Latest news

In honour of Martin Luther King day I’d encourage all of our readers to watch this video interview with Jason Thomas, CIO at Cole, Scott & Kissane, who I spoke with last year about the varying progress made by law firms during the black lives matter movement and why it’s important to maintain that momentum. We also discussed how diversity needs to be firm-wide not just focussed on attorneys – equality by its very definition should apply to all employees.

Levenfeld Pearlstein has achieved a goal of providing a customized portal to every new client at intake. The firm has chosen Aderant Drive to deliver on that goal, and will provide on-demand collaboration portals to virtually every client, regardless of size. Legal IT Insider editor Caroline Hill spoke to Derek Schutz, product manager for knowledge management at Aderant, about whether the age of portals at scale has finally arrived and how that fits with the wide-scale shift to Microsoft Teams.

Prosperoware has just unveiled new data protection features for Microsoft 365 including OneDrive, SharePoint Online and Teams as part of its CAM platform. CAM is a SaaS enterprise digital transformation and governance platform that help firms to govern and reduce the risks associated with multiple collaboration systems.

The courts have been given the chance to pivot, and need to make sustainable, long term changes now, argues Lisa Helfer. We particularly like the references to Judge Dredd and Mad Max!

UK-headquartered legal engineering company Syke continues its run of big name hires with the appointment of former Royal Mail legal procurement head Sarah Barrett-Vane as its head of legal procurement, spend management & eBilling.

Online disputes platform Opus 2 has appointed Martin Coen as CEO, taking over from founder Graham Smith Bernal, who is taking on the chairman role. Coen, who comes from the fintech sector and was previously CEO of payments software vendor Dovetail, has long been a board member of Opus 2.

Ex-Thomson Reuters Contract Express head Andy Wishart has joined Agiloft as chief product officer. Wishart is one of the best-known names in the legal contract automation sector, having co-founded Contract Express developer Business Integrity, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2015. At TR he started out as global head of Contract Express but rose up the ranks to become VP of drafting and productivity solutions.

Founded in 2018, Summize assists legal teams and SMEs throughout the contract lifecycle. The platform enables users to understand, manage, and review their contracts, and in a short space of time has evolved from summarising the key points of a contract to a more holistic approach. Here we ask the Summize team to tell us more about the Manchester-based company and its strategy.

eDiscovery veteran Dan Bellopede – best-known for his roles at Recommind and OmniVere – has joined AdvoLogix as chief revenue officer. AdvoLogix is a Salesforce-based legal case and matter management system provider.

Oh it’s good to have a website that works again! News in last week from UK-based capital markets project management tool ScribeStar, which has launched a funding round on Crowdcube. Crowdcube operates an ‘all or nothing’ funding model – if ScribeStar reaches its target funding, it will get the cash. If it doesn’t, it gets nothing. Investors become shareholders with the percentage inevitably correlating to the sum invested. Take a look at what they have to tell you here.

Morae Global Corporation has expanded the company’s Asia-Pacific operations and business with the acquisition of Sydney-based information management provider and iManage reseller Trinogy Systems. Trinogy has long been a rival of Phoenix Business Solutions, which was acquired by Morae in May 2019.

Iridium Technology has acquired automated time entry provider Smart Time Apps, which becomes the fourth limb of Iridium’s business after business intelligence, budgeting (Intellistat), and paperless billing (Steere).

Matters.Cloud, a provider of cloud based practice management software to the legal industry, today announced a new partnership with Sage to make Matters.Cloud available via the Sage Marketplace.

In an acquisition that has the potential to bring about the much-needed centralisation of experience management, Litera has acquired law firm intelligence supplier Foundation Software Group: a move that sees Litera widen its platform from the practice of law to the business of law.

Baker McKenzie has appointed Kate Stonestreet as its new global chief operating officer, taking over from Jason Marty, who joins Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner as COO on 1 March. Stonestreet, who heads Baker’s business services transformation project underpinned by ServiceNow, will oversee all of the business services functions of the firm.

In a high profile hire for UK legal engineering firm SYKE, Jonathan Badrock has joined from DWF to head data services.