Business Intelligence For The Small-Firm Lawyer: How Zama Can Help Small Law Firms Save Time And Stay Competitive
Technology columnist Jeff Bennion looks at Zama, which helps lawyers in smaller firms save time by automating time-consuming research tasks and providing analysis of key developments and important information.
Lawyers in firms of all sizes wear many hats. Busy partners are time constrained, and are constantly challenged to find the time to focus on the important tasks of industry and practice research, client relations, marketing efforts and case status, so it’s important to automate as much as possible. It used to be that powerful software tools were only available to larger firms. However, we are now seeing a shift in the market where many software products once available only in larger firms are making their way into smaller firms, helping many of these smaller firms to stay competitive with their larger counterparts.
Zama is one of those tools aimed at helping lawyers in smaller firms to save time by automating time-consuming research tasks and providing analysis of key developments and important information.
Intelligence Gathering & Analysis
Zama is a tool that aggregates news and other important information from tens of thousands of open-web media sources on practice areas, industries, companies, and other topics and organizes that information in a useful way to help lawyers stay on top of important developments. For instance, a business litigator can see what is happening in certain industries by preparing a watch list of search terms. A mergers and acquisitions lawyer watching to see how certain companies perform or whether there is any news related to those companies can organize that information in Zama.
Zama differentiates itself from competitors by organizing the information in a useful and intuitive way that allows the user to control both the flavor and the frequency of needed information. Instead of having an inbox full of Google alerts, Zama provides users with one consolidated daily email summary that allows them to track those things that are critical and important to their success.
Another of the very useful features in Zama is the ability to organize news and information into PDF reports for clients or to read on the go, or to actually convert a saved search into an RSS feed to put in your RSS reader or embed on your firm’s website to provide your users with access to information about the latest news in your practice area.
For example, several months ago, I was working on a mass tort in the United States where the global corporation and the United States head office were named defendants. There was a similar class action with similar allegations going on in Canada. Since this was a popular brand, our Google searches were not pulling up daily alerts of this company that were the most relevant to the case because we were only using websites and news sources to search online. Zama, on the other hand, pulls from court filings, as well as social media and online news sources.
Here is a walk through of the interface and the features.
Custom Alert
The most useful feature of the Zama offering for the busy lawyer is the Zama customized daily email alert. This one email tells the lawyer what they need to know about any developments around their clients, practice areas, industry sectors, or any other topic that they wish to monitor. Not only does this help the lawyer to get smart about important developments, it saves time by not having to plow through multiple emails, alerts, or newsletters. The information now finds the lawyer, as opposed to the lawyer having to go out and find the information.
Users customize their Alerts to determine how much news they want to see, and how often they want to see it.
Lawyers can also login to the Zama dashboard, which provides a graph showing their watch items and notifies them of any new developments, or increase in conversations around the issues or topics that a user has identified. The user is able to click on a portion of the graph to drill down into a more focused time period to see the articles or posts that drove the spike. Zama also provides analysis of the information by pulling out trending or frequently mentioned terms within articles, allowing the lawyer to quickly understand what happened before even reading a headline or the article itself.
Unlike standard internet searches, Zama monitors court filings. The RSS feed button in the upper right corner allows you to save a search and create an RSS feed of court filings against your client, against a competitor, or filings in an industry you are watching. For me, e-discovery and cyber security are constantly evolving topics, so watching news and court filings is an excellent way to stay current in the industry.
Zama is accessible across desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones in an optimized interface for each device for reviewing your alerts and briefings on the go or presenting to clients at meetings.
In addition to watching trending topics based on key words, you can also get a list of trending terms that are coming up in your watch list and view those topics to see how those trends are affecting your industry.
Zama is a great time-saving tool. It is available for a free 30-day trial here.
Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.
