Yesterday I received a press release from Legal Suite. It was notable for its level of disclosure so I offer two extracts from it.

“Legal Suite has already helped numerous clients in North America, across a number of industry sectors: Direct Energy, AstraZeneca, IATA, TransUnion, Aldo, National Bank of Canada, Industrial Alliance, to name but a few.” It is commendable for a vendor to refer to several specific law departments that use its product and services.

“Legal Suite helps 400 international references, more than 600 projects and 18,000 global users. The group announced 7.8 million dollars of revenues, with a 17% growth for 2011.” Again, it is commendable that the vendor, which is privately held, provides such transparency. If the sentence means that 400 law departments use its offering, that puts the company in the top ranks of matter management software by size of installed base.

Legal Suite will participate in LegalTech New York at booth 1712. For more information about the company, visit its website. www.legal-suite.com

LawDepartmentManagementBlog is pleased to publish the submission of Phil Homburger, the founder and CEO of Synaptec Software, creator of the law department matter management system, LawBase. phil@lawbase.com

“We started programming LawBase in 1979. It became an actual product in 1981. We began before the IBM PC was announced and before any of the current tools were available. There was no affordable commercial database so we created our own. The first system LawBase ran on had a 23MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive that was 8 inches in diameter, weighed 40 pounds and was definitely bigger than a breadbox.”

“LawBase has over 1,000 users in law departments in companies as varied as hospitals, multi-national banks, restaurant holding companies, media companies and mortgage banks.”

“While most of our corporate clients use LawBase in the typical ways to manage matters, outside counsel, legal holds and litigation, one southern California bank has adapted it to perform risk analysis for underwritten loans. Factors such as a borrower company's domestic vs. foreign ownership and geography of operation are entered. Using a formula, LawBase calculates a risk assessment and creates automatic reminders for periodic review.”

An obvious but nonsensical, answer would be “all matters.” That cannot be the solution since it begs the question “What makes something a matter?” (See my post of March 26, 2008: definition of the term "matter".).

Many law departments deem a set of legal activities a matter for purposes of tracking them on a matter management system when the law department retains outside counsel to assist. To keep track of how much goes to each firm, and to all law firms in general, and perhaps to charge those fees back to a business unit or staff function justifies creating and updating a matter.

More of the work of a legal department finds its way into a matter management database if the department defines matters to be tracked along the lines of those that are “significant” or “more than four hours of work” or some other criteria.

Another possibility is to let practice groups define what kinds of matters they wish to include in the system. Employment lawyers might filter and clump their activities differently than would lawyers for the widget business unit. I have not seen a variable rule like that but it would have the advantage of being tailored to perceived needs and therefore more likely to be sustained.

Law departments that track time end up with some “general” matters for hours that would not otherwise have a matter for a home. And, one final thought: it should not be assumed that all matters in a system should have all the same fields populated. The more important the matter, the more fields should be the operative rule.

A negotiation app that was released recently through Apple and will be released soon for Android (BlackBerry to follow) could help in-house counsel. This offering came to my attention from Don Philbin, Jr.

He wrote “We've been studying negotiation patterns empirically with thousands of cases and have some good models using neural networks and patent-pending algorithms. A Lite version is made available on smartphones so negotiators can run scenarios, see infographics on their progress (and projections) and see tit-for-tat type calculations [a term from game theory for a form of reciprocity].” Philbin hopes his app will help corporate lawyers plan and execute effective negotiations. He also sent a link to a video overview as well as a press release.

Early next year, General Counsel Metrics will produce a breakthrough analysis of matter management software (MMS) in light of law department benchmark metrics. Along with the quantitative insights, there will be assembled my MMS posts from this blog. There are today 143 of them, all organized into five topical areas, with back references listed and sorted, and with a detailed index.

Within the sub-parts of each broad topic – benefits of MMS, choices if you want to license MMS, complementary software, and operational issues –the posts are in chronological order so that someone will have read what is referred back to by later post. This text portion of the analysis extends for nearly 90 pages.

Early in the data collection this year for the GC Metrics benchmark survey, 69 law departments stated how many years they had been using their matter management system. The average number of years those departments had had their system installed was 6.4 years. Later, with 652 law departments in the survey, twice as many (139) had submitted longevity data. The average dropped a year, to 5.4, and the median number of years was 4. The law department with the longest history of a matter management system had just reached the two decade mark!

Given the cost, diversion of time and energy, and risks that face law departments when they license and install a matter management system, it surprises me to see a five-year average life. But it could be that several of these law departments had another system before the current one, so their average years of using that kind of software is higher. The question asked only about the current system and how many years since its installation date.

Describing new developments in CounselLink, Jeff Schuett, its VP and GM at LexisNexis described one particular addition that deserves note from Met. Corp. Counsel, Nov. 2011 at 30. The matter management software has a new feature that “can support existing agreements, allowing clients to publish the billing rules, manage the partnership, set expectations and establish clear communications regarding exceptions and compliance.”

This makes sense to me. Other providers of matter management and e-billing software may have equivalent functions in their software, but I am not aware of them. So my hat’s off to CounselLink for a useful development for legal departments. True, some claims are a bit grand, particularly “manage the partnership” and “establish clear communications,” but I grant some leeway to marketing spin. Even with capabilities stripped down, to have the ability to link guidelines more closely to matter tracking represents a significant benefit.

The latest submission in my series features Eric Blankenship, the veteran leader of EAG’s matter management system offering.

“Founded in 1986, EAG specializes in providing matter management software to corporate legal departments, and litigation consulting services to banks, insurance companies, securities firms and individual investors.

CaseTrack was first introduced in 1995. Prior to that, EAG had been primarily developing custom systems on a client-by-client basis utilizing a variety of platforms (e.g., DOS, Windows, OS/2, Unix, Mac). These systems were costly to develop and support, putting them out of reach of most legal departments. This, combined with the fact that most corporations were beginning to standardize on the Windows operating system, led us to develop an off-the-shelf software package – and CaseTrack was born. The first half-dozen sales were the most difficult. It’s amazing how creative you can be when someone asks “how many other companies are using the product?”!

Today, over 200 legal departments are using CaseTrack. They range in size from Fortune 50 corporations with 500+ users to private companies with less than five users. They include companies from a wide range of industries – automotive, energy, insurance, technology, pharmaceutical, financial services, manufacturing, and health care – who use the product to meet a diverse set of needs from matter management to electronic billing to managing legal holds.

Although CaseTrack is designed out-of-the box to meet the needs of a wide variety of legal departments, companies have been creative in finding ways to enhance its usefulness by seamlessly integrating with their legacy systems. For example, one automobile manufacturer set up an integration point with their mainframe system to retrieve detailed vehicle information, including service history. Having this information available at the push of a button within CaseTrack eliminated the time consuming process of looking it up in a separate system and then manually re-keying the necessary data.”

One of the questions Major, Lindsey & Africa, the executive search firm, asked in-house respondents in a survey was to check which of eight topics interested them. The third-most checked topic was “New technology for legal departments.” Let me riff on that.

Three variations on the central idea of technology could be in play, and only one of them do I wholeheartedly encourage.

(1) Some general counsel might like to know about software and hardware capabilities that have not been used in law departments but that have promise (“New technology for legal departments.”) I doubt that truly novel offerings hold much promise because so many of them disappoint and the learning curve is high.

(2) More general counsel might like to know about technology that their law department doesn’t use, regardless whether the technology is novel (“Technology that is new for my legal department.” Productive software or equipment, tested and debugged by other law departments, gives more assurance of a good return on investment.

(3) Most general counsel, in my opinion, should wish to know about new and better uses of the technology they already have in their department (“New and better uses of my existing technology.”) The cost is much lower, familiarity much higher, and the return on investment of squeezing lots more juice from current systems much greater. Make the most of what you have before you experiment with new software.

Here is the latest backgrounder on a leading matter management system’s founder, Joe Bookman of CompInfo (currently the CEO of PinHawk).

“CompInfo was incorporated in 1978. Yiorgos Athanassatos and I, along with other early CompInfo people, had worked for CBS News Elections and Surveys. We were part of a small group responsible for the Election Night computer system and we started out with large system consulting projects.

Our first law office project came in 1980 when Skadden Arps asked us to develop an accounting system to help them run the firm. We exchanged lower consulting rates for the right to license the resulting software, and LawPack for Law Firms was born. The idea of running a law firm like a large business was unique at the time. The system gained lots of attention, mostly as a curiosity. Eventually, the system was implemented in 11 of the 50 largest law firms in the U.S.

While the Skadden software was being developed, another CompInfo client, Equitable Life, received a Wang VS word processing system for their law department. The head of litigation realized that the Wang VS was a computer and could be used to manage the details about each matter, each outside counsel, and many other things. CompInfo and Equitable worked together to develop the earliest release of Corporate LawPack. During the next 20 years, LawPack was ported to a variety of hardware and software platforms. The software was implemented in numerous law departments, including 40 of the Fortune 100, many large government agencies and financial institutions.

I believe that CompInfo was the only legal vendor with large law firm accounting software as well as large law department software to manage legal bills. Corporate LawPack was the first commercially available matter management system. It was originally targeted at large departments since it required a Wang minicomputer. Those computers were expensive and many corporate IT departments would not support Wang equipment. Today, hardware platform independence is taken for granted but in the 1980’s and 1990’s the choice of hardware platform greatly limited the potential market for software.

CompInfo’s strong market position in both law firm and corporate legal markets made it an attractive takeover target. The company was acquired in 1991 by a law firm time and billing vendor that had recently gone public. Since then, the acquiring company was restructured; sold two time; and endured many management changes. The expanded company did not offer the software support that clients required. I am told that old releases of LawPack are still running in a few corporate departments.”

On a personal note, I met my friend Joe Bookman on the platform of MetroNorth in Scarsdale in 1984. He was holding a Wang portable hard drive, a heavy object the size of a very large hat box. We began talking and a month or so later I quit practicing law and joined CompInfo as a sales person at its offices, then 1860 Broadway. For more on Cottage Industrialists (See my post of Sept. 21, 2011: Frank Orzo of LTOnline; Oct. 14, 2011: Rob Thomas of Serengeti; and Oct. 24, 2011: Ladan Behnia of Mitratech.).