Law Practice Today

Lawyers love the Internet. It offers easy access to services we use daily – booking flights, finding directions, and allowing time-starved lawyers get some holiday shopping done. And e-mail, along with the Blackberry, has enabled lawyers to provide a much higher level of service to their clients without being tethered to their desks.

Internet technologies have not, however, transformed the actual practice of law – and in particular litigation – as one might have expected since the online explosion of the late 1990s. A new breed of Internet companies is emerging, however, to provide unprecedented improvements in service at a fraction of the cost historically associated with legal technology.

What happened?

Some of the more popular software applications used in litigation today were developed in the 1980s, before the first version of Microsoft Windows was released and well before the first Web servers went live. Many lawyers are using a version of litigation software that was initially written for MS-DOS.

The core of litigation technology, which revolves around documentary evidence management databases, has been constantly revised to keep up with the Gateses: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP – never mind Mac OS and Linux. People are having nightmares about what will happen when their office upgrades to Windows Vista! Despite this fear, the programmers keep adding new “features,” many of which are not particularly important to core litigation needs. The result: the litigation technology equivalent of Microsoft Outlook – a slow, bloated program that everyone uses and no one likes.

These locally installed packages that are powerful, but to borrow a metaphor, it takes a village to use them: paralegals, in-house IT staff, consultants, and technology integrators to install, configure, update, and patch software as well as to provide help desk support. Expensive investments in local area networks and server storage are a necessity.

Many of these software packages are so feature-laden, attorneys are offered training classes! What lawyer has time for that? The result is that many or most of the technology-specific functions of litigation are handled by non-lawyers.

Foley Hoag’s “Litigation Technology Services” Web page exemplifies the fragmentation of the current landscape. They support Summation and Concordance for document management, Summation and LiveNote for transcript management, and Sanction and TrialDirector for trial presentation. This makes no sense to lawyers, who must deal with a unified case.

The consequences of all this are familiar to anyone in the industry. Attorneys and law firms are forced into managing multiple outside vendors to work with the same case data at different stages of the process. Without a great deal of planning, management and oversight, the legal technology effort easily becomes an albatross, a sinkhole for attorney resources rather than a source of competitive advantage. It raises the question “If this was supposed to help, why is it so hard to use?”

The second wave of Internet technology

Web 2.0 innovations from Google, YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other companies are disrupting and transforming multi-billion dollar industries. In their offices, our clients are increasingly turning to streamlined, simplified Web-based applications:  Gmail and Salesforce.com instead of Outlook and ACT! The Internet has also transformed the way business is transacted, enabling companies to deliver unprecedented choice, 24-hour access and availability, and substantial cost savings. Core business functions are regularly handled on the Web in virtually every industry one can think of: financial services, health care, airlines, hospitality, transportation and logistics, retail. The list goes on. Even utility bills and traffic tickets can be paid online.

The leading litigation software providers are trying to retrofit their aging applications for the Internet age. It does not work well. Litigation technology needs a fresh start, with tools developed specifically for the Web by people who intimately understand the Web.

What I want for the holidays is legal technology that is easy to start using and doesn’t cost a small fortune.

Today, it’s as easy to get sophisticated search technology for litigation processes as it is to find driving directions or look at online photo albums. Using “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) models, the core technologies of the Internet are being brought to the day-to-day functions of litigation management. So what are some of the characteristics of these services? What will Santa put in your stocking for the coming year?

Increased performance with improved usability

Web-based evidence management and presentation systems such as Nextpoint’s TrialManager platform bring the power and simplicity of Internet search to litigation. Super-fast processing capabilities are driven by powerful Web servers, not limited to a single local processor. Built-in OCR and search engine technologies scan and index every piece of data as it is loaded. TrialManager cases are up and running within minutes of receiving documents – not weeks.

When compared to the complexity of proprietary desktop database packages, a huge advantage of Web-based services is the use standard Web conventions such as search boxes, buttons, and navigation elements. It makes it easy for anyone with basic Internet familiarity to get started quickly without substantial training.

Totally mobile. Accessible from anywhere.

Like Santa’s speedy one-night trip around the world, Web-based products like TrialManager provide access from anywhere on the planet where you can connect to the Internet. Web-based access means all users are working on the same data at all times, be it from the courtroom, the law firm, the hotel or the airport. This eliminates synchronization issues between online and offline databases.

No hardware to configure, no software to install.

Does the United Airlines Website require you to purchase new computers or install software in order to book a flight? Of course not, or no one would ever use it. With Web-based applications, a reasonably up-to-date computer with a browser and broadband connection is all that is needed to provide any user with access to all of the evidence in the case. No more waiting for a litigation database to load, worrying the firm server is running out of storage, or needing new licenses to give access to additional members of the trial team.

Compared to locally installed databases, Web-based systems dramatically reduce the time it takes to deliver new or improved functionality. Patches and upgrades are tested and migrated right to Web servers, where they are immediately accessible to all users. The alternative? Check out the online discussion groups for the leading products. Here’s one recent post: “We have applied Build 9.02 and we are still experiencing the problem with rapid record-to-record navigation in Concordance, which causes the entire Concordance application to spontaneously close without any warning.”

Merry Christmas! Worrying about upgrading software versions are a thing of the past.

Everything you need in one place.

TrialManager is the only application an attorney needs for litigation management and trial preparation, integrating many critical functions required at different stages of a matter: extranet file sharing, so that the litigation team can upload and share case materials such as pleadings and pre-trial orders; application of document coding (or importing coded databases created by outside vendors); automatic, real-time character recognition (OCR) of all documents as they are uploaded into the system; search and tagging of case materials; and easy, intuitive tools to create document treatments and pull-outs. When we prepare demonstrative evidence and animations for openings and summation, we load the files to the extranet where they are available for the entire trial team to review and finalize.

Proven Technology Built Specifically For Complex Trial Processes

Web-based technologies are now proven quantities. Nextpoint has been delivering its services over the Internet to support federal trials across the country for six years, and using TrialManager’s evidence management and presentation applications for the last three. TrialManager’s functionalities were developed based on the real-world experience of Nextpoint’s trial professionals and customers, not by software designers working in isolation.

For example, in the course of supporting trials where deposition video was used, the folks at Nextpoint realized how time-consuming and wasteful the deposition designation process was, involving dozens of hours manually highlighting transcripts, and thousands of pages of expensive color copying. So they added designation functionality to TrialManager that allows the user to highlight a section of a transcript, apply a desired designation label, and generate color-coded “blowback” PDF’s showing the transcript in summary or in full with designations highlighted. Just as important, a line summary of the designations can be created in a file format from which standard video deposition packages can generate video clips of the designated segments.

Another unique functionality of Trial Manager is the ability to designate documents as depositions or trial exhibits, automatically number (or renumber), and electronically “stamp” these exhibits. As with designations, a PDF list of the exhibits can be generated at the click of a button to share with the court or opposing counsel.

It is the Web-based services model that enables new features to be offered with such speed. Because there is only a single place where the software needs to be updated, new features can be rolled out as soon as they are available, not “held and bundled” for years in order to justify charging an upgrade fee.

Cool new stuff

The future of Web-based litigation technologies will look much like innovations taking place on the Web today: streaming deposition video to desktops and Blackberries, synchronization with iPods and other portable media devices, integration for voicemail support, and more.

Substantial cost savings

Nextpoint’s customers have seen substantial cost savings from using Web-based applications to prepare for trial. Copying, shipping, digital media, color printing, and copying costs are substantially reduced. The efficiency of Web programming and distribution allows us to offer Trial Manager starting at $99 per month. That is a pretty easy conversation with the client. And with Santa!