In this Roundup: GCs not impressed with law firm IT; web site that aggregates legal technology software reviews; the demise of “command and control” in KM; legal blogging weak in the UK; Pfizer capped legal fees get it only partly right.
Inhouse Law Department Views of Law Firm Technology
Law department consultant Rees Morrison, in Usefulness of IT applications supplied by law firms, reports on a recently published survey of what inhouse counsel think of law firm IT. His aggregation of the results suggests that inhouse counsel views are significantly more negative than positive. (I do not have access to the Practical Law Company Law Department Quarterly that Morrison cites.)
Legal Software Reviews at LitiReviews
Spotted at Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites: LitiReviews is “the largest collection of free legal and litigation software reviews on the web. All reviews (100+) are full-text, and have been published in legal magazines, journals, websites and blogs. LitiReview links to copies of reviews available on the internet, or hosted by us at the author’s request.”
Knowledge Management
David Jabbari, Global Head of Knowledge Management, Allen & Overy LLP, reports in The End of ‘Command Control’ Approaches to Knowledge Management? (Law Practice Today, ABA, August 2008) on his firm’s adoption of wikis and “the demise of ‘command and control’ approaches to KM.”
Legal Blogging in the UK – Or Not
In general, I view the UK legal market as 5 to 10 years ahead of the US. Not so for lawyers blogging. I was surprised to learn in Legal blogs: isn’t it time British lawyers staked their claim in the blogosphere? (Times Online, 21 Aug 2008) that there are relatively few British law blogs.
Capped Fees, Innovation, and Legal Tech
Jordan Furlong, editor of CBA The National and blogger, writes an insightful post, Capped fees, limited innovation, about Pfizer retaining Jackson Lewis for all its labor law work. He observes that “while Pfizer is combining two innovations here, convergence and capped fees (well, UK law departments wouldn’t call law firm panels exactly innovative), it missed an opportunity to add a third when it retained the right to recoup Jackson Lewis’s unspent fees at the end of the year.” Too bad for legal technology: if Pfizer had structured this element of the deal differently, it might have encouraged better use of technology for efficiency.