In this round-up: a report on legal innovation, law library survey, enterprise RSS update, IT outsourcing, and EED udpates. 

Innovation in the Legal Market
Adam Smith, Esq. has an excellent blog post about innovation in the legal market. The Financial Times on “Legal Innovators 2006” has a good summary and analysis of an article by and awards from the FT for legal innovations in the UK.

Law Libraries
Law Librarians Look Beyond Books in the American Lawyer (July 2006) presents the results of ALM’s law librarian survey. If you thought law librarians were an endangered species, think again, with library functions, budgets, and billability all growing.

RSS
Over at LawLibTech, Cindy Chick has two good posts on enterprise RSS. In Newsgator – Deliver News to Your Enterprise (7/14/06), she describes developments in delivering information enterprise wide via RSS and a news aggregator. In RSS Feeds for Current Awareness, Cindy provides an update on legal publishers’ adoption of RSS for current awareness.

IT Outsourcing – Offshoring
The McKinsey Quarterly (July 2006), in Moving IT infrastructure labor offshore, discusses the theme that “offshoring of IT infrastructure—machines and networks and the people who manage them—has been relatively slow to develop. But this is changing as leaders show how to offshore it effectively and vendors step up to meet a growing opportunity.” This is important reading for BigLaw CIOs who want to stay current on technology offshoring trends.

E-Discovery (EED)
In December 2005 I posted about the problem of near duplicates in large document collections and suggested that Equivio, a then new software solution, was promising. Equivio continues to penetrate the EED market and has partnered with numerous e-discovery players. Lawyers and litigation support professionals facing reviews of large document sets should be sure that they have a good strategy to deal with near duplicates.

Are Litigators Ready for the New Meet-and-Confer Sessions? (NLJ, 7/25/06) has a good overview of the pending Federal discovery rules changes slated for December.

The Business Review of Albany, NY reports in Xerox finalizes Amici purchase; opens its litigation services division in Albany (7/28/06) that “Now that Xerox has completed its $174 million acquisition of Amici LLC of Albany, its new unit, Xerox Litigation Services will begin offering electronic discovery and records management products.” Xerox joins at least one other Fortune 500 company (EMC) as a player in the ever-growing EED space.

Does Your EDD Provider Make House Calls? in law.com (8/15/06) discusses the growing impact of EU privacy and company IP concerns on processing data in discovery.