UK SET FOR BIGGEST LEGAL IT ORDER YET ?
The City law firm Linklaters is on the verge of placing what is believed to be the biggest single order seen to-date within the UK legal IT market. Legal Technology Insider sources suggest the firm has already exchanged letters of intent with the proposed supplier of its new practice management infrastructure. But, while it is no secret that Linklaters has for some time been planning to replace many of its current IT systems, what is surprising is the choice of supplier and the size of the budget set aside to implement the project.

Eschewing the usual legal PMS suspects - CMS, Elite, Keystone and its incumbent supplier ResSoft - Linklaters has settled on SAP, a systems house better known as a developer of ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems for the commercial market. Interestingly, the other name on the final shortlist was JD Edwards, another ERP supplier from outside the traditional legal systems market.

The budget reportedly set aside for the project is £18 million, which sounds huge until it is set in the context of the fact that large law firms typically spend 6 percent of their annual turnover on IT - and Linklaters last year had a turnover of in excess of £500 million. Linklaters decision to go the ERP route also lends some credence to the view that the big global law firms have outgrown conventional legal PMS products, which tend to be restricted to financial management, and now require systems that can help manage all their resources.
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DID KEYSTONE COPS START EALING COMEDY ?
Keystone Solutions has advised the London Stock Exchange that contract negotiations are underway with Clifford Chance and that the company has been selected as joint preferred supplier (with Oracle) for a new practice management system. No further details will be released until the deal is complete and a contract signed.

The news has not stopped Keystone's shares from bumping along near their 12 month low although it is unclear whether this is a result of the general depression in all TMT stocks, the aftermath of the WTC attack or reports that Linklaters will not be turning to Keystone for its new PMS.

The news also prompted speculation that Chris Hoad's recent resignation as general manager of CMS Europe was linked to CMS failing to win the Clifford Chance order. While it is true Hoad spent the last five years at Clifford Chance, latterly as head of financial systems, he only joined CMS in late June, by when it was already an open secret that Clifford Chance and Keystone were in talks. We suspect the timing was purely coincidental and that the official reason given for his departure - the difficulties of commuting daily from East Anglia to Ealing and HoadÕs desire to return to consulting in the City - is genuine. In the meantime perhaps CMS should consider reopening its office in the City of London
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LEGAL TECHIES WIN PRIZES
The Society for Computers & Law has launched its 2002 award for 'the most outstanding application of information technology to the law in the UK and Republic of Ireland'. The closing date for entries is 12 November and the winner will be announced in London on 21 January 2002. There is an online nomination form on the SCL web site.

FIRST STOP AIMS TO BE THE FIRST STOP
Gateley Wareing in Birmingham recently announced that in conjunction with its 'IT partner' - First Stop Computer Group - the firm would be rolling out the iManage content and document management system on a practice wide basis. Well we have heard of Gateley Wareing and are familiar with the iManage system but who are First Stop?

In fact the privately held company has been around since the mid 1980s acting as a reseller and systems integrator in the general business market - and in the process generating an enviable £24 million turnover - but it was only in the spring of 2000 that it made a concentrated move into the legal sector, when it acquired the Resolutions Systems business from ResSoft and recruited Paul Hoffbrand as its legal business manager.

Since then Surbiton based First Stop (020 8974 3545) has begun to carve itself a niche as a systems integrator and infrastructure solutions provider, in the JMC IT, MIL, Tikit and Ramesys mould, with a client list that includes Freshfields, Rowe & Maw, Mills & Reeve, Campbell Hooper, Lawrence Graham and Taylor Joynson Garrett.

Along with the iManage system, First Stop is also a reseller for Workshare's DeltaView redliner software but it is in the field of data storage and disaster recovery that the company believes it has the edge on its competitors.

As the distributor of products such as Network Appliance's NetApp Filer and KVault's Enterprise Vault, First Stop has been able to develop a range of solutions to meet modern network and data management problems. For example Gateley Wareing is also installing a NAS (network attached storage) system to provide, in the words of IT manager Dee Scarlett "fast, resilient and simple access to our documents". Other firms are running First Stop's REVS (Resilient Exchange Vault Service) to overcome some of the problems associated with relying on Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to handle large volumes of email traffic, including archiving and server crashes. www.firstop.co.uk
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BAILII TO REPORT ON STATUS
The British & Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) is holding a meeting in London tonight (10 October) to report on the latest progress of its "free the law initiative" to make primary legal materials more freely available both to lawyers and members of the public via the internet. It is now two years since the initiative was launched and while the cynics here on the Insider believe this is a well meaning but ultimately doomed venture - because it apparently defies all commercial reality - some credit must be given to the people who are putting a lot of energy into trying to make the project work. We will be reporting on the outcome of the meeting in the next issue. www.bailii.org
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THE LEGAL TECHNOLOGY JOBS BOARD
If you are a legal systems supplier or a law firm looking for IT staff, including positions in management, development, sales, support and training, you can post your vacancies free of charge on the Legal Technology Insider web site. Email job details to: news@legalnewsmedia.com
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ZED HOPING TO BRING 24/7 ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Of the suppliers exhibiting at the LegalTech London event later this month, Zed for Business (020 8606 6000) may have one of the more unusual names but it also has one of the more novel products. As a subsidiary of the Finnish telecoms group Sonera, the company has drawn on this background to develop a new managed service that can deliver real time information to fee earners, anywhere and at any time, via any WAP compatible device, including mobile phones and PDAs. The service also supports web mail delivery to browsers.

Zed's UK manager Robert Silver is keen to emphasise this is a managed service for businesses, as distinct from just another glorified text messaging service for consumers, and that in addition to delivering emails direct to a mobile phone, the service can also handle third party commercial applications, including calendars and contact databases. To this end Zed, which plans to focus on vertical markets including legal, has been piloting the service with at least four top 20 London firms over the past few months to determine which types of fee earner application could benefit from being wireless-enabled.

Zed for Business, who will be demonstrating the service on Stand 427 at LegalTech, has also appointed Tikit as a UK legal market reseller. The Insider understands Tikit is now investigating the viability of delivering access to the Carpe Diem time recording application via the Zed service. http://business.zed.com
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NO SURPRISES FROM TIKIT
The Tikit Group plc, which floated on the AIM market in June, has published its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2001. The results contain no big surprises with a turnover of £4.7 million (2000 - £4.9m) and operating profit of £460k (2000 - £500k) only marginally down on the previous year. The company also reports that levels of activity have exceeded initial expectations, with a good growth in higher margin and recurring revenue business and a strong balance sheet including a cash inflow of £0.72m from operating activities.

Despite concerns that the wider UK economy is heading into recession, Tikit's executive chairman Mike McGoun remains optimistic, commenting: "The pipeline of opportunities remains visible, though we are seeing some early signs of tightening in the market, in particular on third party software sales. Although there is a great deal of uncertainty in the economy, the larger UK law firms have shown great resilience in the past in maintaining their fee levels and continuing to invest in systems that improve productivity or provide competitive advantage and at this stage the board does not anticipate that the tightening of the market will have a significant effect on prospects for the second half."
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NEWS IN BRIEF

LATENT DMS MARKET WORTH £20 MILLION ?
Speaking at the company's recent value added reseller (VAR) conference Gordon Olson, the chairman of low cost document management systems developer Meticulus Solutions, said he believed the latent market for legal DMS software in the UK was worth at least £20 million in licence fees alone.

Olson said although traditional DMS products, such as PC Docs, were perceived as not affordable by most law firms, there was a growing recognition - among the so called late majority market - that document management was desirable as it could deliver productivity and quality management benefits, providing the price was right. Explaining the Meticulus decision to sell its systems indirectly via resellers, Olson said that as most of these firms rely heavily on 'trusted suppliers' of IT systems and support services, they are therefore more likely to buy a DMS product from the existing supplier of their accounts and office automation software than a specialist best of breed systems integrator.

Although Olson describes his company's Meticulist system as the "Model T Ford of the document management market" it is actually a sophisticated product that draws on the company's lengthy track record in this field, going back to the Kinesis system in the early 1990s. The system sells for around £350 a seat, including the "SQL Server 7 in a box" server side software and is fully integrated with the Windows desktop, with the 'Find' command launching all search functions.

Along with conventional reseller deals, Meticulus (01249 700050) is running a 'referring partner' scheme for organisations, such as scanning bureaux, who are in the document business and can generate sales leads but do not handle technology implementation projects.
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LEGAL TECH LONDON THREE WEEKS AWAY
The LegalTech London conference and exhibition opens its doors for business in Hall N6 at the Docklands ExCeL centre in three weeks' time - see admission details below. Having finally moved from the bunker environment of the Barbican, the event organisers have taken advantage of the new venue to expand the scale and scope of the show.

The free exhibition has stands from just about every supplier serving the UK legal IT market - in fact so many exhibitors will be present that the original floor plan has been redrawn to accomodate them. The Insider will report on the new product launches in its 21 November issue.

In addition the event also includes a comprehensive, and very reasonably priced, conference programme. This is split into three simultaneous tracks: strategy & technology, communications & technology, and administration. Topics covered in the first two tracks include: client extranets, online legal services, the use of XML in litigation, case management, online dealrooms and the creation of the paperless court. The administration track includes presentations by the BIALL law librarians group and the Institute of Legal Cashiers & Administrators (ILCA).

Although both days start with free breakfast briefings featuring major commentators, including Martin Telfer from Mallesons in Australia and Jay Jaffe from the USA, the conference timetable has been constructed to still give delegates plenty of time to visit the exhibition stands.

The opening hours for the free exhibition are 10:00am to 5:00pm (Wednesday) and 10:00am to 4:30pm (Thursday). The conference starts at 8:45am with the free breakfast briefings, followed by the pay-for sessions at 10.00am to 4:30pm. Admission is £140 (+ VAT) per session or you can buy a carnet ticket allowing an organisation to send delegates to a total of 20 sessions for £850 (+ VAT). www.imark.co.uk/legaltech
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EVENTS NEWS IN BRIEF

AVOIDING THE PYRAMIDS OF WORDPROCESSING PAIN
Jamie Wodetzki of SpeedLegal, the Australian supplier in which Wolters Kluwer/CCH now has a shareholding, was recently in the UK to give presentations on the company's XML based SmartPrecedent document assembly software.

So why use XML? According to Wodetzki, the key benefit is it allows content to be stored in a structured fashion, in a vendor neutral format that is not dependent on any underlying technology. Wodetzki compares this with the situation prevailing in the legal market since the 1980s where every change of wordprocessing platform - from Wang to WordPerfect to Word 6 to Word 97 - has also forced users to recompile their content and macros. A switch to XML, says Wodetzki, could avoid what he calls these "pyramids of pain". www.speedlegal.com
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BPM - THE NEXT NEW NEW THING ?
Its been a while since we have had a new craze in the legal IT market but we think we have just identified the next new best thing since sliced bread in the shape of business process management software. It even comes complete with a handy TLA (three letter acronym) namely BPM and already we are hearing the clatter of consultants' feet as they scramble to get on board this latest bandwagon.

So what is BPM? At the moment it appears to be little more than a new name for a workflow system and in fact at least one supplier has already rebranded its existing case management software with the new BPM monicker.

Of course there is a serious side to this in that for many years one of the holy grails of all legal software developers has been to devise workflow or matter management systems that could help improve fee earner productivity by automating those recurring aspects of day-to-day legal practice that do not lend themselves to the high volume, sausage machine approach of the traditional case management system. The question is: does BPM add anything new to this situation or is it just an excuse for a rebranding exercise, in much the same way that in the early 1990s the humble legal accounts package sprouted a few extra bells and whistles to become a practice management system.

Perhaps we are being unduly sceptical but it does also seem a convenient coincidence that BPM should come along just as the online legal services/e-commerce bubble has clearly burst and interest in the current fad for knowledge management systems has probably peaked. DLA's IT director Daniel Pollick once famously observed that the legal world was "blown along by more technology crazes than Toys 'R' Us". BPM looks to be the next one.
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COURT TV - LIVE AND KICKING AT THE HAGUE
Although the OJ Simpson trial is widely reckoned to have killed off any chance of the Lord Chancellor's Department ever approving the regular televising and broadcast of court proceedings in the UK, one place where court TV is still very much alive and kicking is within the armed fortress-like environs of the UN International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

The Insider recently had an opportunity to see this service in action and the contrast with OJ could not have been more striking. Instead of providing a macabre form of reality TV entertainment, the object of the exercise at The Hague is to ensure justice is clearly seen to be done - a key factor given the political controversy surrounding the trial of people like Slobodan Milosevic and the geographic remoteness of the court from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

Inevitably precautions must to be taken to protect the safety of witnesses, including distorting voices, blanking out faces and even introducing a 30 minute gap between filming and actual transmission as a final safeguard against witnesses being inadvertently identified.

Despite these restrictions, thanks to a battery of remote controlled but unobtrusive cameras in every court, the employment of producers from the TV industry and an investment in control rooms and mixing desks that would be the envy of many professional TV production companies, the way the proceedings are televised makes for an objective legal viewing experience that even most conservative English judges would find hard to criticise.

INTERNET NEWS IN BRIEF

HUMAN RIGHTS COURT BUYS TIKIT PORTAL
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has bought a range of document and knowledge management products and system development tools from Tikit that will provide the foundations for Phase II of the Court's existing Court Management Information System (CMIS).

In addition to supplying software, Tikit is also working with the ECHR on the development of Phase II. This will see CMIS integrated with an upgraded version of the Court's current public information system (HUDOC) to create an internet portal providing the 800 million members of the public within the Council of Europe's 43 member states with web access to an extensive database of information about the Court's activities. This will include the current progress of the thousands of cases commenced each year, through to judgments and the status of measures adopted by governments to implement the Court's judgments. www.echr.coe.int/
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IS MICROSOFT IIS SECURE ?
In the wake of a number of recent, well publicised virus security scares, including the Nimda (aka W32.Minda) and Code Red worms, IT analysts Gartner have issued a warning that they believe Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) is inherently flawed and that the only way to ensure ongoing network security is to dump IIS and replace it with alternative web server software from suppliers such as iPlanet and Apache.

Although Gartner's advice has been criticised on the grounds of practicality - IIS is used to power over eight million web sites worldwide - these latest scares have prompted Microsoft to release a free 'lock down wizard' security patch for IIS, NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Explorer. It is available on CD (if you have a user passport) and as a free download from the Microsoft web site.

McAfee, the well-known developer of anti-virus systems, has also launched its own solution, called SecureIIS. The company claims this offers a proactive approach that will offer protection against future intrusions by protecting against entire classes of hack attacks, rather than looking for specific and known attack signatures. www.microsoft.com/security
http://corporate.mcafee.com
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WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK
Following on from our story in the last issue about European law firms apparently being happy to work with English language legal software, the managing director of one UK systems supplier told the Insider this trend was most graphically demonstrated during the course of a recent product presentation he gave to a German law firm. When the question of language came up, the supplier was dumbfounded to hear the firm's managing partner say they had solved the problem by introducing a policy of sacking all members of staff who could not learn English.

Stephen Murphy of Hummingbird has a different perspective on this issue. He told the Insider it was a little galling to know his company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing foreign language versions of products like PC Docs, only to discover that most European firms only wanted the English version.
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THE INSIDER - SIX YEARS OLD TODAY
As Legal Technology Insider celebrates its sixth birthday this week, we dug out out our first issue to see which stories were making the headlines back in October 1995. Our lead story reported that Scotland's Dundas & Wilson (now part of the Anderson Legal network) had decided to replace its 130 users Windows for Workgroups peer-to-peer network but had opted for Novell NetWare 4.1 because it felt Windows NT "was not robust enough" for its needs.

Elsewhere, Berwin Leighton had just chosen Norwel to supply its new practice management system. By contrast earlier this year Berwin Leighton merged with another Nowel site - Paisner & Co - and switched to Elite. Legal aid specialist Fisher Meredith was singing the praises of its new Dart accounts system. Dart subsequently folded and the firm has since installed AIM's Evolution system. And, Sweet & Maxwell was in the final stages of beta testing a Windows 95 version of the White Book on CD-Rom.

We had a three partner Blackpool firm asking if it was time to migrate from a Uniplex wordprocessing system, on Unix, to WordPerfect running on Windows 95. And, we noted that a Dell Pentium 75, with 16Mb of RAM and an HP LaserJet, seemed excellent value for money at just £1650. For the same money today you could buy two Pentium 4s, each with 128Mb of RAM, huge hard disks, DVD drives and still have enough change leftover to buy a laser printer.
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LEGAL TECHNOLOGY EVENTS DIARY

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Publisher & Editor: Charles Christian