In-House Counsel

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #93 ? additions to earlier posts

By Rees Morrison

Polar diagrams. Florence Nightingale used a polar diagram, similar to a pie chart, to depict illnesses and injuries, according to Gregory Berns, iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently (Harvard Bus. Press 2008) at 43. A polar diagram shows the magnitude of a quantity in several directions. A global law department might describe its dispersion of lawyers or legal spend with such a diagram (See my post of May 7, 2008: methods to portray data with 9 references and 22 cited in one of them.).

ASP ? SaaS. What I thought of as an ASP (Application Service Provider) is now sometimes referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS software is not on the client's server, and requires only a web browser, security clearance, and permission to access the website. That availability over the Internet is a benefit because a law department does not require any hardware and, whenever there is a product enhancement, it can be rolled out seamlessly without a need for the client ? or its hard-pressed IT department ? to do anything (See my post of March 26, 2006: IT departments and ASP?s in terms of support; Feb. 6, 2008: an ASP matter management system; April 26, 2006: IT referees the decision regarding ASP; July 5, 2006: ASP compliance systems; April 22, 2007: e-billing systems as ASP; and April 7, 2006: advantages of ASP e-billing in terms of data availability to vendors.).

Another matter management system, with e-billing. CSC Matter Management enables users to define templates, custom screens and data fields. CSC E-Billing is an optional module available within CSC Matter Management (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.).

XML for legal departments. It is rare to find a reference to XML, so I quote from a recent piece in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel by Jennifer Mailander. ?CSC [Corporation Service Company] is the leader in providing XML - Extensible Markup Language - to corporate law departments. The extensible piece is meant to describe the process that allows the user to define its own elements in helping information systems share data. This permits disparate IT solutions to talk to one another. Many of our clients already have a matter management system in place, and we are able to feed our service of process data, for example, into such a system via the XML stream. We also do this in feeding our e-billing data into a client's accounts payable system. (See my post of July 16, 2005: legal-XML compliant vendor that handles legal filings; April 5, 2007: Exari and XML compliance; and Dec. 14, 2008: XML tags in contract management software.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on February 25, 2009 (boomark / email).