Category: Law Departments / Client Service

InsideCounsel magazine (9/07) reports on its annual 10 most innovative law departments.   Once again, technology played a big or supporting role at several winners. Highlights from 2007’s Most Innovative Legal Departments (PDF) include: To address a shortage of IP lawyers, IBM‘s law department turned...

Legally solid contracts may not be good for the business.  That’s a conclusion in Best Practices: Assessing And Managing Legal Risk in the June 2007 newsletter of International Association for Contract and Commercial Management. The article cites studies suggesting that well-tuned legal contracts may not...

What’s better, a bigger pie or a bigger slice?  I am a legal technology consultant by profession but an economist at heart. One reason I did not practice law is a sense that too much is about slicing rather than growing the pie. Legal tech...

Corporate Counsel magazine named the General Electric law department as best of the year. Home-grown technology was a key factor the editors considered.  All Systems Go (Corporate Counsel, 4/18/07) reports that the GE law department has developed many interesting applications, including a web-based questionnaire to...

Blogs are now old hat. How many large law firms write blogs?  It turns out that not many. Joy London (of excited utterances) and I have compiled a directory of large US firm blogs. It includes only firm-branded blogs. It also includes large firms that...

Making lawyers more efficient means clients need to be tougher. I was therefore surprised to see one typically tough customer scale back on a recent innovation.  The headline in LegalWeek.com (2/15/07) says it all: GE to ditch e-tendering to ‘deepen relationships’ in Euro panel review....

Here’s a great illustration of the difference between human and technology failure.  A friend sent me the following e-mail auto-reply text from a lawyer: “Please note that due to the high volume of e-mails received, delays caused by internet service providers and other problems one...