In this Roundup: New York Times article on high-end jobs flowing to India; Defense Department using Endecca faceted search; and Morrison Foerster being “green” in its information technology.
Outsourcing
India’s Edge Goes Beyond Outsourcing (NY Times, 4/4/07) reports that “increasingly the jobs of Western white-collar elites in fields as diverse as investment banking, aircraft engineering and pharmaceutical research have begun flowing to India and a few other developing countries… As Indian back offices become more sophisticated, Western companies are finding that large parts of their work, even high-end tasks, can also be done from India.” The article does not mention lawyers (or legal technology consultants for that matter!), but the implications are clear. Beyond tapping Indian talent, companies increasingly see India as a huge market for their products and services, which also drives the move there. In my view, that would be true for lawyers but for restrictive rules in India.
Concept Searching
I’ve been involved with full-text and concept search for over two decades. Most of the interesting software comes out of the defense and intelligence sector. So it was interesting to read that the Defense Intelligence Agency is using “Endeca Technologies’ Information Access Platform to search 20 sources of intelligence gathered by agents in the field. Weeks from now, the search engine’s reach will be extended to intelligence gathered through the interception of radio and other signals, news feeds such as Reuters, and “message traffic” from the State Department, such as e-mail, instant messaging, and file transfers.” Intelligence Agency Boosts Search Capability (Information Week, 3/26/07). DIA is particularly interested in faceted search.
Update (4/24/07) – An Endeca press release (3/14) reports “LexisNexis has selected the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) to power the legal business development solution”
Greening IT
MoFo IT Gets Its Green On (Law Tech News, 4/4/07) describes several steps taken by IT at Morrison & Foerster to reduce energy consumption, including replacing CRTs with flat screen monitors, server virtualization, and recycling. I hope that the units the firm is buying have a power saver mode. It has always driven me nuts to walk around an office seeing numerous CRTs left turned on, a double waste, consuming electricity plus extra AC to counteract the heat.