The Web-based practice management application Rocket Matter today released version 2.0 of its platform. The new version adds two notable features: document assembly and custom fields. With this release, Rocket Matter becomes the only cloud-based practice management platform to integrate document assembly, according to Larry Port, the company’s co-founder and chief software architect. The document [...]
I have published a post about them at the Catalyst E-Discovery Search Blog: Two New Legal Ethics Opinions Suggest Clear Skies Ahead for Cloud Computing.
The Web-based practice-management application Clio marked its third year of business Oct. 1. Today, to mark the occasion, it announced new features and unveiled a cleaner design.
The most significant changes announced today are that Clio users can now integrate their accounts with three of the leading cloud-based document management applications: NetDocuments, Dropbox and Box.net. The integration means that the documents you have in Clio’s document management system can now be synchronized with these other applications. Besides keeping your documents synchronized, this has two other advantages: it gives you access to your documents when you are offline and it provides a back-up copy of your documents.
Figure 1
To integrate with Dropbox, simply go to your settings in Clio and select the setting that authorizes Clio to access your dropbox account. As with Clio’s Google Apps integration, the connection is made using the OAuth protocol, which allows access without sharing your password. You are then asked to allow the connection between Clio and Dropbox (Figure 1). Click “allow” and Clio immediately creates a Clio folder in Dropbox and populates that folder with sub-folders for every matter you have in Clio. Once the process is done, you can view your Dropbox documents directly from within your matters on Clio. (Figure 2). As you drag and drop documents into Clio, they automatically show up in Dropbox, with no further action required.
Figure 2
Clio has also cleaned up its user interface by redesigning its pages to highlight the search bar. Needless to say, this is the trend among a number of sites — from WestlawNext to Lexis Advance — and emulates the simple design of Google. Clio has replaced its somewhat tiny search box with a larger, more prominent one (Figure 3) and eliminated some of the clutter at the top of the page. It has added a simple notifications icon that lights up red when you have unread messages.
Figure 3
Also enhanced is the search function itself. It now includes autocomplete, so that as you begin to type the name of a client or matter, a drop-down list appears of matching entries (Figure 4). That makes it a bit easier and quicker to find what you are looking for.
Figure 4
In announcing these changes, Clio provided some figures about its growth. In three years, it has grown to nearly 50 employees and its customers number “in the thousands.” It manages over 3.5 million contacts, 750,000 matters and 1.5 million documents. All tolled, customers using Clio’s time and billing features have billed $275 million.
“As a company, we’ve exploded over the past year,” Clio co-founder and CEO Jack Newton told me in an interview earlier this week. Clio will be rolling out more enhancements over the next six months, he added.
Legal research company Fastcase will announce a new utility tomorrow that enables one-click printing of any case from any source on the Web or in any Microsoft Word document. Called Fastcase Cloud Printing, the utility lets you print or save a nicely formatted, two-column version of any case. The utility works with Google Scholar, Westlaw, LexisNexis or anywhere there is a case online.
You can also use it to create and print a list of cases. Say you are reading a case or a brief that contains many citations. With a single click, Fastcase Cloud Printing will generate a list of all the cited cases within the document and let you select the ones you want to print.
The printing utility is installed as an add-on to Internet Explorer or Word. Versions for Google Chrome and Firefox will be released later. For now, the utility works with Web pages and Word documents. Later versions will also allow one-click printing from Outlook and PDF documents.
The utility works by recognizing citations within documents and then using that information to pull the matching case or cases from Fastcase. For example, if you use it to print a case you are reading in Google Scholar, it does not somehow pull the case from Scholar and reformat it. Instead, it finds the corresponding case in Fastcase and presents it for you to print.
One obvious benefit of such an app is simply to be able to print cleaner, better-formatted versions of Web cases. Another is to be able easily to bulk print a set of cited cases.
A less-obvious benefit of this app is that it may save a firm money. In concept, the app is similar to Westlaw Find & Print. But users of Find & Print pay for it by the transaction. Law Firm Bottom Line recently estimated that the cost of Find & Print has increased 144% over five years. The Fastcase utility can eliminate the need to use Find & Print — even from within Westlaw.
Initially, Fastcase will offer the application only to enterprise subscribers, who will receive it as part of their existing subscriptions at no extra charge. Later, the app will be offered to lawyers who have access to Fastcase through their state bar associations, although they may have to pay an added fee for it.
For screencaps of Fastcase Cloud Printing, see below.
The toolbar lets you select to print the case you are viewing, the cases cited within the case, or a citation you enter. It then takes a few seconds for Findcase to retrieve the cases.
When you choose to print all cited cases, the app lists the cases and lets you select the ones to print.
The formatted case can be printed or saved to your computer.
The public beta release last week of LexisNexis Firm Manager adds yet another choice for lawyers to use Software as a Service, or SaaS, to manage their law practices. Already offering law practice management in the cloud are such sites as Clio and Rocket Matter. Do SaaS applications make sense for lawyers? Is it ethical for lawyers to use them?
At a panel discussion recorded during LegalTech last week, I joined three other legal technology professionals to discuss the topic of law practice management via the cloud. Moderator of the panel was Tom Mighell, author of the blog Inter Alia and senior consultant at Contoural. Besides me, the other panelists were Carolyn Elefant, creator of MyShingle.com, and Andy Adkins, founder of the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
Watch our video below. If you have any trouble seeing the video below, then you can play it by clicking on this link.
Four companies that offer legal-oriented products and services through the cloud have banded together to form the Legal Cloud Computing Association. LCCA’s purpose, according to its announcement, “is to promote standards for cloud computing that are responsive to the needs of the legal profession and to enable lawyers to become aware of the benefits of computing technology through the development and distribution of education and informational resources.”
The four companies that make up LCCA’s founding membership are:
As its first official act as an organization, the LCCA published its comments on the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 paper concerning lawyers’ use of Internet-based client-development tools (PDF).
The LCCA tells the ABA commission that it supports efforts to provide clarity to the legal profession on the ethical implications of Internet technologies. With regard to cloud computing, the LCCA proposes that the ABA endorse a minimal set of standards for cloud-computing providers along with model terms of service for cloud providers.
Those minimal standards, the LCCA says, should cover data-center security, network security, software security, data-transmission security, back-ups and redundancy, confidentiality and privacy, and data portability.
Last week here, I reported on an iPhone evidence app that was missing one of the federal rules. The company that created the app, Tekk Innovations, contacted me to say that it has now updated the app’s description to say, “Current as of December 1, 2007.” That may not be enough to alert everyone that it is missing a rule, but it is a step in the right direction.
The company also said that it has another app, Lawstack, that it describes as its “flagship legal app.” Lawstack has all the federal rules update through December 2009, it said. It includes the Constitution and the federal rules of civil procedure, appellate procedure, evidence, bankruptcy procedure and criminal procedure.
Winners of the 2008 Webby Awards have been announced, honoring excellence in Web sites in more than 100 categories, and in the law category, the Webby Award winner is OUT-LAW.COM, the IT and e-commerce legal-help site of the international law firm Pinsent Masons. Winner of the People’s Voice award — decided by votes from the public — is the Web site of the American Bar Association magazine, the ABA Journal.
At first I thought it was just my computer, but it turns out that something is broken in the latest version of Google Desktop that can disable its desktop search function for Firefox users. Try to perform a desktop search and instead of results, Firefox displays the error message, “The connection was reset.” The problem started when I “upgraded” to the latest version of Google Desktop. After unsuccessfully fiddling with my settings, I searched Google’s help and found this discussion thread which revealed that I am not alone in experiencing this problem. The thread also reveals a fix for the problem, albeit an unsatisfactory one.
The problem only occurs if you’ve turned off indexing of your Web history in Google Desktop’s preferences. Turn it back on and the search function also turns back on (although the discussion thread suggests that some people still had problems with indexing of their e-mail). This is an unsatisfactory fix because many people don’t want Google indexing their Web-surfing histories. The discussion thread suggested another fix, which is to delete your “GoogleDesktopMozilla.dll” file, but when I tried this, it caused Google Desktop to stop indexing any new files or e-mails. The most-functional workaround, it appears, is to revert to a prior version of Google Desktop, which can be downloaded from the Google Desktop page.
I truly hate these things. The anonymous editor of Blawg Review (who I don’t hate) has started a meme he calls Simply the Best. He’s tagged his top 10 law blogs; each of them, in turn, is supposed to tag theirs, and so on, until we end up with one great big group hug. I’ve now been tagged — by both J. Craig Williams and Monica Bay — and had to think long and hard before joining in. (Legal Blog Watch, where I co-blog with Carolyn Elefant, has also been tagged.
Here’s the problem: My feedreader tells me that I subscribe to the RSS feeds of roughly 350 blogs. Those are the ones I at least scan on a regular basis. Almost every day, it seems, I discover yet another blog that I like. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of really good blogs out there. To pick 10 from among them is somewhat arbitrary and certainly capricious.
Then again, it is a question I am frequently asked when I give seminars — not my top 10, necessarily, but which blogs I consider to be among the best. There are a few I regularly point to, so let’s see if I can keep it to 10. (Since they tagged me already, I am omitting Williams and Bay so as not to appear biased; they’d otherwise be here.). In no particular order, they are:
There. It was painful but I did it. Happy now, Blawg Review ed.?
