Law Department Management Blog
The dominant software used in-house are word processing and e-mail/calendar, followed far behind by matter management, document management, spreadsheets and presentation software. My blog has discussed 27 types of specialized software. What else might a law department use?
1. Benefit plans, to test proposed changes (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.)
2. Blogs (See my posts of July 20, 2005; and May 4, 2007 for an attack on blogs.).
3. Concept maps (See my posts of Nov. 28, 2005; and Dec. 21, 2005 #1.).
4. Corporate secretary and Board of Director packages (See my posts of July 19, 2006; Aug. 9, 2006; Oct. 1, 2006; Oct. 29, 2006; Jan. 24, 2006 for ten packages in one department; and March 9, 2007 #1 for more on software to assist Boards.).
5. Decision-trees (See my posts of Oct. 24, 2005 about FMC; and June 18, 2007 about belief nets.).
6. Dictation and voice recognition (See my posts of Nov. 20, 2006 on dictation; Feb. 4, 2007 and Feb. 6, 2007 on word-to-text capabilities; and Aug. 26, 2005 on voice recognition.).
7. Discovery (See my posts of Feb. 9, 2006 about hundreds of vendors at LegalTech; and Feb. 19, 2007 about mandates by departments to their firms to use them.).
8. Document assembly (See my posts of March 24, 2005 on if-then, rule-based document assembly software; Feb. 24, 2007 on rules-based document assembly software; and April 18, 2007 on DealBuilder and its use by three law firms.).
9. EDGAR filings (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.).
10. Expert systems (See my posts of Oct. 31, 2007 and March 27, 2005 on artificial intelligence software.).
11. Extranets (See my posts of Feb. 12, 2006 comparing extranets to portals; Jan. 30, 2006: ChevronTexaco; Oct. 18, 2006: unremarked extranets; Oct. 21, 2005: used other than in major litigation; and Jan. 3, 2006: Tyco’s extranet.).
12. Form 16s (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.).
13. Immigration forms (See my post of June 4, 2007 on I-9 software.).
14. Intellectual property databases (See my post of May 1, 2005 with some examples.).
15. Intelligent agents (See my post of Jan. 4, 2006.).
16. Knowledge management (See my post of March 5, 2005 on Google Desktop.).
17. Monte Carlo simulations (See my post of May 15, 2005.).
18. Network mapping (See my post of May 7, 2006.).
19. Neural nets (See my posts of March 27, 2005 on artificial intelligence software; and April 7, 2006 with its reference to neural networks.).
20. Portals (See my posts of Feb. 12, 2006 comparing an extranet to a portal; Aug. 5, 2005 about a portal in Sears’ law department for litigation support; April 9, 2006 about a portal in a manufacturer’s law department; and Aug. 16, 2006 about contents of portals.).
21. Registered agent, when creating and updating corporate matters (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.).
22. Semantic-concept search (See my posts of Feb. 19, 2006; April 4, 2006 #4; May 24, 2005 on concept searching, and July 21, 2005 on text analysis.).
23. Social networks (See my post of Jan.19, 2008 on LinkedIn; and Jan. 30, 2008 #2 on LawLink.com.).
24. Stock options (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.).
25. Subsidiary tracking (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006.).
26. Voting (See my post of April 18, 2005.).
27. Wikis (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 about Cornell’s legal wiki; Feb. 12, 2006 that predicts wikis between law departments; March 17, 2006 on wikis; May 17, 2006 on wiki-law.org; March 9, 2007 about Legal OnRamp; and March 20, 2007 #1 about Lucent’s law-department wiki.).
What have I missed?