The past week has seen recognition for BigHand and IT Lab in the Megabuyte50 Awards, while the Law Society of Scotland has been given a cyber award for its Smartcard digital ID initiative. Ashurst has appointed a new CFO, while in tech news from the UK, My Home Move has gone live on LexisOne, in Canada, NetDocuments has been selected by McLennan Ross, while Australian-headquartered DocsCorp has announced a new integration with HighQ. And out of the US, we flag Aderant’s worthy-of-a-mention CSR initiative over the past year, which has seen employees worldwide take a day out of work to help a charity or project.
Awards
BigHand has won the Accounting & Enterprise Software category at the Megabuyte50 Awards and come out in sixth place overall in the top 50 rankings of best performing private technology companies.
Megabuyte’s rankings take into account a company’s growth, profitability, cash conversion and size.
Megabuyte said of BigHand’s accounting and enterprise software win: “The company has consistently delivered double-digit levels of organic growth, as a result of competitive displacements, growth within existing accounts, investment in faster markets, such as North America, and expansion into smaller legal firms and other professional services organisations, through its SaaS solution. Meanwhile, margins and cash conversions are particularly strong”.
BigHand was listed in eighth place overall in 2015.
Other Megabuyte top 50 listings include IT support and technology partner, IT Lab, which appeared for the first time at number 28.
IT Lab’s CEO Peter Sweetbaum said: “The Megabuyte50 awards is an incredibly influential independent measure of companies among our peer group, and our position in this league table is a reflection of our obsession with meeting our customers’ needs and our differentiated business model focused on helping our clients to navigate the rapidly evolving technology landscape.”
Elsewhere, The Law Society of Scotland has been recognised by the inaugural Scottish Cyber Awards for its members ‘Smartcard’ initiative, which provides practising solicitors with a secure digital signature and acts as professional ID across Europe and globally.
The professional body – which currently has over 11,000 members – was named winner of the Leading Light Innovation Award ahead of fellow finalists Net-Defence and Payfont.
Lorna Jack, chief executive of the Law Society of Scotland said: “The Smartcard is a major part of the work we are doing to help our members protect themselves and their clients from cybercrime and we are very proud that our work has been recognised with this award in what was a very competitive category.”
Colin Slater, partner and cyber security lead in Scotland for award sponsor PwC Scotland, said: “It’s reassuring that while cyber security may be a nascent sector in Scotland, it has a strong bedrock to build from in the future.
Appointments
Ashurst has selected a new chief financial and operations officer, appointing UKTV’s Jan Gooze-Zijl to the role.
Gooze-Zijl, who has previously held roles at corporatiosn including Virgin Media Group, Telefonica O2 Europe, Accenture and Telewest Communications, will formally start in February. He replaces Brian Dunlop, who left Ashurst in August, as the firm continues to suffer from falling profits and a wave of departures.
UK
My Home Move Ltd, the UK’s largest provider of mover conveyancing services, is now live on LexisOne. LexisOne is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for legal from LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions, which is powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX.
It was the fact that LexisOne is built on Microsoft Dynamics AX platform that clinched the deal with My Home Move, which is committed to Microsoft technology for its IT infrastructure, and already has staff in-house ready to maximise the use of the solution.
Andy Sparkes, general manager at LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions, said: “Due to the fast changing global environment, organisations require standard best practice processes to manage business; alongside reliable visibility of commercial performance in real-time. Only an ERP-led business management approach can truly facilitate this.”
Canada
NetDocuments has been selected by Canadian law firm McLennan Ross, which has offices across Edmonton, Calgary, and Yellowknife in Alberta and Northwest territories.
According to Chuck Martel, information systems manager at McLennan Ross, the decision to switch its DMS was driven in a large part by the innovation and security initiatives NetDocuments brings to the legal DMS market.
“NetDocuments’ flexible storage options with ndFlexStore™ will allow our firm to leverage the global cloud-based platform while separating the data storage location – solving the long-standing issue of data sovereignty through delivering a single instance of software with intelligent ‘geo-aware’ document storage,” said Martel.
Australia
DocsCorp has announced that metadata management software, cleanDocs, now integrates with HighQ, a provider of secure cloud collaboration and content management solutions, to ensure the highest degree of security and compliance when sharing information and collaborating in the cloud.
HighQ customers with the iManage Work connector will be the first to benefit from the integration. Documents uploaded to HighQ from iManage Work using the HighQ integration appliance will now be able to be cleaned of metadata as a seamless part of the upload process. Documents are routed by the connector to a server on the client’s premises where the documents are cleaned before they are uploaded to HighQ.
Leading independent Australia law firm Hall & Wilcox is one of the first firms globally to benefit from the integration. Peter Campbell, client solutions director, said, “We are already enthusiastic users of both the cleanDocs product and HighQ and value them as part of our technology portfolio. The collaboration between HighQ and DocsCorp to link the two products, demonstrates a shared vision and technical capability that aligns with our own smarter law strategy to co-create solutions with clients and other providers.”
CSR
Deserving of a mention, Aderant this year encouraged all of its 450 employees worldwide to dedicate a full day of service in their respective communities in 2016. Each of the nine offices around the world selected a date, a charity and a project, donating their time and talents in a variety of disciplines.
In Aderant’s headquarters in Atlanta, employees set aside October 19 as their day of service to help the Chattahoochee Nature Center with a variety of projects including boardwalk repair, greenhouse cleaning, garden planting, and trail clearing and cleanup. “We try to do something different each year,” said Stephanie Buback, Aderant’s Global Director of Human Resources. “The Chattahoochee Nature Center was perfect because they value being part of the community’s educational, scientific and cultural life. With our headquarters in close proximity to the Nature Center, we felt it was a great fit for our day of service.”
Legal tech startups
Did you catch our latest Startup Corner interview with PandaDoc? Headquartered in Silicon Valley, PandaDoc is a web-based contract automation and transaction management platform. You can read the article here: http://legaltechnology.com//latest-news/startup-corner-pandadoc-who-why-what-where-how/