February 2, 2011 by Dan Siegel.

Yesterday, my associates, Molly Gilligan, Diana D’Auria and I, spent the date (actually our annual jaunt) at Legaltech, New York, the large commercial legal technology show (not to be confused with the ABA’s Techshow, where I will be speaking in April). As usual, there were many vendors and we were able to visit with friends from our many partners, including LexisNexis TimeMatters, CaseMap and Concordance, Legal Files case and matter management software, AccessData Summation (I have just become a newly-minted Summation Support Specialist, which replaces my prior certification as a Summation Certified Trainer) and Payne Systems (Metadata Assistant). We also visited with our newest partner, Business Integrity, which markets Contract Express, an easy, user-friendly document assembly software program. It was particularly heartening to hear the totally positive feedback for my book, The Lawyer’s Guide to LexisNexis CaseMap. Users love it and apparently so do the people at Casesoft, the Lexis division responsible for CaseMap, TextMap, NoteMap and TimeMap.  Overall, a great day, some new friends made, some old aquaintances renewed.

One minor complaint. One of my associates tried to register online on the first day of the show. Because registration was closed, she was informed she had to register at the show. Lo and behold, the otherwise free registration was no longer available and we were hit with a $50.00 registration fee for attending the show. Nowhere on the Legaltech site can I find mention of this policy, and it’s not apparent (if it exists) on the portion of the site devoted to Legaltech in California. That just didn’t seem fair.

Posted in What's New?, Trade Shows, Integrated Technology Services, Software | Print | No Comments »

March 27, 2010 by Dan Siegel.

Having just returned from Techshow 2010 in Chicago, the ABA Law Practice Management Division’s annual trade show and CLE program extravaganza, I was struck by a couple of things. First, no longer did it seem as though every booth was focused on e-discovery. While there is no question that e-discovery is an important issue, I felt as though the issues the vendors focused upon were things like case management (and my friends from Time Matters and Legal Files were present), document management (ditto for Worldox and Fujitsu (Scansnap), legal research (Lexis for Office - Wow! and West’s new product) and other products designed to improve workflow. I, for one, was pleased to see this.

But that doesn’t mean e-discovery is passe or forgotten. Some vendors focused on it, as did some of the programs. Perhaps one of the better programs I attended was E-Discovery in Small Cases, a topic that is often forgotten. Many of my clients handle these “smaller” cases, and they are in fact the bread and butter of many firms. But the e-discovery vendors often focus so much on the big ticket (and big revenue) cases that they forget that these small potatoes are present and their value adds up too.

 In future posts, I’ll talk more about these and other topics. And in my other blog, www.palegalblog.com, I plan to discuss why so few Pennsylvania attorneys attended.

Posted in What's New?, Trade Shows | Print | No Comments »