Based on Recommind’s CORE™ (Context Optimized Relevancy Engine) platform, the new solution will become the central focus of Stephenson Harwood’s legal know-how environment.

Recommind’s Decisiv Search will provide access to the firm’s distributed information through a single enterprise search platform that is based on powerful and unique concept-based search technology. Stephenson Harwood will also use Recommind’s Matters & Expertise module of Decisiv Search, allowing all partners and staff worldwide to not only quickly and seamlessly search for content, but also to locate colleagues with relevant experience and knowledge of particular subjects within the firm.

“We chose Recommind after a thorough review of the market. Decisiv Search is intuitive and easy to use, and we particularly liked the document preview functionality. We are also impressed with the Recommind team, and the fact that they will be giving us ongoing support gives us confidence about its success. Decisiv Search will help us tie together all these various information sources and provide a more aggregated and efficient work environment that will enable us all to quickly find exactly what we are looking for from one, simple search interface” comments Myra Raggett, Director of Legal Information Services at Stephenson Harwood.

“An effective enterprise search and knowledge management system is absolutely critical to law firms. We are looking forward to working with Stephenson Harwood to create a single search interface that will enable their lawyers to quickly find the information, matters and expertise they need,” said Simon Price, Managing Director at Recommind.

Stephenson Harwood is the latest law firm to adopt Recommind’s search technology. Other law firms already using Recommind’s technology include Mills and Reeves, Clifford Chance, Cassels Brock & Blackwell and Macfarlanes.

Web Analytics is a legal-specific solution that allows law firms to glean tailored insights and unprecedented intelligence from their web traffic data. The legal-specific nature of Web Analytics means that users can gain unique and detailed insights into the performance of specific site areas, including practice groups, attorney bios, and news and articles, packaged in an easy to interpret format. In addition, the solution uses page tagging technology to increase data accuracy and speed of reporting and provide enhanced flexibility for data collection.

This detailed information, coupled with hands-on support from Hubbard One’s market-leading team, means firms can now better evaluate content and site performance and understand visitors’ key interests and behaviours. In turn, the information can then be used to inform and bolster the effectiveness of interactive marketing programmes, inform web strategy and better understand website ROI.

• Key features of the Web Analytics solution include:
• Key performance indicator dashboards: providing a comprehensive and unprecedented view of website performance as it relates to traffic, visitor loyalty, content, pages and referral sources;
•  Sophisticated analysis tools: facilitating the design of customized reports utilising a range of powerful filters and metrics;
• Social and mobile tracking: enabling the tracking of referrals from social media and mobile devices, including referrers and top content types;
• Customizable features: allowing the organization of data exactly the way firms need it, with customizable dashboards and other design elements;
• Data visualization: displaying web trends in easy-to-read graphs, charts and other user-friendly visual formats; and
• Expert knowledge: improving the ability for clients to understand and interpret Web Analytics data through analysis by a dedicated team.

“Analysing web information and traffic has historically been lengthy and complex, but necessary, for law firms,” said John Simpson, senior director, interactive marketing at Hubbard One. “We recognized that law firms felt overwhelmed by the whole process and needed a solution that took the guesswork out of web analytics, while specifically meeting their complex and changing needs. Web Analytics will enable law firms to analyse and place relevant information into a business context and drive fact-based decisions that meet their client-specific business goals and objectives.”

For more information on the Web Analytics solution, please visit: www.hubbardone.com/webanalytics.

Given the hypothesis that law firms would rather shed costs before people, here are three areas that could positively impact the bottom line for law firms.

Traditionally for most firms increased revenue has been the most efficient way of impacting the bottom line but in todays economy increasing the revenue stream is becoming ever more difficult. So how can the bottom line be improved? The short answer is to focus on your overhead spend. Typical areas that can have a quick and lasting bearing on the bottom line are.

1.Contracts

While the letter of a negotiated IT contract is usually good enough the actual value that it provides to the business sometimes isn’t. Your contracts can be renegotiated with savings of up to 40%. See if you can consolidate your supplier base, the more business you can give to a particular supplier the better the deal you can get

2.Telephones

Telephone & mobile phone contracts from the Telco’s are rarely flexible enough to allow firms to benefit from the most recent and reduced call tariffs. Can you change the model by which you’re mobiles are managed, or can you always ensure that you are receiving the most up to date tariffs?

3.Virtual Office & Hot desking

Do you really need all that office space? Can your people desk share? Consider ways of allowing your work force to work from home or introduce a combination of hot desking and working from home.

There are many other ways to impact positively on the bottom line but these three techniques can be implemented relatively quickly and in some cases with little disruption to your firm. There are new ways in which you can manage contracts, for example mobile phone contracts have some innovative ways in which to cut costs and good suppliers will also manage the fleet of mobiles to boot so you don’t have to! So all in all if possible cut costs before people.

• The convergence of old and new file formats

• Preparing for and protection from Lawyer mobility

• An introduction to Office 15

Register for this free webinar, which will be held on May 21, 2012.

Session 1

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM EDT

(2:00 PM BST)

Register Now

Session 2

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT

(9:00 AM PDT)

Register Now

CAPTURE eliminates the labor intensive handling and manual data processing of invoices and dramatically lowers costs. The service outsources the non-core activities and allows your accounts payable process to focus on the value-add of visibility and control. Chrome River handles all of the requirements of personnel and sophisticated technology to support invoice intake processing, which allows organizations to quickly scale up or down as needed.

With CAPTURE, vendors send invoices to a dedicated PO Box, email or fax number. The rest of the process is handled by the secure CAPTURE processing center. All invoices are gathered, opened, separated, prepped and scanned with high-quality imaging hardware and software. The invoice data is then extracted using intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A double quality control process using human verification ensures a 99.5% accuracy rate.

The digital invoices and data are delivered securely to the Chrome River INVOICE service accessible by the customer within one business day of receipt. Customers using this service can further improve their approval process by configuring automated routing steps to ensure invoices are immediately delivered directly to the appropriate individuals for approval. With Chrome River CAPTURE, customers can move to 100% electronic invoicing immediately to make remarkable improvements to their accounts payable process.

“Chrome River CAPTURE is another service that we knew would make our customers lives easier.” said Dan Humbert, Product Director of Chrome River Technologies. “With CAPTURE, invoice handling including pre- and post-processing is provided as a secure, outsourced service. Working in combination with Chrome River’s invoice processing software, invoices are securely managed and controlled using your organization’s compliance rules and automated routing to ease process handling through to payment. We’re pleased to offer another service that saves time, money and man-hours as part of a cost management strategy.”

Chrome River is committed to keeping their end users happy with continuous enhancements and innovations that impress and make their lives easier. The addition of Chrome River CAPTURE is another enhancement that adds significant value to Chrome River’s expense management product line.

May 10th from 5.30pm – 8.00pm

At Topshop, 1 New Change, City of London, EC2V 6AH

Champagne, drinks and nibbles will be served

Please join us in an informal setting, have a drink with your friends and get
fashion tips from the Topshop Personal Shopping team.

Feel free to bring your lady colleagues along too!

Please RSVP to Alison Thorpe at athorpe@nqbillback.com or 07850 203760

less application juggling for end-users, a more intuitive experience for lawyers and secretaries and accelerated document turnaround.”

BigHand, the market leading voice productivity software vendor in the global legal sector, has today announced the launch of an OpenText Document Management eDOCS Edition (eDOCS DM) integration module designed to expedite the document production process for mutual customers. The new module allows integration between BigHand4 and eDOCS DM5*, and is the result of BigHand being approved as an OpenText Technical ISV Partner in January 2012.

Dan Speed, Managing Director for BigHand in Canada & Asia-Pacific, commented: “BigHand and eDOCS DM5 are widely used across the legal industry and are complimentary. While BigHand increases efficiency at the initial document creation stage via voice, eDOCS offers market leading document and content management. Recently we have seen an increase in requests from our legal customers for eDOCS DM5 interoperability and in line with our Agile development methodology we set out to quickly respond by building a simple, elegant integration that enhances the BigHand experience for mutual customers.”

“The integration, in the first instance, allows a link to the completed eDOCS document to be embedded within BigHand software leading to less application juggling for end-users, a more intuitive experience for lawyers and secretaries and accelerated document turnaround. We are seeing this initial iteration as a first step and look forward to feedback from law firms so that we may look to enrich the solution further in future.”

Erik Schmidt, Manager of Product Marketing & Business Development for eDOCS at Open Text commented:

“BigHand became an accredited OpenText Technical ISV Partner at the end of January and we’ve been working with them closely to provide the tools and support they need to develop the integration module. They have been very efficient in their approach to integrating with both eDOCS DM 5.2 and 5.3 within a short space of time, and we are already working with them to provide support for future DM releases on the roadmap. Given the number of legal clients already using eDOCS and BigHand, added to the number of new clients increasingly adopting both products, we expect their integration module to be very well received in the market.”

Watson, Farley & Williams employs 630 staff located across 13 worldwide offices that provide a wide range of legal services in various industry sectors such as finance and investment, maritime, energy, natural resources, transport, property and technology. The firm has seen a strong rate of growth over the past three years and has, on average, opened one new office every 18 months since 2006. The new data center network deployment will provide the performance and resilience needed to support higher traffic and daily data volumes, but will also give Watson, Farley & Williams the long-term flexibility and capacity it needs as the business expands.

Richard Latham, the firm’s IT manager, explains, “Every three years, we replace our storage to add more capacity given we are supporting more users and more locations. During this particular cycle, all three elements were upgraded – storage, servers and the network – in order to improve the performance of our virtualized data center.”

Watson, Farley & Williams’ virtualization programme has reduced its hardware footprint and saved cost with five physical IBM servers installed – and associated Net App fabric-attached storage – running 88 virtual servers using VMware vSphere. However, the law firm was finding that the 1 GbE links between servers and associated storage were reaching their capacity.

Watson, Farley & Williams network analyst Graham Kirk says, “A solution could have been to trunk four Gigabit Ethernet connections together to solve this, but we wanted to avoid this by going straight for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which means we don’t have to address the server/storage network equipment for the next three years, which is our typical refresh cycle.”

The importance of this is considerable as the infrastructure is common to all IT services provided to the firm’s staff both locally and internationally. This includes Watson, Farley & Williams’ e-mail solution, electronic document management, office applications, knowledge management and CRM systems, time recording and practice management software.

Data growth in the business has been vast. Latham says, “Our data vault is now about 44 terabytes of which a huge proportion is e-mail, which is the lifeblood of any law firm given documents are sent to and from clients all the time. We use a multilayered, clustered solution, which is mirrored offsite to ensure availability, the knock-on effect being servers and their storage need to be high-performing.”

The firm deployed two Brocade VDX 6720 switches for resiliency. Kirk explains, “We did a side-by-side comparison with [a competitor] and the Brocade VDX 6720 switches won hands-down given they deliver far better price/performance benefits and are much easier to install. We estimate time savings of 30 to 40 percent on the whole project of six weeks.”

Latham concludes, “We are obsessed with removing risk. If the core server/storage infrastructure inLondonhad become unavailable, then all 630 staff worldwide would be impacted in some way. The [Brocade VDX] upgrade could have been a risk, but it simply wasn’t, which is a credit to Brocade.”

Marcus Jewell, country manager UK/Ireland at Brocade, stated, “The Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches have solved Watson, Farley & Williams’ storage network performance issues with the virtualized servers now responding much better. The firm’s requirements have been met and the feedback we have received is that the installation has practically been an ‘install and forget’ process – a perfect outcome given law firms can’t tolerate any systems downtime.”

About Brocade Data Center Networking Solutions

Network architects are now looking for ways to build more powerful, flatter networks that can support higher traffic loads and increased east-to-west traffic in virtualized environments, all while avoiding network congestion. Collapsing network layers also reduces complexity, which lowers overhead costs and reduces risk. This type of design, however, requires high-density, high-bandwidth network components that deliver full wire-speed connectivity. With its Ethernet fabric technology and the industry’s most powerful routers for enterprise data centers, Brocade can help organizations build flatter, simpler networks today – and at measurably lower cost than the competition.

For more information, please visit www.brocade.com.

Head of HR for Withy King, Jo Kangurs, commented, “We’re becoming more commercially focused and want to work towards becoming a Sunday Times Top 100 employer. With the legal services reforms, HR is becoming more important than ever before; it’s imperative that we automate and streamline our transactional processes so that we can focus on more strategic projects.”

Withy King, which converted to LLP status last year, will see SelectHR replace its bespoke system and multiple Excel spreadsheets, creating one central store for all people information. “Our current database is very basic; it’s virtually impossible to access all the information we need for our more structured management reporting requirements. SelectHR will provide us with timely and accurate information we can trust and we’ll no longer have to manage data across multiple sources.

“Self-service is also very important to us. Our HR assistant currently deals with all employee queries, which equates to 60 per cent of her time. The new system will reduce this considerably as our 250 staff will take responsibility for their own information. Our managers will have direct access to key HR intelligence such as turnover, sickness and absence, alongside recruitment and training spend for their areas of business, so they will be able to directly access reports.”

Having a system that incorporated recruitment and training was a further reason for choosing SelectHR. “We have more than 300-plus applications for our graduate training programme each year. The online vacancy and application process will considerably cut the hours spent sorting and shortlisting candidates and provide flexibility in how we work with recruitment agencies. The system will also cut the need to manually track equal opportunities statistics, which the Solicitors Regulation Authority could request at any point in time.

“We’ll also be able to keep accurate training records in one system, making it easier to understand spend allocation. It will stop any duplication which we’ve had in past where multiple people have attended the same course, instead of one person disseminating that information on their return. Our lawyers will be able to easily manage their CPD online too so they remain compliant. Having ready access to all of our people information will save a considerable amount of time, leaving us to focus on strategic measures that attract and retain the best talent.”

Withy King operates across seven offices in the South West, providing legal services to both individual and commercial clients. It specialises in sectors including racing and bloodstock, agriculture, property & construction, property development & planning, hotels & leisure, care sector and technology and media.

For more information on Access, its consultancy and software solutions contact Matt Newman on 0845 345 3300 or visit http://www.theaccessgroup.com.

Ben Wightwick

By Ben Wightwick at HighQ Solutions

Gamification as a concept isn’t new and is something I have written about before within the context of LegalIT. To be honest, it still doesn’t have a great reputation or traction within the enterprise, let alone within legal. It’s a concept with very few real world examples of how it could affect our daily lives. Despite this, I can see it making an impact in Legal IT in the next 2-3 years.

So how could it improve the use of technology inside a law firm and what could it mean for law firms clients? Gamification is defined in Wikipedia as ‘the integration of game mechanics or game dynamics into a website, service, community, campaign, or application in order to drive participation and engagement.’ A recent Gartner study, states Gamification will be used by 70% of the Global 2000 by 2015, with over $1.6Bn spent on related products, services and technologies. Those of you who have LinkedIn profiles will have already been ‘encouraged’ to complete your profile which is a type of gamification. And if you check-in on Foursquare and achieve badges for new locations, this is gamification.

So how does this affect law firms and the Legal IT vendors? At the moment it doesn’t, but I think it should. It certainly won’t make boring tasks less boring, it won’t help awful user interface (UI) and immediately improve user experiences (UX), which are common, but it can provide shared vision and objectives for leaderless groups or groups spread across the globe. I think it will influence legalIT vendors to design their software more intuitively and emphasise collaboration and ultimately humanise and empower staff. Generally when people think of gamification they think of achieving inconsequential ‘badges’ when tasks are complete, but it doesn’t have to be like that at all. Why not build out the concept of a virtual currency, which can be earned against a pre-defined collection of tasks collected by a team or department, which in turn could be used against a corporate shopping list, whether that is a team lunch or a drinks trolley on a Friday evening?

Why not target the #1 enterprise bugbear, Email? Applying some game mechanics in the UX around things like the number of emails in your inbox, size of your inbox, speed of reply, total filed in to Filesite, coupled with some simple benchmarking would enable you to see how you compare to your colleagues and potentially achieve a long time objective of your IT dept, reducing your email capacity. It also wouldn’t be hard to associate a little gamification to the client & matter inception process or the matter management process within a law firm. Traditionally the client and matter inception process is a ball ache, with screens of tick boxes and information to fill in. Due to regulatory requirements, this isn’t going to change dramatically but why not incentivise completing the process accurately and in its entirety first time round?

The legal industry is currently in its biggest transformational shift for a generation and technology is playing a big part in that. Legal technology has to change its focus from the law firm to it’s clients, it has to adapt and become more collaborative, more social and the traditional legal technology vendors are going struggling to deliver upon this expectation. Is gamification too far for legal? The answer is probably yes for now, but look beyond LegalIT for the trends that are circling enterpirse technology, look out for gamification success stories as well as the failures as I certainly don’t think it is going away.

One thing to add and whilst this article might be shinning a positive light on the promise of gamification, it is obviously not a silver bullet and won’t fix all your organisations issues. But if the only thing that happens is that the UX is improved then that’s a good thing right? I think the power of game mechanics could drive behavior change in the law firm technology platforms of the future or am I completely bonkers?