to legal, compliance, and information management. "The abundance of investment capital and the rapid growth of legal technology software and service companies has created an environment of rapidly intensifying M&A transactions," says executive vice president Prashant Dubey, the leader of the new unit...

Help, Please!

Posted on November 08, 2010
Want to start an heated discussion? Just ask any lawyer how they feel about their firm's IT Help Desk. Or ask IT staff how they feel about the attorneys they serve. No question about it: It's hard to hire effective entry level IT staff. In CIO|Insight, Dan Resinger cites a York College of Pennsylvania survey of 520 HR professionals/hiring managers to see what they look for (beyond baseline tech skills)...

Darwin Watch

Posted on November 05, 2010
Huron Consulting Group has acquired London-based Trilantic International, which offers electronic data discovery technology to clients in Europe and the Middle East. Huron's flagship EDD software V3locity (pronounced velocity) offers processing, hosting, document review, production, and project management tools...

Frequent Flyer

Posted on November 04, 2010
SNR Denton (née Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Denton Wilde Sapte) has hired the vivacious Sally King as its new global chief operating officer. King, formerly a leader of ALM's Counsel Connect (the predecessor to Law.com), most recently served as COO for the Americas region at Clifford Chance...

Tornado Warning

Posted on November 03, 2010
Larry Bodine is screaming at the top of his lungs to alert lawyers -- especially small firm practitioners -- about the American Bar Association's Commission on Ethics 2020 Work Group's Issues Paper Concerning Lawyers' Use of Internet Based Client Development Tools...

Good omens?

Posted on November 02, 2010
First quarter results are out and Microsoft beat Wall Street predictions, with a net income rise of 16% to $5.4 billion (or 62 centers per share), reports The Associated Press. That figure excludes the impact of revenue deferrals last year. Its revenue jumped 25% to $16...

Law.com Re-Launches

Posted on November 01, 2010
Kudos to our colleagues at Law.com, who have just launched a major upgrade of ALM's Law.com website. The understated, fresh design sports a surprising hot pink and cool blue color palette. The upgrade adds many new features, including a "carousel" that rotates in the middle of the site to highlight top stories from ALM's roster of publications...

Finding Relativity

Posted on October 29, 2010
In LTN's October issue, Sean Doherty dives into kCura Relativity, web-based e-discovery software that "uses web forms to customize the user interface and configure workflows that offer to fulfill specific document requirements." Relativity helps users index, search, review, analyze, and code documents -- and then "produce responsive document sets that withhold privileged documents...

World Series "Advertising" Opportunities

Posted on October 28, 2010
Meg Charlton, daughter of my friends Jim and Barbara Charlton, is behind this hilarious World Series ad spoof. (Note, you probably have to see the real advertisement on the site first before the video runs, but it's worth the wait.) P.S. Yes, yes, my annual Final Report on the NYY season will appear shortly after the conclusion of the World Series...

Life Jacket, Please

Posted on October 28, 2010
The wake from Maryland's Chief Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm's September ruling in Victor Stanley II continues to generate nausea for defense lawyers and euphoria for plaintiffs attorneys. Craig Ball detailed the ruling in the October issue of Law Technology News, describing Grimm's fury at the "unrelentingly abusive antics" of Mark Pappas, the principal of the defendant company in the copyright dispute...

Sound the Trumpet!

Posted on October 27, 2010
Accolades from your peers not only help your own career, but reflect golden on your law firm and law department. So here's an opportunity to spotlight your achievements: submit a nomination for our eighth annual juried LTN Awards. Winners will be honored at LegalTech New York 2011...

Merging Compliance and EDD

Posted on October 26, 2010
More evidence that compliance, risk management, and e-discovery are overlapping: Iron Mountain has debuted its Enterprise Discovery Suite, which offers information governance and discovery capabilities. It includes four components: NearPoint, Connected Classify & Collect, eVantage, and Legal Review, all designed to help organizations collaborate, address investigation and litigation, and reduce cost, risk, and time...

No, Thanks

Posted on October 22, 2010
When Chris Leslie became general counsel at Hitachi Data Systems, he brought the mindset of Sun Microsystems, where he had served in senior legal positions for 11 years. Sun was aggressive about global compliance issues, particularly those addressing bribery and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act...

Addition by Subtraction

Posted on October 21, 2010
Adobe Acrobat X (aka 10) has been launched, with a significant revamp of the menu bar, cutting choices in half. Ernest Svenson, in his PDF for Lawyers blog, explains that the upgrade now offers "File, Edit, View, Window, and Help" options, jettisoning "Document, Comments, Forms, Tools, and Advanced" buttons...

Humans v. Machines

Posted on October 20, 2010
Our October LTN cover article "Crash or Soar?" has many folks talking about how much we can trust computers, or humans, when it comes to properly identifying relevant documents early in the electronic data discovery process. Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie, both involved with the eDiscovery Institute, argue that bringing computers to the party enhances everything from transparency, replicability, quality of results, to cost-reduction...

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