Reinventing Professionals

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.

I had a great conversation with Nicole Eagan, the dynamic Chief Marketing Officer for Autonomy, on the last day of LegalTech a few weeks ago. In addition to sharing stories about the evolution of the technology industry and our respective experiences in the dot-com era, we discussed trends related to audio information governance and other issues that will affect the landscape in 2009.

I spoke with Dean Gonsowski, VP of E-Discovery Services for Clearwell Systems, on the last day of LegalTech NY. We discussed the continuing trend of enterprises taking e-discovery in-house, internationalization and data mapping. He noted that "good proactive hygiene" in e-discovery has always been the goal.

Further to my post about this story -- Burst of Lawsuits Boosts E-Discovery Firms -- I had a chance to speak with Craig Carpenter, VP & General Counsel at Recommind, one of the companies cited in the article. He mentioned the trend toward building more effective and intelligent infrastructure.