Headlines

Cleansing period at Hummingbird
In an interview with the Insider, Mark Portu, the vice president of Open Text Legal Solutions (which has taken over the old Hummingbird Legal division) said the Hummingbird DMS and LegalKey records management business would continue to be a core part of the company as it was Open Text’s strategy to “acquire vertical domain expertise in markets it intended to dominate”. He added that although the brand names had changed (for example, the Hummingbird Enterprise DM product is now called Open Text Livelink eDOCS DM) Open Text was “putting its weight behind a major push into the legal market”.

At the time of writing, most of Hummingbird UK’s Legal staff, including Andy Eden, Chris Giles, Ben Mitchell and Lisa Ingleby, are still with the company however we hear there are a lot of CVs in circulation. Departures include the joint founders Barry Litwin and Fred Sorkin, plus Legal Key founder Yuri Frayman, European VP Tony Heywood and Iain Jones from European sales. Mark Portu said there would “continue to be headcount changes” as Open Text was going through “a period of corporate cleansing to eliminate some inefficiency in Hummingbird’s sales and marketing”. On a global level Open Text expects to shed 500 staff (about 15% of its workforce). The company will be unveiling its product roadmap for Hummingbird at the Livelink annual user conference in Phoenix next week.

• After evaluating an option to upgrade its Hummingbird DMS, Kendall Freeman has decided to switch to the rival Interwoven WorkSite system. Phoenix Business Solutions are helping with the implementation project.
 
Don't cry for me Cryoserver
Cryoserver Ltd, a UK email archiving system developer went into liquidation at the end of last week with staff reportedly clearing out their London offices on Friday. The company claimed to have a number of law firms using the system – according to Insider records the most recent order was from Taylor Wessing in October 2005 – and Tikit also became a distributor. The last available accounts, for the year ending April 2005, showed a £368,672 loss. The liquidation is being handled by Stonham & Co.

Eversheds stick with Linetime for debt
Eversheds’ Leeds-based unsecured recoveries division is to upgrade its existing 150+ user debt recovery system to Linetime’s Debtime SQL software. The firm, which has been running Linetime software for over 10 years, will also be installing a number of Linetime’s add-on modules. Commenting on the deal, Eversheds’ recoveries manager Ian Torkington said the reason for staying with Linetime was down to a number of factors including the firm’s previous experiences of working with Linetime. “It’s easy to forget about the fact that, irrespective of how technically efficient a system is, it is the personal and business relationships that often make the difference.”

Boom time for Eclipse
Eclipse Legal Systems is reporting its best results ever, with turnover for the 2005/06 trading year at £3.2 million and profits exceeding £500k. The firm’s marketing manager Darren Gower said “whilst many legal IT providers are still struggling to match the performances of their heyday, we have experienced unswerving and ever increasing demand for our Proclaim case management system.” Currently over 300 firms now run Eclipse software.

Growing demand for matter centric systems
The demand for matter centric systems is increasing with Phoenix Business Solutions, which has already undertaken similar projects for five firms, winning three more orders to implement Interwoven’s WorkSite Matter Centric system. The wins were at Cobbetts, Edwin Coe and Osborne Clarke, the latter’s head of IT Nathan Clarke commenting that “the implementation is firmly focused on delivering a complete electronic matter file, shifting the emphasis away from paper-based files and significantly enhancing the distribution of knowledge content”. Roger Pickett of Phoenix believes firms see these projects are “the first real step towards utilising data from their practice management systems to good effect” and the start of seriously thinking about matter lifecycle from inception to destruction. Phoenix will be working with users on PMS/WorkSite projects over the coming months.

• In a related development, Norton Rose won first place at Interwoven’s recent European awards for the best matter centric project designs. You can find full details on the Insider website on the know-how resources page.
www.legaltechnology.com/casestudies.htm#records

Korbitec give up the GhostFill
The shake-out in the legal IT market continues with Korbitec, the developers of the GhostFill document assembly system, the latest departure. At the end of last month Korbitec announced that in order to have sufficient resources to support its own content based legal applications in South Africa and North America, the company would no longer actively sell GhostFill in the generic document assembly market and ‘did not envisage releasing a successor to GhostFill 5 in the retail market’.

Axxia interface - there ia an alternative
One of the better kept secrets of the legal IT world is Office Practice from the Andrew Simmans consultancy (01403 265607). Originally developed in conjunction with ASB Law and Morton Fraser to complement Axxia’s case management system, it is now run by nearly 2000 users in seven large firms. Simmans says the system began life as a way to provide a consistent filing approach across firms using Axxia case management, so both case and non-case users (typically using Microsoft Word) could store and retrieve documents at one single, common location.

Since then its role has expanded and it has become popular with users wanting an alternative to the Axxia interface (which requires everything to be done from within the Axxia system) because they would prefer to spend their time in Word or Outlook. Using Office Practice all documents can now be stored in the same place – whether case generated, emails, Word documents or any other documents – and users can open, update or create documents from within Outlook or Microsoft Office. The most recent enhancement is QuickView Plus, which gives users the ability to quickly preview documents, where they need to check several documents with similar titles to find the correct one.
www.simmans.com

Linklaters outsource to Perot
Linklaters is to outsource some of its IT development work to Perot Systems. The outsourcing deal will see Perot working on specific projects – the first will involve KM systems – thereby removing the need for the firm to recruit and train staff for ad-hoc assignments.

Cripps roll out converged IP
Cripps Harries Hall has rolled out a ‘converged IP’ project, in conjunction with network integrators Scalable Networks (01628 852500), that replaces the firm’s old telephony system. Head of IT Mike Burton (who will be talking about the project at a breakfast briefing Scalable is holding at One Aldwych on 30th November – full details on the web) said business drivers included improving personal response to client calls and providing better access to client information on the road to remove ‘dead time’.
www.snplc.com/legal

Calvis to increase legal focus
Anne Coventry, most recently working as a business analyst at Farrer & Co and Kendall Freeman, has joined Calvis as a managing consultant. Her appointment coincides with the decision by Calvis to expand its legal sector activities into CRM and document management consultancy work. Calvis say they “don’t see themselves as a competitor of Tikit but more of an alternative”.

G3 acquired by FTI Consulting
UK litigation support consultancy G3 has been acquired by the US-based FTI Consulting group for approximately $2.5 million in a combination of cash and shares. For the past six years G3 has been the primary UK supplier of the Ringtail Legal product range (Ringtail is now also part of FTI group) as well as providing associated consultancy, ASP and e-disclosure services. G3’s three directors (Terry Dickinson, Nick Athanasi and Andrew Kennell) are staying with the company.

E-disclosure will save money in fraud case
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has awarded litigation support consultancy Legal Inc a contract to provide e-disclosure services in one of the SFO’s largest cases to-date. The case (R-v-Denis O’Neill) is the result of an investigation – called Operation Holbein – into allegations of dishonest price fixing of certain generic drugs by nine company executives and five pharmaceutical companies to defraud the NHS of millions of pounds. The accused all deny the charges.

On behalf of the SFO, Legal Inc created a managed disclosure suite in which the prosecution’s disclosed material – normally disclosed to the defence by inspection of volumes of documents – can be viewed and analysed online by defence lawyers in a secure and independent environment. Legal Inc’s contract covers the design, management and implementation of the processes and workflow of the systems, to ensure that accuracy of data entry, ease of searching and analysis benefits all parties. According to Legal Inc director Lisa Burton, e-disclosure should save the taxpayer a significant sum of money “we estimate for Operation Holbein that a conventional disclosure of material on paper would have cost in excess of £2.5 million whereas electronic disclosure will cost about £1.7 million across three years.”

DocsCorp sign up Phoenix
Phoenix Business Solutions has signed an OEM deal with DocsCorp, developers of the Adobe Acrobat alternative pdfDocs, that will see Phoenix using DocsCorp products within their Interwoven WorkSite CD bible tool. The new version will be launched in the New Year.
• Briony Mackenzie has joined the sales & marketing team at Phoenix from Active Navigation.

Philips brainstorm into the future
With Philips next year celebrating 50 years in the dictation systems business, earlier this year the company’s Vienna based product development team hosted a brainstorming session for European law firms to consider what they wanted to see in dictation systems in the year 2010. The top two requirements were reliability and mobility, whilst the least interest shown was for speech recognition.

Global business development director (in effect the head of R&D) Manfred Horndl said there were a number of ideas to come out of the brainstorming session that would be followed through into production in the months to come. One technology not to make the final cut however is wireless connectivity, whether via Bluetooth or wi-fi. Horndl told the Insider that although Philips had been working with wireless since 1999, the current view was the theoretical benefits were still outweighed by the practical limitations. These include increased power consumption and the impact on battery life, increased cost and the fact the pairing/connection process for wireless (particularly for lawyers – Ed) takes far longer than the time needed to transfer dictation files via a cable connection.

• Industry estimates suggest just 25% of dictation users have switched to digital, the rest still use analogue tape. In an attempt to tip the balance Philips has launched an RoI calculator – a spreadsheet macro that takes real data from a law firm to demonstrate the savings (including the repayment time in weeks) that can be made by switching from tape to digital technology. Horndl also believes the software supplied out of the box by Philips will address the needs of the average law firm as it now offers “about 80% of the functionality of workflow systems”.

Olswang go DDS with Bighand
Olswang has selected Bighand as its preferred supplier for a digital dictation workflow management system. Bighand was selected on the basis of technical and user feedback and will be rolled out on a firmwide basis over the next six months. IT director Clive Knott said the firm carried out an extensive trial of two systems (SRC/Winscribe and Bighand) said staff found “the Bighand system interface was easier to use and, more importantly, the playback of recording on Bighand was superior quality, an important factor for us as our secretaries deal with an enormous amount of dictation here. Price-wise SRC was cheaper but we felt it was worth paying the extra for these benefits.”
• In other Bighand news, Manchester firm George Davies reports that since installing Bighand 12 months ago, the firm has been able to improve its fee earner to secretary ratio from 1:1 to 4:1.

Insider poll: how big is your email in-box
Last time we asked whether you were a hoarder or a deleter when it came to managing the number of email messages in your in-box.

When asked how quickly you deal with a new message, 64% of you said you try to read, answer and file or delete it as soon as possible, 4% said within an hour, 14% said by the end of the working day, 4% said by the end of the week, and 14% said they hoped to do it someday soon. Next, we asked how many unread emails would typically still be found in your in-box at the end of the working day. This time 64% (we suspect the same 64%) said the box would be empty, 28% said between
1-to-10 messages, and 7% said there would be more than 50 unread messages.

When however it came to messages that had been read, then the results suggest there are far more hoarders than deleters in the legal IT world. A mere 7% said there would be zero messages left in the in-box, 21% said on average between 1 and 25 messages, 29% said more than 25 but less than 100, leaving 43% with more than 100 read messages left in the in-box. Before you get too complacent we need to look at those with more than 100+ messages in a little more detail. Looking at the survey results as a whole, 21% admitted to having more than 1000 messages in their in-box and 4% confessed to having more than 5000!

This month our focus is on buzzword bingo – have you even heard of some of the jargon now widely being used (matter centricity, virtualisation etc) never mind whether you understand what it means? The link to the survey form can be found on the top right of the Insider website and, as ever, all responses are anonymous.

Running for charity in NYC
Catherine Birkett of Laserform, now part of the CS Group, spent last Sunday in New York taking part in NYC’s annual marathon, where she was running to raise money for Barnados. Vin Muria. the CS Group’s chief executive said the company is “very supportive of all our staff and like to encourage their charitable endeavours”. Muria herself has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for charity.

Blog on for news
For the latest legal IT stories and background news in depth visit the Insider’s blog – The Orange Rag. You can also subscribe to it via an RSS feed.
www.theorangerag.com

Vital statistics

• Zero – the number of firms attending a recent legal IT conference who said they planned to install Microsoft Vista in 2007.

• One – the number of firms attending a recent legal IT conference who said they were upgrading to Microsoft XP in 2007.

• 44% – the number of UK households who still don’t have any internet access. Approximately 70% of these ‘refuseniks’ said they didn’t think the internet was important and thought it highly unlikely they would ever go online.

10 years ago today...
In November 1996 DJ Freeman became the second UK firm to order the Keystone practice management system. Eversheds had just placed what was then the UK’s largest ever order for a legal software system – the firm was spending £2 million on a Unix-based Elite PMS. And Hexar and Kommunicate were engaged in a bitter marketing battle over who sold the better fax management system.    
 
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News in brief

Two more wins for Emis IT
Emis IT has won two more orders for its Seneca CM practice management system. They were Richards Solicitors in Edgware and 42-user Taylors, who have offices in Manchester and Blackburn.

Napthens standardise on SOS
Following its recent merger with Roscoes in the North-West, Preston-based Napthens has opted to standardise on SOS for its practice management system. Napthens already used SOS whereas the smaller Roscoes ran an Axxia system.

Lexis launch LawLeader for smaller firms
LexisNexis Butterworths has launched LawLeader, a new, web-based current awareness service for sole practitioners, small-to-midsize firms, barristers, inhouse council and local government lawyers that provides the latest news of legal current affairs, as well as the most important and relevant legal updates through a single access point. The service covers 8 practice areas including employment, crime, civil procedure and professional indemnity.

Watson Burton lock-down with Sanctuary
Watson Burton has selected SecureWave’s Sanctuary Device Control to provide the firm’s PCs with end-point port and media security and lock-down. Sanctuary allows administrators to control the use of CDs, USB memory sticks, Firewire, WiFi and Bluetooth devices remotely from a central terminal via Microsoft Active Directory.
www.securewave.com

Two councils go with Tricostar
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council and Suffolk County Council have both ordered Tricostar Legal case management systems. Although Doncaster previously ran Tricostar’s older Timebase product, the authority looked at a variety of other systems before picking Tricostar Legal, which is based on the Sage CRM product. Suffolk’s legal services will use Tricostar to work towards the government’s Gershon agenda, which is all about councils identifying and delivering efficiencies in service provision.
www.tricostar.com

Aderant introduces portal solution
Aderant has announced the immediate availability of a new Microsoft SharePoint based system. Called Expert Portal and built on Handshake Software technology, it enables firms to quickly expose and publish realtime data from various business systems, including client, matter, financial and other information, to fee earners, decision makers and even clients through a SharePoint portal.

Easy Convey beefs up offerings
Conveyancing case management specialist Easy Convey has beefed up its offerings with a new product and a new alliance. The product is an enhancement to the CASA e-submission service that allows users to generate their own SDLT 5 certificates. The new alliance is with xit2, the electronic information exchange that shares data between mortgage brokers surveyors, conveyancers and referrers.

TFB user conference overnighter
TFB is holding its annual user group conference in Birmingham at the end of this month (24 & 25 November). The programme includes a session on TFB’s five year roadmap for its software.

Rotherham go for Iken court bundling
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has begun using Iken’s court bundling system to support the activities of both its child-care and general legal teams. The system, available as a stand alone package or as part of Iken’s matter management suite, handles the indexing, sectioning and pagination of court bundles.
www.iken.biz/courtbundling

Mills & Reeve to implement Zantaz for e-data retention
Mills & Reeve has selected the Zantaz EAS enterprise archive system to help it meet its electronic data retention requirements. The firm’s head of IT Graeme Low said there were three business drivers for the project “We needed a more effective means of supporting our data retention and compliance obligations. We needed support for our own internal knowledge management initiatives. And we needed to reduce the risk associated with the amount of our data that is captured and held in emails.”

Caversham use DPL for new trusts system
The Jersey office of Caversham Fiduciary Services has awarded document assembly specialists DPL (01732 867792) a contract to develop a new system to automate the formation of offshore trusts and companies. The system, which will include risk assessment, management controls and compliance procedures, is being developed in DPL’s new .Net KBX In-site technology.
www.chamnet.com

Possession Claim Online launched
Claims for possession of residential property can now be made online through the Court Service’s new Possession Claim Online facility. Property owners, including private landlords can apply electronically on a 24/7 basis for repossession for non-payment of rent or mortgages. Court fees are paid electronically, claims are issued straightaway and court hearing dates are scheduled automatically. Claimants and defendants can also track their claim online and once a possession order has been granted, claimants can also arrange for warrants to be issued via the service.
www.possessionclaim.gov.uk/pcol/
   
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The Insider web site
For the latest legal IT news, jobs, events and information, visit the Insider web site, described by The Times newspaper as "the definitive online resource for legal technology information".
 
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Fresh on the radar

The Beaver is back in town
Back in the 1990s, Mike Willstrop’s Beaver Corporation was one of the major players in the debt recovery software market with its Legal Arms system – Axxia was one of its biggest resellers. Beaver, later BCL, was subsequently acquired by I-Many Inc and many of the people involved with legal IT projects left the company. Now the business is back as Bware Legal Solutions (0845 226 8184) and headed by Jim Stanley, one of original Beaver directors.

Once again the main focus is debt recovery and credit management, with the software going by the Nexum brand name however Bware is also offering risk management and KPI reporting in its product portfolio. Stanley says the software is once more ‘vendor agnostic’ so it can be bolted onto the third-party practice management systems – Bware hopes to finalise some reseller deals in the near future – and will offer a novel pay-for-use/pay-on-results pricing model. Current Bware users include Brachers, Blake Lapthorn Linnell and Halliwells.
www.bwaresolutions.com

AT&T subsidiary entering legal market
AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce (020 8867 8318) has launched its Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) into the UK legal market. Sterling, which has 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies on B2B systems, is now offering tailored IT solutions to law firms to help them to address issues such as client e-billing, in-bound invoice processing, treasury/cash management and secure banking collaboration.

According to Sterling account manager John Brett “Not only does GIS help cut costs by automating billing and invoice processing, it also offers additional benefits such as the ability to integrate previously disparate IT systems and streamline internal and external communications. All of these functions are complementary to existing systems and provide an out-of-the box alternative to inhouse development.” As part of a market awareness programme, Sterling Commerce is running a series of 1 hour seminars for law firms. To register or receive further information on Sterling call John Brett on 07748 766959 or email john_brett@stercomm.com
www.sterlingcommerce.co.uk/response/LegalGIS/LegalGIS1006.pdf
 
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International news

Interwoven win in the Netherlands
De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, one of the largest law firms in the Netherlands, has chosen the Interwoven engagement & matter-centric collaboration system. Based on Interwoven WorkSite and implemented by local partner Morningstar Systems, the system allows De Brauw to improve operational efficiency while providing an automated means of unifying its geographically dispersed internal teams.
www.morningstarsystems.nl

Dirkzwager go with Aderant
Dutch law firm Dirkzwager Advocaten en Notarissen, which has offices in Arnhem and Nijmegen, has signed an agreement with Timesoft to implement Aderant’s Back and Front Office practice management software. Aderant now has 25 user firms in the Benelux region.
www.timesoft.nl

New Nordic reseller for Metastorm
Metastorm has formed a new distribution partnership with Component Software, a leading provider of business intelligence software in the Nordic region. Component will represent Metastorm to sell, install and provide in-region support for Metastorm’s BPM business process management software.
www.csn.no
 
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Digital dictation news in brief

Gordon Brown drop G2 for Winscribe
Law firm Gordon Brown Associates has selected a Winscribe DDS “to provide a more reliable solution after concerns over the performance of its incumbent provider” G2. The firm’s practice manager Eileen Wignall said “Due to the unreliability of our previous (digital dictation) system, staff have welcomed Winscribe with open arms”. Winscribe reseller Direct Dictation Solutions helped the firm to swap out G2 for Winscribe.

Linetime and nFlow get together
DDS developer nFlow and legal software supplier Linetime have signed a cooperation agreement that will see nFlow’s digital dictation software integrated into the automated document production process in Linetime’s new .Net Express product. A beta version of the integration should be ready for the Islington Legal IT exhibition in February.

New transcription service
TypeSource has launched a new pay-as-you-go digital dictation transcription service. Files can be submitted as email attachments and documents will normally be turned around within 24 hours. Pritchard Englefield is one of the first law firms to sign up for the service.
www.typesource.co.uk
 
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People & places

Wordwave rebrands as MLS
Following its acquisition earlier this year by the Merrill Corporation (no relation to Merrill Lynch) court IT and reporting specialist Wordwave International has been rebranded as part of Merrill Legal Solutions. Commenting on the move, MLS international managing director Sarah Andrews said “The convergence of our litigation support services within MLS allows us to provide clients with support at all stages of the litigation process, from the moment the complaint is received until the case is resolved.”
www.merrillcorp.com

SoftDesign opens in Hereford
Managed services specialist SoftDesign Services (020 8293 3123) has opened a new office in Hereford to support its growing West Midlands customer base. The office will be managed by Tom Bott.

Baldock takes on Kroll UK role
Kroll Ontrack has appointed Martin Baldock, previously with RGL LLP and before that KPMG’s forensic technology division, as director of operations for legal technologies in the UK.

New intake at Axxia
New recruits at Axxia include Liz Tipper, who joins business development, Dominic Brown who joins the project management group from Eversheds, and Wael Karkach, George Patterson and Jacqueline Remy who join the support team.

Entwistle joins Linetime sales team
Lisa Entwistle has joined the sales team at Linetime, having spent the past year in a training and support role at the company.

Timeslice take gold
Timeslice has attained gold certified status in the Microsoft partner programme.
 
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Insider job of the week

Support Consultant
Aderant, £30-£33k +
Aderant is looking for a support consultant to join its EMEA support team providing application support on a 1st and 2nd level basis to European users. SQL skills are essential and law firm experience desirable. To apply, email your CV to careers.eu@aderant.com

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