ILTACON Exhibits: The End of Fairy Tales (Part 2)

The news out of the big ILTA conference in Las Vegas keeps on coming, as chronicled by tech columnist Sean Doherty.

Part 1 of this post began at the end of fairy tales from the kick-off of the exhibit hall at the International Legal Technology Association’s annual meeting (ILTACON) in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. There is no better place to start Part 2 than with iManage Inc.’s buyout from Hewlett-Packard of the entire iManage business and the new management-owned company’s project White Rabbit, right from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

I can’t make up this stuff as fast as I can report it.

The iManage leadership team completed a buyout from Hewlett-Packard for the entire iManage business, including brand, product and services. The new iManage, backed by the Bank of Montreal and led by CEO Neil Araujo, CMO Dan Carmel and Chief Scientist Rafiq Mohammadi, will continue the company’s founding mission from 1995: to help professionals in professional firms manage matters according to a webinar by Araujo and Carmel.

The iManage product line includes HP WorkSite, WorkSite Records Manager, IUS or HP Universal Search, and LinkSite with Flow CM. Although there will be no immediate change in line-up, iManage will superimpose new branding over the existing products. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: iManage Work incorporates WorkSite, iManage Share includes LinkSite with Flow CM, iManage Insight contains Universal Search, and iManage Govern capsules Records Manager. Click image to enlarge.

Law firms and professional-services organizations will not lose their investment in HP technology. The iManage product line will still have access to HP technology, such as Autonomy’s IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), and the ability to deploy in hybrid and private clouds in HP cloud services, besides on-premise installations. The new company is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Silicon Valley, London and Bangalore. It began with approximately 180 former HP employees dedicated to iManage. Araujo and Carmel expect the company to grow by 100 people in the next 12 months.

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In the webinar, Carmel introduced the new iManage work product management system from its inception as a document management system and its first iteration as a matter-centric application with collaboration. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: The iManage road map in light of more complex work and chaos (mobility) with new clients and professional users.

The iManage White Rabbit project ensued from the feedback of 1,000 professionals and 70 direct interviews of professionals regarding five iManage workflows. The workflows used snippets from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” With a focus on new professionals and new clients, the project team is developing a responsive user interface (UI) that will automatically adjust (morph) to a device’s display. The new UI, developed under Agile methodology, is stateless and Web-friendly, with new pagination architecture that quickly moves through large volumes of content without waiting for downloads and has improved server-to-server proxy for better global management of a single engagement file.

The new UI will not replace existing product features but will approach desktop functionality over time, said Carmel. It will become the preferred interface. The iManage team will formally reveal the first code implementation at ILTACON. In September or October, White Rabbit will be deployed to selected customers with substantial BlackBerry and Google Inc. Android user populations, said Carmel. “Curiouser and Curiouser!”

Sponsored

LawToolBox demonstrates its court deadline app integration with Matter Center at ILTACON. LawToolBox calculates rules-based court deadlines in all 50 states based on rules of procedure in state and federal courts. The Denver-based company’s Court Deadline App for Matter Center expands on its existing apps for Office 365 and Windows.

To use the LawToolBox’s court deadline app with Matter Center, a law office needs Office 365, an Azure account, and Matter Center for Office 365 in place. Matter Center uses SharePoint sites to base matters and reuse them in other Microsoft products, such as OneDrive for Business, OneNote 2013, Word and Outlook. Matter Center creates a SharePoint site for each case to store case calendars, document libraries and other case data.

With the LawToolBox Court Deadline app for Matter Center and SharePoint, legal professionals can select a client and matter, choose the court rule set, and fix a trigger date, such as “Date trial commences,” to generate deadlines in Matter Center. Users can add selected or all deadlines to their Matter Center calendar—deadlines appear right next to documents. The deadlines can be shared with the Outlook calendars for everyone on the case. Select deadlines can be externally shared using the iCal calendar format. See Grow’s video here.

Like LawToolBox, NetDocuments, a cloud-based document and email management provider, announced it will integrate its document management system and email services, called NetDocuments EM (read: Decisiv Email), with Microsoft cloud technologies. With “Will” being the operative word, NetDocuments intends to design an Azure-hosted version of NetDocuments DMS, deliver access to it through the Office 365 add-in model, integrate NetDocuments EM with Exchange Online, and integrate ndOffice, an application that brings the Salt Lake City-based company’s DMS directly to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Whew.

The NetDocuments’ public announcement did not indicate how an Office 365 investment in Outlook and OneDrive for Business will play out with the plan. But one thing is for sure, Matter Center development is a SharePoint-based collaboration system that Microsoft provides to select partners.

Handshake Software, a provider of SharePoint portal and tools, partnered with Neudesic, an expertise location system for law firms, before ILTACON. The partnership brings the Neudesic Firm Directory, with people-centric profiles that capture and discover experience, to Handshake Software’s portals. Customers can use the Firm Directory’s taxonomy to surface attorney experience with Handshake Software’s Expertise Locator, which uses contracts, documents, time entries and other line-of-business systems to derive attorney expertise.

Prior to partnering with Neudesic, Handshake Software partnered with LexisNexis Legal & Professional to integrate the LexisNexis Digital Library with Handshake Software’s Portal & Search product for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. Although this allows attorneys and librarians to review and check out ebook titles via SharePoint, more to point is the ability to access electronic titles in a SharePoint context. The partnership can provide direct access to resource materials in a matter, with matter contacts, documents and financials.

Sony Electronics gets with World Software Corp. to showcase at ILTACON how its Digital Paper System (DPTS1) works with Worldox GX4 and its new Web 2.0 integration, which provides mobile device access to World Software’s DMS.

Although new attorneys may eschew the stylus interface to handwrite input, mature attorneys can appreciate the ability to write and erase words on digital paper, which are automatically saved in PDF files and securely synchronized with Worldox GX4 or Box. The device also makes an excellent e-reader using 16-level gray scale with E Ink Mobius technology–it accepts notes right on the page like a book.

The Digital Paper System is approximately 9 ¼ (width) x 12 ¼ (height) x 9/32 (depth) inches and weighs 12.6 ounces. It has 13.3-inch flexible electronic paper with a display resolution of 1200 x 1600 dots per inch. The device has an internal memory sufficient to store approximately 2800 one-megabyte PDF files, a micro SD memory card slot and micro USB connector, and support to transmit and receive files using AES 256-bit encryption over Wi-Fi 802.11 b/n/g networks.

Sony brought the price of its Digital Paper device down to an affordable $799 in April. So if you remember things better when you write them down, investigate the Digital Paper System.

SHORT TAKES

Have you got a multifunction printer? Seek J2 Global Inc. on the exhibit floor and see how their eFax Corporate product can turn paper-based faxing from an MFP into Internet faxing with the company’s MFP Fax Direct Feature.

Elegrity Inc., a law firm business process software provider, will show its most recent E-Suite product line, which comprises E-Win for new business intake, E-Valuate for conflict checking, E-Insight for insight into clients and services, E-Change for change management in firm data, and E-Conclude for matter closure.

The E-Suite adds to the San Francisco-based Elegrity’s E-Connect platform. E-Connect integrates existing firm processes and data to provide the E-Suite with actionable data for client intake, new marketing endeavours and managing change to client information.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc., an information management and printer manufacturer, debuts at ILTACON a Workshare connector for the company’s Dispatcher Phoenix, which automatically identifies and handles documents. The Workshare integration will address information governance issues in content management, including document placement into file collaboration systems. With the Workshare connector, Dispatcher Phoenix integrates legal professionals’ document and record management workflows with multiple platforms including Outlook and Microsoft Office. The workflows extend to Workshare’s file-sharing infrastructure with file comparison tools.

Nuance Communications Inc., a provider of speech and imaging software, has new versions of its capture software products, Nuance AutoStore 7 and eCopy ShareScan 5.4. The latest versions of AutoStore and eCopy improve document capture for business process capture workflows and collaborative capture workflows, respectively. Note the eCopy Office, Suite and Enterprise products now have the eCopy Cloud Pak option to securely scan documents to Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox, with additional document management connectivity to DocuWare and Exact Synergy Enterprise.

Earlier: ILTACON Exhibits: The End of Fairy Tales (Part 1)


Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.

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