Legal Technology Software - Basic Information on Legal Software Categories and Functionality

Legal technology is used to support law office operations and to develop systems and databanks to improve and enhance client relationships and service levels. Some of the most common legal technologies used today are listed below. These explanations are brief and introductory in nature, for more information on any of these technologies, please contact the Xerdict Group to discuss your information needs.

Calendaring and Docketing

Docketing and calendaring systems help to track commitments, prevent missed deadlines, reduce liability insurance, and increases attorney productivity as they juggle various priorities. Better systems allow for either manual or automated date events (driven by case/matter variables) and also integrate date rules from third-party suppliers of these rules.

Case Management

Case management legal technology software systems consist of several elements of functionality, all interrelated in one system. This includes a client database, client relationship management, case database, case diary and sometimes integrated calendar and document management systems. The most notable tracking area, the case database, typically contains descriptive information about a law firm's (or corporate law department's) cases including case name, budget, costs, plaintiff and defendant information, court information, related parties, sub plaintiffs, settlement demands and offers, and many other descriptive fields of information. These systems also commonly provide personal information management (e.g. contact management) modules to help track information about all a firm or corporate law department's contacts.

Corporate Counsel Software

These are case management legal technology systems geared to the needs of corporate counsel. Unlike law firm oriented packages, which contain information on conflicts and other law firm areas of interest, these systems facilitate the tracking of corporate documents, billing and bill review, case budgeting, cost tracking, internal departmental workflow routing of documents for review and approval, complex litigation trend analysis, and many other related items of interest to corporate law departments.

Document Management and Assembly

Document Management software is used to track and manage a law firm or corporate law department's documents. These legal technology systems typically allow one to add documents, check-in and check-out documents, track revisions, assign code words to documents to faciliate easy searches, assign documents to cases and clients, and integrate with email systems and faxing software to power easy and integrated distribution of documents to other members of the law firm or to clients.

Document Assembly software is used to automate the creation of legal documents. Attorneys or paralegals use the software by answering questions presented to them on a screen. Their answers are used to generate legal documents. These legal technology systems allow attorneys to, far more efficiently, use appropriate clauses and languages during the construction of legal documents. These "appropriate clauses" are both common chunks of text recognized as the best in class text relating to a particular legal situation as well as client specific text that should be used in place of a standard for a particular issue. These systems are commonly used to create "draft" versions of documents in a matter of minutes, leaving detailed refinement based on a template one can assume to be strong to the individual preferences of an attorney.

Electronic Discovery

These are legal technology systems which provide web-based visibility to documents which must be reviewed during the course of a litigation. The systems commonly host the electronic versions of documents (sometimes in a law office, sometimes by the software company) and provide sets of documents to coders for their review. The systems will route documents based on the classification and coding given to them to attorneys of a law firm. Some of these systems also provide the ability to do redactions and production numbering. These systems can help to reduce the total cost of document review by eliminating redundancy and lowering the risk of missed files. They also can help minimize the risk of including privileged files in a document production.

Law Firm Portals

These are systems where law firms can post client specific data. This can include data such as procedures, invoices, upcoming events, and bulletin board type items. These portals also can contain marketing information about the firm, or links to public marketing information about the firm, in an effort to increase and expand the amount and types of representation the law firm provides to the client. These are typically secure, password protected, encrypted sites.

Spam Filters

These are software packages that help control the amount of spam emails that reach a law firm's email system. There are packages that run internally on a firm's network as well as third party services that can be contracted to assist law firms in the identification and reduction of spam emails. These systems tend to provide multi-leveled tiered filtering -- one level being a scan of incoming messages to identify obvious span messages (edge filtering) with a secondary filtering mechanism which can act upon user specific rules to identify messages that each email user can define to refine which messages are and are not delivered to their email inbox.

Speech Recogition

These are software packages that convert the spoken word to computer text. The packages are getting better and better over time, with very user friendly voices, easy to use commands, vast and customized dictionaries, and many other features. Because the transcriptions, althougth very good, are not perfect, excellent typists may prefer straight typing. However, individuals who lack strong typing skills or those with repetitive stress injuries and/or disabilities, may benefit from these technologies.

Task Tracking

Systems that provide task tracking capability allow members of a legal work team to track and manage all the to-do's associated with a legal matter. Tasks can be assigned to individuals, assigned start dates and end states, prioritized, described in detail, and assigned a status code. The systems tracking these tasks can them generate reports sorted by any of the above criteria to allow one to quickly understand the to-do's associated with a matter. And, if these systems are internet based systems, all of the members of the legal work team can update the status of tasks anytime, anywhere.

Time and Billing

These systems help law firm's track their time and bill expenses out to clients on a timely basis. Many packages include integration with a firm's General Ledger and Accounts Payable software (or integrated modules). Client billing cycle requirements, receipts and adjustments modules, collections management modules, interfaces with third-party packages to recapture indirect costs, cash management, bank account reconciliation and client analysis and financial reporting modules are other features commonly delivered with these legal technology time and billing software packages.

Trial Presentation

These are legal technology systems that create compelling exhibits and graphics to use in court, including pictures, images, audio clips, videos, depositions, Microsoft office documents, web pages, interactive 3D models, and more. These systems also allow law firms to easily and quickly import data to different formats for presentation. They also help to collect and present the data in a manner which is interesting and appropriate for courtroom use, often developing very easy ways to direct a jury member's attention to the key phrase or element of an exhibit.

For More Information

Xerdict Group LLC is happy to provide prospective clients with a no-cost initial consultation to review their legal technology software needs and to discuss potential solutions.   Please contact us at Info@xerdictgroup.com or 973-286-4350 with any needs or requests you have.