This week’s new product upgrades and releases are from Aderant + Phoenix Business Solutions + Mitratech + DPS Software + Advanced Legal + DocSolid + Lexis Visualfiles + Nikec + BA Insight
• Aderant has released Aderant CRM4Legal 5.3, the company’s integrated marketing, business development, and client communication system. The release primarily focuses on advanced integration between CRM4Legal and the Aderant Expert practice management system, and Microsoft Exchange. As part of the new release, CRM4Legal now provides direct, out-of-the-box integration with the Aderant Expert practice management system, allowing firms to easily integrate client and matter data from Expert with contact and company data in CRM4Legal. The Expert Integration Manager enables firms to customize the data they integrate and to manage, schedule, and monitor the ongoing synchronization. Combining financial data with contact and company CRM data, provides a firm with additional insight into its contact and client relationships, marketing and business development initiatives, and cross-selling opportunities. CRM4Legal 5.3 also includes a new custom contact synchronization engine, Contact Connect, which allows contacts to sync directly between Exchange and CRM4Legal.
• Phoenix Business Solutions has announced that the next version of Phoenix Monitor – version2.1, which includes significant enhancements to the data leakage prevention capabilities (which seem to be very popular with U.S. customers), will be released following the ILTA conference in August. Phoenix continues to partner with SolarWinds and the Phoenix Monitor Community on further enhancements to IDOL, EFS, and DLP monitoring and alerting, as well as other aspects of the Monitor suite.
• Mitratech has released othe next generation of its TeamConnect platform. While the 4.0 version of TeamConnect continues to offer fully integrated, comprehensive legal management products Mitratech is known for – including matter management, spend management and e-Billing, contract management, legal hold, and compliance solutions — this highly configurable and upgradable platform is claimed to “revolutionize legal technology expectations”.
“Today, legal departments are offered two choices: they can get up and running quickly with out-of-the-box products and process apps that offer limited functionality, minimal security, and only basic configurability OR they can spend months and millions of dollars implementing a complex, robust enterprise solution that is likely going to take the same amount of time to upgrade a year or two from now. We don’t believe either of these options is satisfactory,” said Mitratech CEO Jason Parkman.
“The new TeamConnect allows legal departments to stop compromising. It offers the robust, sophisticated functionality that TeamConnect has long been known for – while ensuring that the product can be implemented, administered, configured, and upgraded in an efficient and sustainable manner, resulting in lower total cost of ownership for our clients. We know that both of these goals are incredibly important, and we are thrilled to offer the only solution that fulfills both of these needs. Early results show that an average TeamConnect client will see the payback period on their initial investment cut by 43% due to increased configurability, faster implementation, and new functionality.”
• DPS Software has added a new functionality to DPSCloud, its managed IT solution which allows law firms to send and receive CJSM emails straight from and into their Outlook Office inbox and assign them to the right case or matter in their case management system.
The new development was made possible by the integration between Microsoft’s email platform and DPS’s case management software that gives users access to their case-related information straight from their email system. The Criminal Justice Secure eMail service enables users working in CJS as well as public, private and voluntary organisations to send emails containing sensitive data in a secure way. While the information transmitted via the CJSM system remains on CJS’s servers, all the other data owned by hosted clients is stored in DPS’s UK-based data centre, enabling them to comply with the regulatory requirements that must be observed by legal businesses in Great Britain.
• Advanced Legal has announced the launch of the latest version of Advanced Sign, an electronic signature and document exchange service specifically designed to meet the needs of the legal market. Advanced Sign version 2 has a new, more user friendly layout and increased functionality, making the system more flexible and aligned with law firms’ business needs.
The new functionality has been developed following customer feedback and market demand and will help law firms to automate a number of key processes, increasing efficiency and improving productivity.
Advanced Sign allows the digital exchange of documents for secure signature and viewing, offering clients a superior and cost effective method of dealing with documentation. Documents can be delivered and returned instantly, leading to a faster turnaround and increased productivity. Clients are also able to view and sign documents using mobile devices and so are not restricted to office working. The new release introduces enhanced features including: self-signing – where the sender’s signature is automatically added to a document upon sending; text boxes – which can be added for document data capture, such as addresses or contact numbers; check boxes – which can be added for confirming client consent/agreement; and post-it style annotations to detail client instructions. https://www.advancedsign.co.uk
• DocSolid has announced its Mailman 2.0 release, marking a significant generational evolution of the KwikTag Legal document scanning platform for law firms including cloud connectivity, increased image throughput and efficiencies, and substantive OCR improvements. KwikTag Legal lets law firms and corporate legal departments reduce the costs associated with paper records, enabling image capture integrated with the firm’s Autonomy iManage, Open Text EDOCS, Worldox, NetDocuments, Elite and Aderant systems. KwikTag Legal works with any MFD, copier or scanner, turning a firm’s existing devices into one-button, integrated scanning on-ramps.
The Mailman 2.0 releaseprovides important enhancements and new capabilities, including:
· Cloud Connected – enabling customers to select the services and frequency for cloud connectivity. Scanning statistics for each customer are communicated to the DocSolid cloud-based Post Office; customers can understand their usage patterns, and proactive support can be initiated. Courier Mode in Mailman 2.0 enables customers to schedule all cloud-based communication, or to make it a manually-initiated process. KwikTag Legal’s Mailman does not place any client-specific images or metadata in the cloud.
· Performance Driven – more horsepower increases overall image throughput and efficiencies. Mailman 2.0 turns on more prioritization choices for staging image jobs at the server engine. It also provides more choices for image compression and optimization of image input from the scan device.
· OCR Improvements – substantially improved OCR accuracy and flexibility is now standard, and optional international dictionaries are now available for the Mailman 2.0 engine.
Mailman 2.0 is part of the standard new system deployment for KwikTag Legal, and is available for existing customers as part of the standard cloud-based, auto-update included with the system support agreement.
• Lexis Visualfiles 2014, the latest release of LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions’ legal workflow and case management system, is growing in popularity in law firms with the number of client upgrades having risen substantially in the first half of this year. This growth is driven by the modern and intuitive Microsoft Office-style user interface, which greatly enhances user experience; and the new Outlook Plus integration module for lighter touch users. The transition from previous versions to Visualfiles 2014 is painless – this has further fuelled adoption by law firms. Visualfiles 2014 has been designed to be backwards compatible so that customers can upgrade without rewriting any of their existing business applications. The new interface works seamlessly with current workflows already in use in earlier versions.
Several more updates in Visualfiles 2014 are imminent. In accordance with the changes initiated by HM Courts & Tribunals Service in the way multiple cases are submitted to the County Court Bulk Centre (CCBC), the CCBC module in Visualfiles 2014 is being updated to reflect the new regulatory requirements. The new CCBC module will be available in the next service pack of Visualfiles 2014, scheduled for an early August release. On customer request, a new integration of Visualfiles with BigHand digital dictation is being introduced. This integration, developed by LexisNexis, is presently in the early adoption phase with key clients. This advanced functionality will make it easier and faster for fee earners and secretaries to work on documents.
• Building on the success of the previous release, the latest enhancements provide heightened security to enhance information integrity and help firms meet the upcoming new EU regulations. Among the new features, Nikec Docstore offers audit trail capabilities, improved activity reporting on users and/or files and integration with Document Management Systems (DMS), Active Directory and Outlook. It also offers users superior control when sharing files and folders internally or with external parties.
Users can now access and share attachments through the Docstore platform directly from their Outlook or DMS interface which not only minimises the number of steps between these processes, but consequently saves time and improves productivity. Meanwhile the ability to share documents directly via the familiar Outlook/DMS interface encourages user uptake which subsequently leads to enhance communications between teams and their clients.
Nikec Docstore also integrates with the firm’s Active Directory to alleviate the need for IT teams to manually recreate file and folder structures and permissions settings, resulting in time and cost savings.
• BA Insight has announced AutoClassifier 2014, which applies text analytics and semantic processing to add consistent, quality metadata to content surfaced within SharePoint. It also works with content stored outside of SharePoint, as long as it is indexed into SharePoint Search. The BA Insight Connector Framework enables secure access to a broad base of distributed content. BA Insight say the exponential growth of information requires new methods for managing content and search. If documents are not tagged with the appropriate metadata, then queries return every document that contains the search term, with no refinement of search results. To meet today’s information challenges, metadata must be used to enrich the end user search experience. AutoClassifier 2014 provides automatic tagging and classification of content based upon a taxonomy, using a robust rules engine. AutoClassifier 2014 is currently available. Existing customers receive this new version as a standard
maintenance upgrade.