IN THIS ISSUE
Keystone confirms Solution 6 talks - Have a cool yule - Midware to ship Solicitec in Australia - Dragon still not out of the woods - Building a rounder lawyer - News in brief - Online publishing news - Latest web sites to bookmark - Next issue: 09.01.2002

KEYSTONE CONFIRMS SOLUTION 6 TALKS
Keystone Solutions has confirmed reports, which first appeared in our companion publication Legal Technology Insider, that the company has entered into preliminary discussions with Solution 6 Holdings, regarding a possible merger of some of the subsidiaries of Solution 6 with Keystone. The official Keystone announcement adds that "discussions are at a very early stage and may or may not lead to a transaction. Further announcements will be made as appropriate."

Although Solution 6 is best known in the legal market for its CMS OPEN 'tier 2' PMS system, both Solution 6 and Keystone have had dealings with smaller 'tier 3' law firms in Australia as a result of their separate involvements with Deloitte & Touche Australia's Law3000 accounts software.

Meanwhile Keystone Solutions (which is quoted on the London main market) has reported improved results for the half year to 30 September 2001, compared to the same period last year. Turnover for the half-year was up 40 percent to £2.84 million (£1.99m for the same period last year). The loss before tax and goodwill amortisation was 38 percent lower at £1.90 million (£3.07m last year).

Non-executive chairman, Claes Hultman said: "During the first half, the company succeeded in being named joint (with Oracle) preferred supplier to London based Clifford Chance, the world's largest legal firm. Contract negotiations for this deal have extended into the second half of the financial year - thus the results reflect the sales costs of this extremely large contract but not the expected revenues."

Solution 6 also ended the year on a strong note with two signings for its CMS OPEN product in London - Richards Butler and Speechly Bircham, plus Thacher Profitt & Wood in the United States - one of the firms that lost its head office in the 11 September attack on the World Trade Centre, and Pels Rijcken & Droogleever Fortuijn, a 200-fee earner firm in The Hague and, another Netherlands firm Trip Advocaten and Notarissen BV.

HAVE A COOL YULE, ALL CHANGE IN 2002 AND A FEW RUMOURS
This is our last issue before the Christmas & New Year holiday break, so seasons greetings and a cool yule to all our subscribers. We will be back on 9th January and - to reflect a refocussing of our editorial content - we will be reverting to this ezine's original name of Legal Technology News. We are also shifting our publication date to Wednesdays - you can find the full 2002 editorial schedule for Legal Technology News and our companion title Legal Technology Insider on the web at www.legalnewsmedia.com/deadlines.htm

Contrary to a couple of rumours currently going around the market "no" we have not been acquired by The Lawyer Group and "no" we have not bought Legal IT magazine however we are implementing some changes to reinforce our position as the leading legal technology news source. Along with breaking UK legal IT stories, we will also be devoting more space to reporting international legal technology news, along with the latest developments in online legal publishing, law firm web sites, online legal services, marketing and e-training.

MIDWARE TO SHIP SOLICITEC IN AUSTRALIA
Legal systems supplier Midware has been appointed the exclusive Australian distributor for the UK's matter and workflow management software provider Solicitec. Midware's ceo Mark Flack said Solicitec's product range "complements and enhances Midware's workflow, client collaboration and practice management solutions... We are now able to provide unsurpassed solutions to every law firm, corporate law departments and government departments with a need for matter management, workflow and collaboration software within Australia."

Midware has already announced to the market that sales for the first quarter were around 15 percent over budget and that the sales pipeline is the strongest it has ever been, despite Australia's current economic conditions. It is expected that sales of Solicitec's Visualfiles product can only enhance opportunities to build revenue and returns in the next six months.

Solicitec managing director Mark Woodward said Solicitec had considered setting up a direct sales channel in Australia. "We thoroughly investigated the market and the movers and shakers within it, we even took a stand at Lexpo in Sydney, and experienced first hand the interest in our products but at the end of the day, it made much more sense, working with Midware, the organisation that already had a technology relationship with most of the significant law firms

LERNOUT & HAUSPIE AND DRAGON - STILL NOT OUT OF THE WOODS
Reports that Lernout & Hauspie has been able to sell its Dragon speech recognition software business to the US scanning and OCR systems developer ScanSoft may have been a little premature as it now appears that the Delaware banruptcy court administering L&H's affairs has reservations about the deal.

Last week the court was due to approve the auction process in which ScaSoft bid for Dragon but decided not to do so, following official objections from another speech recognition company - Speechworks - and by Dragon's former owners, Jim and Janet Baker. The Bakers claim their alternative bid would have generated about $6 million more for the creditors than the ScanSoft deal. The hearing lasted all day and ended with the judge granting Speechworks and the Bakers extra time to examine witnesses offering testimony on the financial aspects of the deal.

The judge also hinted that one option she was considering was to scrap the entire auction process. The matter returns to court later this week when the judge will consider motions from the UK speech recognition systems company AllVoice which is seeking to prevent L&H stripping AllVoice of its patent rights in any sale of the Dragon business. AllVoice's IP dispute with Dragon and L&H pre-dates L&H's financial collapse.

BUILDING A MORE ROUNDED LAWYER
UK law firm practice development consultancy Practical Solutions (0161 929 8355) has launched a new training course aimed at improving the management skills of partners in small to mid sized solicitors practices who are responsible for running their firms. Practical Solutions's David Horstead said the courses - called Better Practice - reflect the fact that modern lawyers need to have more than just legal skills if they are to run a successful practice.

"There are four building blocks in any successful business. You have to manage people, sales & marketing, finance and systems. In each of these disciplines," says Horstead, "success comes from balancing strong day-to-day management with effective longer term strategic planning. In most other types of business there is a chief executive supported by specialist managers who deal with each of the management functions. But in most solicitors practices every partner is the equivalent of a general manager. As well as being a fee earner, most partners have a team of people to manage, they have to service clients and generate new business, manage finance and ensure that the most efficient case management and quality systems are in place."

The Better Practice course (which is CPD approved) will normally take between 10 and 12 months to complete and although there is a two hour workshop each month, most of the course is centred on self study and mentoring by a Practical Solutions coach. www.inpractice.co.uk

NEWS IN BRIEF
iMANAGE GOES EUROPEAN - iManage this week announced the availability of German and French versions of its iManage WorkSite desktop applications. Earlier this year the company further strengthened its European presence by opening of an office in Germany - it already has offices in France and the UK.

ALTERNATIVE TEAM TO RESELL ISYS - UK legal software specialist Alternative Team (020 7700 1616) has been appointed a reseller for the ISYS range of knowledge management products.ÊISYS pricing starts from as little as £150 per user for the networked version and £12,000 for an unlimited user web server licence. The latest web enabled version of ISYS includes a web spider and agent, plus software to convert legacy documents to HTML on the fly. www.a-team.co.uk

NEW CLUSTERING TECHNOLOGY AIMS TO CUT SEARCH TIMES - UK-based Fleetfoot Internet Solutions this week launched the Turbo10 Metasearch Engine which automatically groups results into similar topic areas or 'clusters' thereby enabling searchers to quickly home in on a relevant topic cluster and find a result quicker. Turbo10's clustering technology is based on a multilingual information retrieval algorithm that concurrently clusters results from other search engines so, for example, if you search on 'salsa', Turbo10's algorithm identifies 'dancing' and 'recipes' as two distinct topics. For more information visit http://turbo10.com

MICROSOFT PROJECT BETA - Microsoft has just released the 'marketing beta' version of Microsoft Project 2002, the latest version of the company's popular project management package. Pricing details have yet to be announced however the company claims the new version takes the product into the realms of collaborative working across an extranet thanks to a new web interface that will allow an organisation's clients to have direct access to the system. www.microsoft.com/project

FIRST OFFICE XP BUG FIX - Microsoft has released Service Pack 1, its first collection of bug fixes for its Office XP application suite. The pack can be downloaded from any Microsoft web site - although it does constitute a 17Mb download for end users and a 40Mb download for system administrators.

LOST WAX FIND LEGAL COUNSEL - The European software company Lost Wax has appointed Stuart Benson as general counsel. Benson has over 25 years experience in the legal profession as a partner and head of litigation first with Turner Kenneth Brown and latterly with DLA.

SEARCHFLOW IN ENVIRONMENTAL SEARCH DEAL - Searchflow, one of the three National Land Information Service (NLIS) channels under the UK government's near incomprehensible plans to create an online conveyancing infrastructure, has signed an exclusive agreement to provide the Home Envirosearch environmental reports service to residential conveyancers. Home Envirosearch reports enable home buyers to discover if the property they are buying is built on contaminated land or affected by environments risks, including radon gas, subsidence and flooding.

SYBASE IN MAJOR CHINA COURTS DEAL - iAnywhere Solutions, the mobile & wireless subsidiary of Sybase, is to supply the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China with its SQL Anywhere Studio system to collect, manage and synchronise information between the Court's central office in Beijing and regional locations.

ONLINE PUBLISHING NEWS
WEST GROUP INCORPORATES DOT NET - The West Group has announced new ease-of-use enhancements to its WestFind&Print service. The new WestFind&Print uses the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET to give researchers access to its features in an environment that is automatically structured to their device platform. Researchers can use WestFind&Print to enter citations and automatically have the full text, table of authorities and KeyCite results printed, downloaded or delivered via email. The Microsoft .NET Framework lets users employ WestFind&Print from a variety of platforms - desktop computer, personal digital assistant or cellular phone - while automatically optimizing each access method for speed and functionality.

LAWTEL ADDS TWO NEW SERVICES TO PERSONAL INJURY SITE - Lawtel UK has added the PI Quantum Report Search facility, which allows PI practitioners to conduct highly specialised searches for PI awards and settlements, and the New Earnings Survey, which lets users assess the value of clients' loss of earnings by providing information relating to average hourly and weekly earnings for a variety of different types of employment, to the Lawtel Personal Injury service. Elsewhere within Lawtel, subscribers can now access the full text of articles from the Modern Law Review (from 1998), Family Law (from 1997) and the Solicitors Journal (from 1996) through Lawtel's full text document delivery service Transcripts Express.

LATEST LEGAL WEB SITES TO BOOKMARK
EU LAW ONLINE - IT services company Erin and regulatory specialist Cullen International have launched a new internet legal advice site providing information on the latest EU legislation to affect e-commerce. The site, which is already available in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, is designed to make it easier for non-specialist lawyers to research e-commerce law. www.eLexPortal.com

VIDESS NEW LOOK WEB SITE - Legal systems supplier Videss has relaunched its web site. New facilities include a software 'walk through' that lets visitors examine the features of the company's new personal injury case management system. Its a nice site - it even works on a Mac and, unlike some legal tickers out there, the news ticker doesn't crash the system. There are also no pointless graphics that take forever to download and a logical menu and overall interface.www.videss.co.uk

BRADSHAWS SETS UP ONLINE WILLS DATABASE - Three solicitors with the Birmingham law firm Bradshaws have set up what they hope will become the UK's definitive online database of wills. Solicitors can register wills for £10 each (for £17 the will can also be scanned, so authorised copies can be made at a later date if the original is lost) and the charge for searches is £5 per will. Robert Bradshaw says the new service - called the National Will Registry - can offer a viable alternative to the traditional approach to trying to locate wills via advertising and the employment of probate researchers. www.nationalwillsregistry.co.uk