Headlines

The iManage + Interwoven merger latest
As was announced at the beginning of last month, content and document management specialists Interwoven and iManage have entered into a definitive agreement to merge in a stock and cash transaction valued at $171 million. The latest development in this story, announced earlier this week, is that the US Federal Trade Commission has granted an early termination of the antitrust waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. Essentially this removes one of the regulatory hurdles that could have stalled the merger process, which is now expected to close during the fourth quarter of this year. On completion of the deal, Interwoven shareholders will own approximately 67% and iManage shareholders approximately 33% of the combined company. Of course we still have a long way to go before the fat lady sings but Alan Pelz Sharp, the VP for software & Services with the consultancy Ovum has published this comment on the proposed merger:

"For those of us who followed the document and content management space through the dotcom boom, it is a sobering illustration of changed times. At the height of the boom, Interwoven could have snapped up a player like iManage from its petty cash drawer. But times have changed and Interwoven, once a star of Silicon Valley, has fallen behind the pack and seen its revenues and importance plummet. At the peak of the boom, Interwoven was in the habit of declaring document management to be dead, and prophesying the failure of competitors such as Documentum and FileNET. Just three years on and the tables have turned. Interwoven has spent the last 18 months struggling to reposition itself as a company capable of delivering DM solutions.

"iManage was another beneficiary of the boom that too quickly lost track and focus and fell down the rankings. The last couple of years have seen something of a turnaround and refocus for the company but the gap between it and the market leaders has become too wide to close. So what we have today is two companies that promised the world, gained millions from successful IPO's now merging together to try and gain some weight and substance in a quickly consolidating market. Together, on paper at least, they have every chance of becoming a major player again. The technologies make sense together, and the management teams are now sufficiently experienced in working through tough times to make it work.

"There are, however, some fundamental questions to be answered. Interwoven is clearly the dominant partner in the merger, and its approach to both developing and selling CM has been very different to that of iManage. In well regulated document-centric environments, such as legal and financial services, iManage has made a name for itself as a supplier of high-class solutions, well suited to their specific requirements. Interwoven is still largely a purveyor of complex, high-end web content management systems - a functional rather than process-centric sell. Nor has Interwoven excelled at vertical-focused solutions. Merging these two philosophies and approaches may be tougher than merging the technologies. Our advice to potential customers is to wait a while until the dust settles and we see exactly what direction the new company is planning to go in. It is likely that there will further consolidation in the sector before the end of this year - along with major announcements from some of the larger players in the field. It is an exciting time in the industry but also a challenging and confusing period for suppliers and customers alike."

MBO at JMC
Manchester-based JMC.IT (the trading name for JM Computing Ltd) has announced a management buy-out by a six-strong team of directors led by sales and marketing director, Andrew Burgess. The MBO team has assumed immediate control of the ultimate holding company, JMC Group Limited. The group's former directors, George Buchan and Paul Tobin, owners of the company since 1988, will retain a small shareholding and Tobin will continue to have an operational involvement for the foreseeable future. The new MBO team comprises Andrew Burgess, who is the new managing director, sales directors Tim Maxwell and Mike Bentley, engineering director Nick Isherwood, financial director Dave Gill and technical director, Malcolm Sykes. The MBO Team were supported by HSBC Bank, Cobbetts Solicitors, Rickitt Mitchell & Partners and Deloitte & Touche.
http://www.jmc.it

Eversheds win for Vrisko
Vrisko Limited has signed up Eversheds as the first client for its new LawSuite information integration solution. LawSuite is designed to integrate any information source with any internal business application. Technically, it comprises an open standard XML delivery platform, plus a suite of software components which interface to the information sources on the one hand, and a law firm's internal business applications on the other. The solution supplied to Eversheds integrates Westlaw UK's legal content with Eversheds' internal knowledge management system, which in turn is based on Tikit's Knowledge Portal and Hummingbird technology. Other LawSuite components, to be developed in response to client requirements, will integrate other information sources with other internal applications.
http://www.vrisko.com

18 years of growth at Solicitec
Solicitec (founded in 1985) has just celebrated 18 years of continuous growth. With group turnover up more than 20% at just over £8 million and profits over £500k it "represents a very successful year of trading in a quiet market". Company chairman Neil Ewin added "It has been a great year for us but if anything, next year looks even better. Our order book is at a record level and our latest products are only just reaching their full potential. There have also been investments in new ways to market, such as ASP delivery, which are starting to show positive returns. Finally we look forward to increasing revenues from new business ventures in Australia and South East Asia."

Hummingbird to form legal CIO advisory board
Hummingbird has announced plans to form a 21 member Legal CIO Advisory Board. The Board will be comprised of influential CIOs from law firms globally and key Hummingbird executives, with the objective of providing a forum for discussion, feedback and consultation on issues related to "product functionality and quality, support and services." Hummingbird expects to finalize membership by October 2003 and the Board will hold its first annual meeting during the Hummingbird Annual Worldwide Summit Conference in Florida in February 2004.
 
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News in brief

Elite secures first Billback win
Elite has secured the first contract for its Billback integrated cost recovery system from Wisconsin law firm Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek. Elite now has the exclusive distribution rights to the Australian developed Billback system in North America and is hoping to make inroads into the US market which has hitherto been dominated by Equitrac and Copitrak.

New one click PDF function
Omtool has announced the release of Swiftwriter, a new Adobe Acrobat plug-in that makes to create, profile and save PDFs into a wide array of document management systems including Hummingbird and iManage. Swiftwriter adds a previously unavailable "Save to DMS" toolbar icon and menu option to PDF viewers so documents can be profiled and saved on the fly, the first time a document is accessed. This one-button convenience should streamline workflows and helps reduce the number of documents that remain untouched in email inboxes or untraceable in arbitrary folders on local and network drives. Swiftwriter also allows PDFs to be created instantly from virtually any file format, including Word, Excel and other commonly used law office applications. For Omtool sales information in Europe call +44 (0)1932 334444.
http://www.omtool.com

Baker Mack to rollout Workshare globally
Baker & McKenzie, one of the world's largest law firms, will implement Workshare 3 across its operations in UK, France, Germany and USA. This deal will be the largest installation of Workshare 3 to date, with the system being used by a total of 3000 Baker & McKenzie employees, 1400 of which will be in the UK, France and Germany. The system will allow each employee to effectively manage email attachments and revisions, incorporate changes from other people, prevent document corruption and protect against the inadvertent disclosure of sensitive metadata information.
http://www.workshare.com

Pisces last call data exchange working draft
PISCES, the electronic data exchange standard, has just released the Last Call Working Draft of the Legal extension to the Standard. This will allow lawyers to exchange all data needed to define a lease or register title electronically, without the need to send hard copy or to re-key data. The draft is the fruit of the work of 20 major law firms, software suppliers and other organisations closely involved with property transactions, over the past 18 months. The Last Call Working draft is available publicly via the PISCES web site at http://www.pisces.org.uk and comments from all interested parties are now invited. The deadline for receipt of comments is 16th October 2003.

Boswood takes no 1 slot at Thomson Legal
The Thomson Corporation has appointed Mike Boswood as president & CEO of Thomson Legal & Regulatory International. In this new position, Boswood will continue in his role as managing director of Thomson Legal & Regulatory Europe, as well as be responsible for overseeing businesses activities in the Asia Pacific and Latin America markets, the global trademark business, and cross-border sales of Thomson Legal & Regulatory products, services and solutions. He will continue to be based in London.
 
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Email management news in brief
No apologies for another extensive report on email management related subjects but this is now the number one item on the IT agenda for many law firms today. And if you are in Leeds next week, check out Tikit's seminar on email security (see Events Diary for more details).

TSB orders KVS
Ann Elia, the head of IT at Travers Smith Braithwaite, says she is delighted to announce the purchase of KVS Enterprise Vault from First Stop Computer Group. The firm has purchased the product to support and control their hugely growing Microsoft Exchange environment. The Enterprise Vault will archive public folder items as well as the 350 users mailboxes and remove the need for the users to archive to PST files. The product will be rolled out during September and October. Other KVS Vault users include Lawrence Graham, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Nabarro Nathanson, SJ Berwin and Denton Wilde Sapte.
http://www.firstop.co.uk

Maclay Murray Spens go with DDX
DespatchBox has secured its first Scottish legal client with an order for the DDX email encryption system from Maclay Murray & Spens. The firm's IT director Angus Mackenzie said one of the key factors that lead to the selection of DDX "was the integration package provided for Microsoft Outlook, none of the other systems we looked at provided this". DDX, which uses the SSL encryption standard to protect email contents, has also recently been implemented Freshfields, Pinsents and Olswang.
http://www.despatchbox.com

Meticulus and Open Orchard partner to deliver legal mail
Meticulus Solutions and BT offshoot/email policy management provider Open Orchard have announced a partnership targeted at improving email policy compliance, security and traceability in the legal market. The partnership will integrate Open Orchard's Ensure Legal system with the Meticulus Red Letter secure email server software to provide compliance with best practice use of email in communications between law firms and their clients. Ensure Legal lets firms monitor email or web activity and identify and intervene with help or automated restraint when users violate a corporate policy or regulation. The combined solution adds best-of-breed policy management to Red Letter's benefits of confidentiality, encryption, ease of use and proof of delivery.
http://www.redletteremail.com

Hummingbird to offer rules based email management
has just announced Automated E-Mail Management, a new server-based solution designed to automate profiling of incoming and outgoing email messages for retention and regulatory compliance. Although the the Hummingbird DM already provides the ability to index and search both Microsoft Exchange public folders and Lotus Notes repositories, the new system expands on these capabilities by adding automated, server-side email profiling capabilities including: the ability for administrators to define rules utilizing an easy to use graphical wizard interface similar to the Outlook Rules Wizard; the ability to easily define regular expressions to match patterns such as client/matter number or project ID, allowing for proper categorization of email content to the appropriate document management folders; and capturing the header information of the email message and automatically profiling the metadata such as To, From, Subject, and Date into Hummingbird DM.

C2C releases Archive One Capacity
C2C, which has offices in the US and UK (tel 0118 951 1211) this week released Version 2.3 of its Archive One Capacity email archiving and capacity management system for Microsoft Exchange. New features include integration with standard anti-virus solutions (in case any archived emails contain a virus), the ability to restore an email back into the mailbox; and an architecture that supports distributed Exchange implementations, which means users can move between offices and still access their archived email. A case study on how Macfarlane use Archive One can be found at http://www.c2c.com/industry/casestudies/macfarlanes.htm
 
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Special report: Litigation support - Electronic disclosure in the UK
by Terry Harrison, Business Development Manager, LDM (020 7613 1160)
http://www.lmd.uk.com

It is interesting that Electronic Disclosure (or Discovery) is an every day part of litigation in the US yet it is still slow to being adopted by UK lawyers as an integral procedure. Is it because lawyers feel that current methods of dealing with electronic documents is good enough? Is it because lawyers need more information about what it is and how it works? Is it because electronic disclosure is at its best when worked with a litigation support system and most firms do not have one?

Let us attempt to address some of these questions and other doubts commencing with the basic premise of standard disclosure. This imposes upon the parties in an action a duty to make a "reasonable search" for relevant documents. Those two words "reasonable search" are the crucial as clearly the onus is on lawyers to advise their clients accordingly. The real point here is whether or not, when disclosure is being considered by the lawyer and his client, electronic documents are being searched for as well as traditional hard copy documents.

What is electronic disclosure? Simply it is the collection, review and production of documents that are stored in electronic format. These documents are not just emails - they can be spreadsheets, memos, reports, presentations - any type of document that has been created electronically. Given that over 97% of business documents are created electronically and that more than 35% never reach paper one begins to see the importance of "reasonable search" with regard to electronic data. The possible sources of this electronic data go beyond desktop PCs and into laptops, network servers, archival storage systems, home PCs, PDAs and even mobile phones.

If lawyers and their clients are searching for electronic documents how are they doing it and what is the usual practice? The best guess is that they are simply concentrating on desk top PCs and are downloading files and folders, the contents of which are then printed out. The difficulties are that this process relies too heavily on paper, the sheer mass of which slows the review. Furthermore, paper documents do not provide the audit trail shown by electronic documents because there is no metadata with hard copy documents. Additionally there is the issue of reliability and efficiency. Printing out electronic documents is not totally reliable because BCCs or deleted documents do not print, nor can it be determined if documents have been modified or edited. There is no capture of metadata so the lawyer cannot always tell "Who knew what, when?" As to efficiency, printing out blank pages, duplicates, page after page of blank cells in spreadsheets and being charged for them is hardly efficient!

LDM has acquired a tried and tested system from the US which processed over 50 million pages of electronic data in the last two years. The system handles all of the commonly used file formats and email systems and here is a very brief outline of how the system works. The first stage is the collection of the data and LDM advises lawyers who can in turn advise their clients with regard to the collection. There will be some cases where there may be documents which have been corrupted, deleted or otherwise hidden and in such cases the services of computer forensics experts may be required in advance of the electronic disclosure process. A methodology is agreed with regard to what documents are required to be processed eg specific custodians and/or date ranges. The system imports the electronic data and immediately captures the images in native file format - this is important in case it is required by the client but also because it is sometimes used in the QC process. The metadata is automatically captured at this stage.

The system automatically preserves the parent and child relationship in emails and the documents are then converted to tiff images. Further, a 100% text extraction is done to save an OCR stage later and PDFs can be created if required. This stage is followed by a 100% QC process and then there is provision for Bates assigning and branding, watermarking, before the images are exported into other applications or printed out if that is what is required. The electronic images can be exported directly into the litigation support software used by the law firm, if one exists. Alternatively, arrangements can be made to host the documents via a web service or simple viewing platform software can be supplied. Once imported into litigation support software, the electronic images are treated as any other scanned image and lawyers undertake their review electronically. Images can be searched, reviewed for privilege and/or relevance, de-duplicated, redacted and annotated.

As far as law firms are concerned, the use of electronic disclosure can improve their competitive edge and technology advanced clients will want their lawyers to utilise whatever technology is available. Furthermore, because of the speed, law firms will be able to increase their capacity. Maybe there is no take off yet but perhaps the seat belts are on and the no smoking sign is displayed!
 
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