Ten days ago I wrote about some interesting articles. This summer is proving to have more than the usual number of useful legal technology articles, including an intriguing report in Information Week about e-mail visualization software that could help in e-discovery.
E-Discovery. Revealing E-Mail’s Secrets in Information Week’s August 1 issue describes a new visual analytic tool for e-mail from Spotfire. “Spotfire Inc. this week will introduce a tool for uncovering patterns and relationships in information extracted from E-mail messages that will be as useful for anti-terrorism efforts as it will be for analyzing business data.” The money quote for e-discovery, citing a senior manager of CIA-funded In-Q-Tel:
‘We identified Spotfire as a leader in the visualization.’ market, he says. That market is important because it’s a place where visualization hasn’t yet been used. ‘E-mail has become an increasing part of electronic discovery.’
At least as of the time of this post, I could not find reference to e-discovery on the Spotfire web site. Those of us with a history in litigation support know that many interesting discovery tools emerged from the intelligence world, so this bears watching.
In other news….
Online Legal Services. Spotted at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices: Why going online is better for everyone by Richard Susskind, describing a new online service by Eversheds that sets “the pace for the next generation of employment lawyers” by generating a range of documents. (The service is based on DealBuilder by Business Integrity – I was very impressed by this tool when I saw a demonstration of it recently. To call it just document assembly is probably too limiting.)
KM. Spotted at excited utterances: From laggard to leader? How the legal sector is finally embracing KM has interesting insights about KM at Baker McKenzie, Blake Cassels, and Freshfields.
Blogging. Spotted at Adam Smith, Esq.: Order From Chaos Via RSS (also from Information Week, August 1), a good overview of how corporations are using Really Simple Syndication (and a good follow-on to my recent Follow-up on Enterprise Blogging and RSS post).