I have commented before on the amount of information Legal Suite makes public, in striking contrast to the close-mouthed approach of other matter management vendors (See my post of Jan. 27, 2012: revenue, specific users, installed base.). The company’s newsletter this month had more detail.

“Heading towards the 400th customer?

Now in its 12th year of operation, the group [Legal Suite] will celebrate in the spring its 400th client. After Unilever France, the 100th client in 2004, RATP Group, the 200th client in 2007, Natixis group, the 300th client in 2010, 2012 will celebrate our 400th client.”

With this sizable group of users, Legal Suite would be in the top three of matter management vendors by number of departments

If you’re reading this and your company sells software, help the rest of us with a comment. What are the differences between these five terms? Some connotations for me are below but many distinctions and definitions elude me, not to mention there may be other terms that deserve to be on the list..

“Programs” are almost elemental, a notch above “code.” Code is the set of instructions written so that a central processing unit, once the code is compiled (if that is necessary), can do something. The term program sounds out-of-date now. “Let’s license a program so CPM can emulate DOS.”

An “application” does a narrower range of things and is very practical. “We wrote an application to print address envelopes for FOIA requests to the EPA.” Today, “apps” abound for mobile devices.

“Software package” suggests that several applications are combined, all to good effect for the user. “Our software package calculates interest due, creates forms, and tracks the matters in a database.”

“Solutions” appeals to marketers because general counsel and other potential purchasers (prospects) don’t care about the technical wizardry and whether Java is the right language. They want their problem solved. “With this solution, all your cares about international currency conversion disappear!”

“Systems” takes software package up a notch. A system has “modules” and an integrated look to it (the graphical user interface, GUI, which the screen shows). It sounds grander to consider implementing a whole suite of capabilities. “Let’s go for the system that has the best functions and features as well as a robust user base.”

How contracts are managed by legal departments is one of the topics covered by Exari’s white paper, Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report, Dec. 2011 at 12. A column chart shows the results from approximately 100 legal departments. Given four choices regarding the percentages of the techniques they use to manage contracts, the departments reported the following: paper filing (45% checked it), network drives (52%), spreadsheets (17%), and “contract management systems" (about 30%). The numbers add up to more than 100 because, I presume, respondents were allowed to check more than one and they use more than one technique.

As scanning becomes more routine, I assume paper filing will diminish. Even so, for years to come companies will want to keep the original of important signed contracts.

What struck me from this data is that contract management software appears to be more common in legal departments than matter management software (See my post of March 1, 2011: estimates something like 2,500 out of 25,000 US legal departments use such software.). Perhaps the term "system" implies something broader than a software program. Some people use the word system to convey an entire organizational process with an array of integrated tools and methods and practices (See my post of Feb. 5, 2012: list of 39 contract management offerings sent on request.). Perhaps the respondents who completed the survey were predisposed toward contract management.

ALM Legal Intelligence compiled responses from 107 senior in-house counsel, about three-quarters of which were general counsel. The summary of the report, in Law Tech. News, Feb. 2012 at 24, says that almost two out of three of the respondents come from companies with annual revenue of less than $1 billion, so many of the respondent departments have only 1-5 lawyers.

Size matters when it comes to e-billing software and its advantages. So, perhaps it is not as surprising as you first think to read that of the 107 law departments “none plan to install e-billing software to track outside counsel and fees.” You don’t benefit sufficiently if you are only two or three in-house lawyers if you have to choose, install, learn, roll out and maintain e-billing software. Even with larger departments the respondents might have thought of matter management software packages as more suited to “track outside counsel and fees.” They might have read the question as speaking merely to the method of transmitting invoices of outside counsel. The short summary also does not indicate what percentage of the respondents already uses e-billing and so don’t “plan to install” it.

In short, a survey finding that suggests an utter lack of interest in e-billing software among law departments may be an artifact of the respondents’ smallness, the question’s ambiguity, or the absence of a revelatory, complementary question. Other data tells us, after all, that e-billing capabilities are spreading.

If you are with a law department, and if you are not interested in document review products – litigation support products, the pickings were slim at LegalTech NY other than matter management (See my post of Jan. 5, 2012: 11 matter management systems with booths at LegalTech.).

Even consulting assistance was sparse. Huron Consulting Group had a booth as did Kierested Systems. Epiq, which now has a legal consulting group headed by veteran Jim Mittenthal, a refugee from the diaspora of HildbrandtBakerRobbins, was also on the floor.

By my rough count, at least six vendors at LegalTechNY offered SharePoint applications. For example, Handshake Software explained to me that its software can draw on the structured, SQL data in any matter management system and put that data into SharePoint. It sounds like the ubiquitous software takes a step toward a portal, or a platform, or a data warehouse.

Handshake also explained that their PageGum application lets an in-house lawyer personalize SharePoint. Tools that personalize what is on the screen for a user have great appeal, if the users take advantage of those features.

I note three other SharePoint vendors from the show. CLM Matrix offers a SharePoint application related to contract administration and Business Integrity http://www.business-integrity.com/ promotes its integration with SharePoint for contract creation and management with Contract Express. The third is Dolphin software, which swims in the same pool as CLM Matrix and Business Integrity.

Every now and then law departments request software written especially for their own purposes. Usually they are very large departments and they conclude that there is no suitable package available for license. Custom software that holds promise as precisely targeted to solve a need may be the perfect solution, or it may belong better elsewhere.

For example Cisco developed the platform that it decided eventually to spin out to LegalOnRamp. According to an interview of Cisco's Steve Harmon, Senior Director of Legal Services, on July 25, 2011 by LegalOnRamp, Cisco did so in part for economics. "Over time, … we could license the technology from LegalOnRamp … more cheaply than I could continue to pay my own staff to maintain and develop that platform."

As a second reason, one applicable to every law department that creates bespoke software, "every dollar that I spend on maintaining existing applications is a dollar that I'm not free to spend on other innovation." Look in the market for vendors spurred to innovate and use your own dollars for different purposes.

If you are interested in knowing more about software for contract management, you can get my compilation of 39 of them. My list has the trade name of the package, the vendor’s name, and a website address. While it can’t claim to be the definitive list of software geared toward production, retrieval and analysis of contracts and agreements, it can certainly claim to be long!

To get it, e-mail me and tell me what software for managing contracts you use in your law department. I am asking neither about generic document management software nor about workarounds (e.g., Word and directories and naming conventions). I want to know about software that is purposefully designed for creating, tracking, and storing contracts. If enough people respond, I will write a summary blog post, disclosing no specific information but only aggregated results.

So, to get the list, write me about your department’s software that helps prepare and administer contracts. rees@reesmorrison.com

Always on the lookout for matter management systems and their developments, I walked the aisles of LegalTech and welcomed these: Bridgeway (e-Counsel, LawManager), CSC [Corporation Services Company], doeLEGAL (Summit), Datacert (AIMS, CLD), EAG (CaseTrack), Legal Files, Legal Suite, LexisNexis (CounselLink, Examen), Mitratech (TeamConnect), Synaptec (LawBase), and TyMetrix (T360).

In my hot-off-the-press report on benchmark metrics of matter management systems, MMS Insights, 10 of the 11 above are in the group of 15 that I analyze most extensively. One of them did not have a participating department among the 400+ U.S. and Canadian companies. Not present at LegalTech, or at least not visited by me, were Legal Edge, Elite’s Practice Manager, and Elite’s ProLaw.

I did not spot perennial exhibitor LT Online, which for years has been at the top of the third-level escalator. Also not represented this year was Serengeti. The newcomer was Legal Suite, which has a commanding presence of installations among law departments in France and now wants to makes its software and services as widespread in the American and Canadian markets.

Charles Christian’s Orange Rag, January 2012, wrote about a British law firm that selected HP Autonomy iManage WorkSite to replace its incumbent bespoke document management system. Christian mentioned a few other choices to fill that need, all based around comparison to Sharepoint. “For Sharepoint ‘the usual suspects’ of iManage and OpenText but also three Sharepoint alternatives: Workshare Point, MacroView DMF and Sword Excalibur.”

I have previously mentioned document management systems (See my post of Oct. 13, 2011: discusses 7 vendors from two surveys.). The three alternatives to Christian’s usual suspects were not included among the seven systems mentioned in that post. Perhaps the UK legal market has offerings that have not penetrated much in the United States.

In general, as I have learned amply from matter management systems for legal departments, once you leave our shores a wholly different array of packages are on offer – legal department software develops locally all around the world.