Reinventing Professionals

I spoke with Chere Estrin, chairperson of the Board of Directors for The Organization of Legal Professionals, a non-profit organization established to provide e-discovery certification to attorneys, non-attorneys, vendors and technicians through education and collaboration. Estrin is also the editor of SUE magazine for women litigators and KNOW magazine for paralegals.

I spoke with Mark Britton, founder and CEO of Avvo.com, one of the leading online legal websites with 1.5 million unique visitors per month. Britton, a co-blogger on this site, and I discussed Avvo's history, its rapid growth, and the ways in which lawyers can benefit from its services.

Earlier this week, I attended an invitation-only breakfast hosted by David Cowen, the managing director of The Cowen Group, an executive search and market analysis firm focusing exclusively on litigation support and e-discovery. The event featured an esteemed panel of thought leaders in e-discovery sharing insider accounts of the early case assessment trend and strategies for conducting one successfully. The attendees and panelists hailed from corporate America, the AmLaw 200 and vendors, including Anacomp, Capital Legal Solutions, DataCert and Recommind, who co-sponsored the program.

I spoke with Joy Heath Rush, the Enterprise Multimedia Manager at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago and the President of the seven-member board of directors for the International Legal Technology Association about the upcoming ILTA annual conference, which she described as "the number one venue for peer networking for people who are professionals in legal technology and unmatched educational sessions."

I spoke with Brett Owens, CEO and co-founder of Chrometa, a company that makes time capture software for solo practitioners and small law firms, about its 2.0 release. The product records and organizes time spent by application, e-mail, Internet activity, and document. It also allows users to view their totals by day, week, month or a customized range.

I spoke with Dale Drury, Vice President of AlphaLit, about his recent recognition in LTN's President's Corner and the company's release of PrivLog Builder, which helps create and manage privilege logs. Drury attributes the development of the new program to the "good ideas of our very smart clients." As he approaches his 23rd anniversary with the company, he notes that common sense and technology can help the industry move forward in this environment. He also highlights that strong project management can help with the recovery in the second half of the year because clients rely on their vendors' project managers to be their advocates.

I spoke with Rich Turner, the Vice President of Marketing for Content Analyst, a concept search engine developer, about the search market, related trends and the impact of the economy on e-discovery.

I spoke this morning with Larry Port, Founding Partner and Chief Software Architect for Rocket Matter, a maker of web-based software for law firm productivity. We discussed the ABA Tech Show, the growth of his company, and the convergence of law and technology in this unstable economy. There is a detailed article about the company, which appeared in the Connecticut Law Tribune late last month.

I had an interesting discussion with Carolyn Crandall, Rich Faris and Chuck Williams of i365 at LegalTech about the success of the Metalincs acquisition, the launch of version 5.0 and some predictions for the coming year.