Law Firm As Collaboration Station
What are the benefits of collaboration for law firms?
I attended the 20th Annual Law Firm Leaders Forum at The Pierre Hotel in New York City on October 8 and 9, courtesy of Thomson Reuters. Professor Heidi Gardner, Lecturer on Law and Distinguished Fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School, discussed how law firm leaders can lead their firms through changing times. Gardner shared her research on collaboration and explored how collaboration among law firm partners can help firms foster innovation.
Although Gardner did not talk about what software firms use to collaborate with colleagues and clients, she noted two trends in law that bespeak collaboration. First, law has grown in complexity, requiring lawyers to specialize in discrete areas and work in practice groups. Second, clients must engage in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) phenomena, such as regulatory schemes, to conduct business that requires expertise across practice groups and disciplines. Collaboration can be used as a means to respond to broad, complex issues presented to clients from highly specialized lawyers in firms.
Gardner’s research included interviewing law firm clients to find out why it was important to them that law firm partners collaborated. Clients said, among other things, that collaboration should foster efficient, innovative and cost-effective legal services and more access to knowledge, a greater geographic reach and perspective, a deeper understanding of the client’s business.
Law Firm Business Development Is More Than Relationship Building
Although there is a cost to collaboration, said Gardner, the benefits will come to outweigh them over time. The benefits will include more successful business development, higher personal productivity, enhanced reputation and “sticky” (read: loyal) clients. Gardner’s research on change and collaboration in law firms will be published later this year. From her talk at the Forum, her book will provide hard evidence of how collaboration can benefit law firms. Software that enables lawyers to directly collaborate on matters and documents with colleagues and clients should be on a firm’s procurement and implementation schedule.
LEGAL TECH UPDATES
Dell Inc., with MSD Partners and Silver Lake, agreed to buy EMC Corp. for a total of $67 billion. The agreed sale price is well over Dell’s valuation of $25 billion, which makes the Austin, Texas-based company the little, big buyer that makes the “world’s largest, privately controlled integrated technology company,” according to the press release. EMC’s CEO, Joe Tucci, will retire and Michael Dell will run Dell and EMC. VMware, which EMC owns 81 percent of, will continue as an independent, publicly held company.
Dell is looking to get away from its image as a PC and server manufacturer and embrace enterprise computing with private cloud and storage offerings that compete with IBM Corp. and HP. Subject to regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close in 2016.
Sponsored
Curbing Client And Talent Loss With Productivity Tech
Law Firm Business Development Is More Than Relationship Building
Happy Lawyers, Better Results The Key To Thriving In Tough Times
AI Presents Both Opportunities And Risks For Lawyers. Are You Prepared?
Why should lawyers care? As firms move to the cloud, they will need to run a cost-effective infrastructure (read virtual machines) in private clouds and transfer and transform their content and software to the cloud. The Dell-EMC transaction combines two franchises with complementary technologies: PCs, servers, storage and VMware’s virtualization technology. The Dell and EMC combination will offer hybrid public and private cloud infrastructure, software-defined data centers, digital transformation tools and services, and a converged infrastructure with mobile device management and security services.
Dell has a window of opportunity with law firms looking to the cloud. IBM has ditched its x86 server business and can’t provide the hardware for private clouds without third-party support. HP is in a state of flux, splitting its business and shedding employees. If Dell can marshal its offerings with EMC and VMware in the short term, the void from IBM and HP give Dell an opportunity to connect law firm customers with long-term cloud services.
Deloitte Consulting allied with Tableau software to enhance Deloitte’s ability to deliver self-service, collaborative analytics to clients. Tableau’s analytical tools help users visualize and share information. Tableau boasts of more than 26,000 customer accounts and reports that tens of thousands of people use Tableau Public to share data in blogs and websites for free.
I-9 Advantage, maker of I-9 and E-Verify management software, will announce enhancements to its products at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas from October 18 to 21. The enhancements include improvements to I-9 Medic software as a service. The I-9 Medic converts and helps correct paper-based I-9 filings. The SaaS utilizes proprietary algorithms and validation tools to error check I-9 forms. The online software also provides step-by-step corrective guidance to amend mistakes and omissions and validate critical data. Enhancements to I-9 Remote allow users to complete the I-9 form on smartphones and tablet computers.
KCura Corp. is hosting Relativity Fest 2015 in Chicago this week. In the keynote address on Monday, Andrew Sieja, kCura CEO, summarized the updates in Relativity 9.3 that will be generally available next month. First, users can turn data fields into analytical widgets and, using the D3 JavaScript library for visualizing data with HTML, SVG and CSS, visualize the results in drill-down graphs and charts. Second, build dashboards using analytical widgets. Third, a new search builder facilitates complex searching and lets you search full text with conditional filters based on any database field. Fourth, quickly move from collecting documents to searching and reviewing them. Relativity 9.3 gives users the ability to process extracted text directly into the Relativity Data Grid, which is Relativity’s NoSQL data store. Processing data in the NoSQL store improves speed, reduces storage requirements, and supports instant searching. The new version simultaneously processes of Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, supports direct processing of E01 files, and streamlines error handling.
Sponsored
AI Presents Both Opportunities And Risks For Lawyers. Are You Prepared?
How The New Lexis+ AI App Empowers Lawyers On The Go
(Disclosure: The author contributes to Thomson Reuters’s Legal Current blog and acts as a paid editorial consultant for Forum Magazine.)
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 [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.
