Here are the recent wins and deals you need to know about including the Howard Kennedy PMS debacle and we also bring you details of the first residents of Barclays Lawtech Eagle Lab and a partnership between Dentons NextLaw Lab and pro bono platform Paladin.
Practice management
UK
Following its unfortunately timed selection of Thomson Reuters Elite Enterprise shortly before that product was sunsetted in 2016, UK top 100 law firm Howard Kennedy has now selected Elite 3E and has also chosen to utilize 3E Data Insights and Xcelerate Budgeting and Forecasting.
Located in London with 200 lawyers, we’re told that Howard Kennedy chose to transition to 3E from Enterprise following a comprehensive review process. We hope that involved a few words to the effect of “how did you let us select and announce that we’ve selected Enterprise so close to the time you decided to bin it.”
The end-to-end financial management solution will be implemented using the Blueprint Accelerator Pack, chosen by the firm to facilitate going live on budget and on time.
3E Data Insights is a self-service analytics model that creates insights from a dashboard on both desktops or mobile devices, enabling fee earners and managers to manage performance. Xcelerate Budgeting and Forecasting—powered by Elite partner OLAP Vision— will unlock real-time insights into the firm’s revenue and expense budgets, forecasts, and other key targets.
Separately Thomson Reuters also this week announced that U.S. law firm Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller has selected eBillingHub.
Hangley Aronchick has three offices across Pennsylvania—in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Norristown—and one in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. With 47 attorneys serving a broad range of clients, the firm chose eBillingHub, following a rapid review process, to help handle an increasing volume of e-bills.
In another UK PMS deal, Oury Clark Solicitors has swapped out its incumbent practice and matter management system for SOS Connect.
Oury Clark Solicitors is part of a larger professional services group which also has offices in Slough and includes a team of chartered accountants, and recruitment and financial consultants.
“We have been growing at quite a rapid rate in recent years,” says partner Simon Walsh. “Although there were no issues with our previous incumbent, we became aware that our practice management software required a greater degree of customisation due to our growth and this was what prompted the switch to SOS Connect.
“The implementation process has been very smooth so far and the SOS team has been exceptionally good.”
US
In the States, Anderson Kill has selected Aderant Expert as its legal practice and financial management software solution. With six offices across the United States, Anderson Kill needed to move away from their current, paper-intensive process by digitizing their business.
“We feel that Aderant Expert, combined with its support team, will enable us to manage our financial operation much more efficiently and effectively,” said Paul Schwartz, Chief Financial Officer at Anderson Kill P.C.
“Expert is sophisticated enough to meet the needs of our multi-office, domestic firm with expertise in large insurance recovery matters, and the Aderant team took a genuine interest in understanding our needs, culture, and team.”
The firm also looked at two other systems but Aderant says that after extensive meetings with management teams, Expert became the clear winner.
And OpenText, which has over the past 18 months become increasingly overshadowed by competitors NetDocuments and iManage and is losing remaining top 200 sites to them, have announced OpenText™ Legal Center – a cloud-based EIM application designed to integrate with OpenText eDOCS to manage client onboarding and document sharing. The company also announced a newly-aligned suite of products with strategic integrations to better serve the needs of the legal market. This enhanced focus will enable new and innovative solutions combining the industry’s leading legal applications like eDOCS, Axcelerate, EnCase and Decisiv.
“Law firms, governments, and corporate legal departments must continually evaluate their processes to remain effective and competitive in a rapidly changing climate,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, OpenText Vice Chair, CEO, and CTO. “OpenText is a leader in legal tech with solutions to help our customers manage the huge volumes of data they collect and generate, while incorporating the benefits of automation and AI. OpenText is committed to expanding our leadership in the legal tech field and helping our legal customers manage information and apply next-generation solutions to improve operational effectiveness, deliver insights, and maximize existing technology investments”
“With our acquisitions of Guidance Software and Recommind, OpenText has expanded and enhanced our solution set,” continued Barrenechea. “Combining these solutions with our industry-leading EIM platform, new AI and ML capabilities, and our experienced professional services organizations allows OpenText to provide a range of solutions unmatched in the legal market today.”
We’ll bring you further details shortly.
Collaboration
Dittmar & Indrenius (D&I), a top law firm in Finland, is adopting HighQ to improve collaboration, productivity and client experience by leveraging HighQ’s intelligent work platform to create added value for clients.
“We’re excited about the tremendous possibilities of HighQ in enhancing our customer experience through increased interaction, availability and overall ease of doing business with our clients,” says Katja Hollmén, D&I’s Director of Client Relations. “Collaborate offers us unique tools that will be immensely valuable to our Powerhouse service model providing strategic cross-silo solutions in complex matters.” Bottom line, she says: “Everyone has to respond to the clients’ evolving needs and to prepare for the future of practice of law. Our focus is on exceeding the most demanding corporate clients’ service expectations and to make sure that the digital transformation is an enjoyable and rewarding experience.”
D&I is known for its landmark references in Nordic cross-border transactions, complex disputes and cases relating to digital business transformations. Their 60 attorneys spread across various practice and industry groups, all serving their clients through three Powerhouses — Transaction, Dispute and Innovation Powerhouse — as one team in one efficiently managed process.
Partnerships
Australian workflow provider Caseflow and Wilson Legal Solutions announced a partnership agreement at ILTACON 2018 under which Wilson will provide implementation and training services in the United States for new installations of the Caseflow Acumen Suite, which helps law firms organize their workflows and cases.
As part of expansion plans into the North American legal market, Caseflow recognized that local implementation and training personnel would be a key requirement for U.S. firms looking to implement the case and matter management system developed in Australia.
Both firms have jointly planned a knowledge-transfer process whereby senior consultants from Caseflow will train members of the team at Wilson in the lifecycle of a Caseflow installation. For the first few new installs, Caseflow will play an active part in mentoring Wilson consultants and overseeing the project management to help ensure an optimal outcome.
And as SAP prepares to bring in changes to its user licensing policy Software Asset Management (SAM ) provider Snow Software has entered a partnership with Akquinet, the Germany-based end-to-end IT service provider to help companies prepare for those changes, under which SAP will focus on authorisations instead of usage.
Combining the two companies’ respective SAP-certified solutions – Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software and Akquinet SAST suite – customers can benefit from greater insight into SAP licenses and authorisations and increase security and compliance. This will help them ensure license compliance and management of authorisations in their SAP systems as well as give them improved security and the ability to comply with the GDPR. They will also be prepared for the new USMM (user measurement tool) that SAP is slated to release later this year.
The Program Manager for Software Asset Management at large Foods Manufacturer in the USA says: “Using the joint offering, we first focused on our 110 Limited Professional Users and found a high number of roles per user, that the ratio between permitted and used TCODES was exceptionally high and that the number of TCODES per roles was way too high. On average, users had 145 Authorisations but actually they were only using 25. As a result, we have realized a license savings potential of between $400k to $500K for just these 110 users.”
UK Legal Tech Lab
Barclays LawTech Eagle Lab is now officially open.
Announced earlier this year, the LawTech incubator in Notting Hill has been launched to turbo-charge London’s LawTech ecosystem. There are a number of partnering law firms of the LawTech Eagle Lab, which include Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance and Simmons and Simmons.
The residents now include –
ayfie – ayfie has developed a solution for law firms that combines natural language processing and linguistics, to extract insights from unstructured data without having to train machine learning algorithms with large document sets
Ginie AI – The technology recommends clauses to lawyers so they can customise contracts, and focus on their real value add, reducing costs for legal departments. Genie AI’s artificial intelligence technology solves the contract drafting problem accurately
Legatics – A platform that optimises and automates legal processes, allowing for real-time visibility over deal processing
Annotate – Annotate provides a single, secure platform that gets law firms working together seamlessly, from first draft to final sign off. They ensure that internal and external teams can collaborate while maintaining compliance, security and information governance
Stephanie Pagni, General Counsel for Barclays UK, who has played a key role in developing the initiative from the start said: “Now that the first residents have moved into our LawTech Eagle Lab, we look forward to working with our partners to facilitate supporting their growth by providing them with an environment in which they are able to collaborate and learn fast. We believe our residents offer the prospect of exciting solutions to improve a wide range of working practices in the legal sector.
“Using the latest technological developments, we anticipate that their innovations will drive positive transformation of the legal sector ranging from enhancements in commercial practice through to greater access to justice and applications to meet the daily legal needs of individuals and businesses in an accessible, efficient and easily comprehensible way.”
Pro bono innovation
And Dentons led by its innovation arm NextLaw Labs has partnered with Paladin, a pro bono platform with a mission to increase access to justice.
Dentons is the first law firm to partner with Paladin, which works with companies as Verizon and Lyft and has now launched a law-firm focussed version of the platform.