Ideas

The ever-growing batch of new communications media, and with it the spreading of business communication onto new platforms, has provided quite the challenge to compliance officers tasked with keeping track of business-related conversations. And according to a new report by e-discovery and information archiving company Smarsh, financial services organizations are growing increasingly concerned.

According to the survey data, compliance anxiety about electronic messaging has shot up over the last year. Fifty percent of those polled this year reported concerns about mobile communications, up a full 27 percent from 2016. Non-email communication channels like social media messaging functions and business chat platforms raised similar concerns among survey-takers. The report found 54 percent of respondents were concerned about compliance in these non-email channels, up from 35 percent last year.

The survey found that email was the most highly monitored communication method, with 98 percent of respondents using a supervision solution to archive messages.

Social media data, though up from years’ past, was less highly supervised. Of those respondents who allow use of social media platforms at all, 77 percent had an archiving solution in place for Twitter data, 70 percent had one for LinkedIn and 67 percent had one for Facebook.

Legal technology has ventured its way from e-discovery to artificial intelligence and touched upon many subsets in between. Yet far and wide, law firms still struggle with finding, implementing and using the array of tools that comprise practice management technology.

Getting technology use off the ground can be burdensome. As found in the in the 2016 ILTA/Inside Legal Technology Survey, 42 percent of firms struggle with user adoption. Further, practice management technology isn’t available at most U.S. firms—the 2016 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report found that only 46 percent of firms have the technology at hand. Yet, among the haves, use went up from the previous year, from 30 to 43 percent.

As document sets get larger, compliance requirements grow more complicated and clients span the globe, many firms are taking technology to task. Here are some things to know for firms looking to dive in and adopt new practice management technology:

1. Know What You’re Looking For

Whether upgrading or starting a new, purchasing the right practice management technology is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make. Knowing what you want to get out of your technology and a sense of what your firm already has will allow you to develop a list of what you need to measure how potential vendors match them.

Russ Haskin, director, business of law consulting at Wilson Legal Solutions, said a lot of firms make mistakes after implementations and later wished they had only determined what they needed ahead of time. “Every firm needs to look in the mirror and do a self-diagnosis and say, ‘What are we doing now that we don’t like that we’re doing? What customizations do we have that we don’t really need?”

To read the entire article, click here.

With changes like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments and transcontinental privacy regulations taking place, it’s safe to say that the legal industry is undergoing massive transitions catalyzed by technology. This evolution is largely driven by the demands of today’s modern lawyer, who wants to get her job done from anywhere at any time, and she expects easy access to the tools she needs.

“When you talk about mobility, what you’re really talking about is, what are the demands of today’s modern lawyer?” said Dan Carmel, iManage’s chief marketing office. “We think we’re dealing with a whole new persona and a set of values and a set of expectations today that didn’t exist five years ago.”

This role of the “modern lawyer”, he noted, isn’t solely filled by the practitioners from the millennial generation. “Although we call it a new professional, we don’t mean it as a kid out of law school. I’d like to think that a 50 year old could be a new professional too. They’re consuming technology in a modern way.”…

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While the legal industry’s relationship with technology is often characterized as behind other industries, legal tech companies have growingly become more mobile, offering apps to deal with many legal department tasks. Riding this wave is financial and practice management software provider Orion Law Management Systems, who recently announced its upgrade of its mobile app, iOrion.

Titled iOrion Version 3.0, the practice management app includes app integration and platform compatibility, as well as other features. Compatible with iOS and Android devices, the app is integrated with Orion’s desktop software, allowing subscribers to synchronize workflows.

“For today’s legal professionals, a full-featured mobile access tool is more than ‘nice-to-have’ – it’s a necessity,” Orion marketing coordinator Heather Deutsch told Legaltech News. “And most legal professionals are justifiably concerned with the constant management of their valuable billable time. …. Once lawyers or legal professionals step away from their computers, keeping track of time becomes a more difficult task. Further, many of the solutions offered for the mobile lawyer and legal staff tend to be complex, cumbersome and expensive.”…

To read the entire article, click here.

People, process and technology are the golden triangle of success in a modern organization, and as a result, it’s common to see organizations partner with representatives of others to bolster their success. In keeping with that trend, Orion Law Management Systems has announced and entered into a partnership with Affinity Consulting Group.

Orion provides law practice software that includes document, time, case and financial management tools, which can each be accessed in a single integrated system. Affinity, in addition to helping clients determine their technology needs, offers consultation services that address a number of common challenges for firms and corporate counsels.

To read the entire article, click here.

For law firms to get smart about bidding on work they need a legal management infrastructure with deep knowledge and understanding of their matters, staffing resources, billing rates and spending data. This knowledge infrastructure, or business intelligence, goes beyond a stand-alone matter management application to include historical and real-time information on billing rates, invoices and costs, and incorporates a facility to calculate alternative fee arrangements and use third-party data to compare law firm metrics to the larger legal industry…

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We all know the client trust accounting rules inside/out.  No comingling.  Prompt withdraw of funds earned by the firm.  Report all activity to clients.  Investigate uncashed checks.  Do reconciliations.  Keep good records.  Make sure everything balances.  But as accountant-administrators, we tend to defer to the lawyers the task of ensuring trust accounts are “closed” and everything disbursed when the matter is completed.

An interesting story was told during last month’s Orion User Group Meeting.  An administrator reported being “grilled” by an examiner from the State Bar as to why certain client trust accounts had no activity (deposits or withdrawals) over the last six months.  Why were these funds still being held by the firm?  That got me thinking…

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Orion Law Management Systems, Inc., a provider of financial and practice management software for law firms, announced today at the company’s 2014 User Group Meeting in Atlanta an extensive update to Orion Version 4 Software. The new version 4.6 sports dashboards, drill-down financial statements, Microsoft Exchange synchronization and support for Office 365.

Orion is an integrated law firm management system that employs software for financial, firm and practice management tasks. The new version supports live financial statements in general ledgers. The statements can be printed and distributed online and support drill-down and charting capabilities. Other new features include:

• Dashboards and visualization of key performance indicators.
• Individual performance data compared to firmwide performance.
• A collections manager module for accounts receiveable.
• Manage collections at the client, matter and invoice levels.
• Better manage billing inquiries when dealing with online e-billing companies

Version 4.6 incorporates an Exchange synchronization module and support for Microsoft Office 365. Law firms can synchronize Orion contacts, tasks and appointments with a cloud-based version of Microsoft Exchange.

All new features in version 4.6 are updates to version 4 and included in customer software maintenance agreements.

“I spoke with Kevin Harris, a project manager for Orion Law Management Systems, a financial and practice management software provider. Harris consults with law firms about infrastructure, business practices, staff and attorney design, utilization, productivity, and collections, among other areas.

We discussed how have law firm preferences changed over the past few years and key trends that are emerging in the Legal Technology market, among other topics.”

Listen to our interview by clicking here.

“A year ago, I wrote here about Orion, the practice-management system designed for mid-sized law firms, and its app for iPad and iPhone, iOrion…”

Read the article here.