A Scattering: Legal Tech Startups, IPOs, Fax, Time Matters And OpenOffice

Based on the world of legal-tech startups, there is hope that a legal technology industry will flourish and help lawyers and law firms provide efficient and cost-effective legal services.

In the post “No There There For The Legal Tech Industry?” I questioned whether legal technology is a sustainable, mature industry for vendors because of the lack of programs designed by and for lawyers. I did not, however, acknowledge startups that focus on legal tech.

When you look at legal-tech startups offering contract management, data analytics, legal research, workflow tools and more, there is hope that a legal technology industry will flourish and help lawyers and law firms provide efficient and cost-effective legal services. The World Bank reported that giving money to entrepreneurs in developing countries will spur high growth. The tactic should also work for developing industries like legal technology. So have you hugged a startup today or are you waiting for a more mature technology partner? Perhaps one that has had an initial public offering (IPO)?

A provider of cloud-based business and legal software, AppFolio Inc., raised $74 million in its IPO on June 26. The company offered to the public 6.2 million shares at $12 per share. It is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker APPF. AppFolio develops and distributes MyCase law practice management software for small law firms. Besides client communication tools, MyCase software includes tools for tracking time, billing clients, managing cases, and assembling and managing documents. Does the IPO make it mature and a more appealing tech partner than a startup?

IPOs can be risky business. One must ask, “Why offer an IPO?” Has private investment petered out? Although AppFolio enjoys robust year-over-year growth, it also has significant expenses and debt, according to its Q2 2015 financial results. After the IPO, according to Benzinga.com, the Santa Barbara, California-based company’s main stockholders, Investment Group of Santa Barbara (33.9 percent) and BV Capital (14.5 percent), will remain its primary equity holders.

Besides the IPO in practice management, in e-discovery UBIC, Inc. (UBIC) went public in 2013. But UBIC’s public offering did not usher other discovery providers into the public domain. If IPOs are indicia of stable technology partners in a mature industry, most legal tech companies are privately funded infants and the legal tech industry is nascent.

We need to look elsewhere for maturity—from the inside out. Lawyers as technology consumers must continually demand increasingly more sophisticated products to compete in legal services and not simply ask for products that satisfy minimal ethical requirements of competence in representing clients. Perhaps then will we get vendors who supply a continuing flow of innovative products to make a vibrant, mature legal-tech industry?

ABOVE THE LAW’S APP EVENT

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Last Friday afternoon I dropped in on Above The Law’s Academy for Private Practice (APP) and landed in the session “Break the Bottleneck: Managing Workflow,” where my fellow columnist, New York attorney and MyCase tech evangelist Nicole Black, led a panel comprised of Washington, D.C., lawyer Carolyn Elefant; Jennifer Ellis, of Lowenthal & Abrams; and Jared Correia, senior law practice advisor at Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP). The discussion included what tools to use in managing a law practice and communicating with clients.

When Ellis brought up using fax technology to communicate with clients, fellow panelists showed little support and no sympathy. But fax remains a secure point-to-point (P2P) communication and a technology that is, out of the box, HIPAA-compliant. I still maintain a Web-based fax service to communicate with clients that can’t be bothered with encrypted email. But as Ellis observed, if I received faxes via email it would blow a hole in the security of the P2P fax protocol and subject it to public Internet email messaging. I receive email notifications of incoming fax transmissions from my service provider and log on to the system using a secure connection to review incoming faxes.

The managing workflow session had a lively question-and-answer period. A participant had a question on what to do with LexisNexis’s Time Matters and new attorneys looking for a more modern, Web-based system. Had a representative from LexisNexis been there, he or she would have inquired whether the questioner’s firm used the Time Matters Mobility module. The Web-based Time Matters Mobility service supports remote access to the firm’s Time Matters server via the Web. Out of the office, attorneys have access to their secure calendar and contact integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange.

To satisfy incoming Millies (Millenials), law firms can take their Time Matters license to a private cloud. Amicus Private Cloud, Legal Workspace and Uptime Legal Systems would be happy to host a firm’s practice management system, even its entire practice, in a private cloud. Youngsters will find it hip when they can remotely connect to their practice-management platform, even from inside their office. Hoot.

A fellow attendee also wanted to know what practice management systems support OpenOffice. I got nostalgic. I started my law office on Sun Microsystems SPARC technology using StarOffice. When I moved to Intel-based PCs, I switched to OpenOffice.org, which was the open-source distribution of StarOffice. When Oracle Corp. acquired Sun Microsystems, it rebranded StarOffice to Oracle Open Office and discontinued the product. On the bright side, Larry Ellison donated OpenOffice.org code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation, which develops and distributes Apache OpenOffice under the Apache license.

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While Oracle was fiddling with StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, volunteer developers forked OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. Both software suites have a similar code base and include applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases. Although these two open-source software projects share the vast majority of their code, a notable difference remains: LibreOffice can embed fonts into documents so they look the same on any computer system even if the computer doesn’t have the font installed.

You can download LibreOffice or OpenOffice software for free for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X operating systems. The open office suites support Open XML, which will allow your documents interoperability with Microsoft Office and other XML-based applications and ensure documents can be open and read during their life cycle as business records.

The only practice management system I know that integrates with LibreOffice and OpenOffice is HoudiniEsq, which also works with Word and WordPerfect.


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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