Welcome to the latest issue of the Legal IT Insider newsletter (November/December 2014 # 278)
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TOP STORIES INCLUDE:
• Microsoft DMS – not a dead parrot but a live elephant – So… Microsoft’s Office 365/SharePoint Matter Center legal DMS project. It may not be a dead parrot but the elephant in the room everyone is ignoring is whether this will ever see the light of day as a serious legal document management system? Or, is it little more than a PR exercise and vaporware? We should find out by 2016 but that may not be a sound DMS procurement strategy!
• Vinasty: the saga continues with Vista set to buy ACS – Advanced Computer Services, the group which owns the UK legal IT provider Advanced Legal, is set to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners for £725m – Vista already own Aderant and inhouse legal tech specialist Mitratech.
• Who’s In & Who’s Out? – All this month’s wins, deals, swapouts & rollouts from the UK, US, EMEA, APAC and the Rest of the World including the Dutch going for WorkSite rather than a SharePoint DMS and yet another OpenText site falling by the wayside in the US at Dykema.
• Butterflies: or what BigHand did next – We also have a look at BigHand and its plans for evolving from a digital dictation caterpillar into a butterfly at the heart of the legal document production process, including today’s launch of its new SmartNote system.
• Legal futures: don’t live in the past – We’ve an interesting report from UK law firm Hodge Jones & Allen which asked a sample of 500 lawyers their views on the current state of the legal world. They are worried that legal IT is starting to wag the law firm dog – they also think IT is not improving the quality of service to clients – and they think a key challenge is the short-sightedness of lawyers who do not understand the basic economics of how to run a profitable business!
• And there’s more! – We report on the success of the new HP LinkSite alternative to DropBox plus Riverview Law adopting the “NewLaw” model by crossing the divide from lawyering to legal IT plus why working-from-home lawyers are often bare naked lawyers.
• The Legal Industry Video Awards: we have our winners – Finally, we have the results of our Legal Industry Video Awards – the winners have been chosen and there will be a showreel of all the winning entries up on the Legal IT Insider website shortly. Congratulations to everyone who took part – a big thank you to our judges – and the winners are going to love their awards.
Our next issue will be out on Wednesday 28 January 2015
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