Articles Posted in June, 2014

At its international Vantage 2014 user conference last week in New York City, Thomson Reuters Elite showed off several new products. I attended a June 23 media day there, where members of the media met with Thomson Reuters executives and attended presentations on the new products. (Full disclosure: Thomson Reuters paid my travel to New York and fed me better than I usually eat.) Elite is a suite of "enterprise business management" products for law firms and other professional services firms that handle financial management, client and matter management, business development and risk…

The July issue of the ABA Journal includes my ‘Ambrogi on Tech’ column, “An Acrobat alternative, at a third of the price.” I review Nuance Power PDF Advanced, a full-featured professional PDF program that does virtually everything Adobe Acrobat Pro can do, but at one-third the price.…

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. And you can teach a lawyer all about social media, but you can’t make the lawyer do anything with it.

For many law firm marketing executives, that is a frustrating fact of life. All the social media training in the world doesn’t…

In a post here May 19, LegalZoom Suffers Setback in North Carolina, I wrote about recent legal developments in South Carolina and North Carolina involving claims that LegalZoom is engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. Towards the end of that post, I wrote:

Meanwhile, LegalZoom

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I’m a bit behind in plugging my own podcast here. Here are the two most-recent episodes of Lawyer2Lawyer.

Facial Recognition Technology: Security vs. Privacy Concerns.

My cohost J. Craig Williams looks at how facial-recognition technology threatens security and privacy. His guests are Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney…

This recent edit tracked by @SCOTUS_servo was minor, but others are ‘truly substantive.’

Last month, a collective “Really!?” rolled through the U.S. legal community when Harvard Law Professor Richard J. Lazarus published his study — and Adam Liptak reported it in

Results are shown in split screen, with the summary on the left and the source document on the right.

This is a summer of legal hackathons here in the Boston area. As I’ve previously mentioned here, The  the ABA Journal and Suffolk University Law School will be cosponsoring a hackathon around the theme of access to justice in conjunction with the ABA annual meeting in Boston. Hackcess…

Recent years have brought an influx of new practice, case and matter management systems, primarily in the cloud. With so much attention paid to these newcomers, it is easy to overlook the venerable old-timers – the companies that have been at this a long time and, because of that, have learned a thing or two about what lawyers want. One such platform is LawBase, a case and matter management system first launched in 1981 by Synaptec Software Inc. Although the company is old, the software is not, says its CEO Philip Homburger. "We adapt and stay up with…

When Foxwordy launched in February, I gave it some grief for claiming to be "the first private social network for lawyers." Needless to say, it wasn't the first. It strikes me as a bad move for any company to start out by claiming to be something it isn't. On top of that, I've grown skeptical about the likelihood of success of any legal-vertical network. I was recently interviewed for a San Francisco Chronicle story about Foxwordy, and I think reporter…

The cloud practice management company Rocket Matter today rolls out a new “Evergreen Retainer” feature. The feature automatically invoices clients to replenish their retainers when their accounts fall below specified amounts.

Using this feature, the lawyer and client would agree on a minimum retainer and a replenishment point. After the client pays…