I thought two stories I saw yesterday warranted a synthesis. First, the ACC/Seregeti report that was floating around last week made it onto a post by Kevin Hunt on Legal Current. That blog observed that legal spend is growing, but the bigger budget line item didn’t translate to more money for outside counsel. Instead, “In-house counsel are increasingly turning to more sophisticated tracking systems to carefully understand where their money is going.”

Second, Michael Rasmussen on Corporate Integrity has a post from last week in which he calls for a “regulatory intelligence” system to deal with the crushing weight of new regulations coming out all over the world. He calls for automated, streamlined processes.

Synthesize those, and I think legal is justified in asking for even more money, not for lawyers, but for tools. Lots of new software tools!

In other news: think you’re an eDiscovery expert? Consider getting certified.  But, hey, maybe you’re wasting your time since even 86 percent of IT professionals still rely on paper. If that’s the rate for the IT guys, then what do you think it is for the lawyers? Would you really trust a hard drive to a lawyer? Josh Tredennick has a problem with an EDRM model.

You know all those movies and TVs shows with the type-A, mountain climbing, super aggressive lawyers? Well, in case your shop is populated with a bunch of them, I thought you should be one of the first to tell them that they can now be fully connected even at base camp. Come to think of it, I did go to law school with a guy just like that…

If those lawyers work in a large company that might be a patent litigation target, then you might want to mention some bad news in addition to the good news about 3G on Everest. In a recent case, Phillip M. Adams & Assoc., LLC v. Windbond Elecs. Corp., a patent case out of the Utah federal courts (give them this cite: 2010 WL 3767318 (D. Utah Sept. 16, 2010)), the defendant was sanctioned for not preserving evidence even though it didn’t know that it would be sued, according to the K&L Gates eDiscovery blog. The court reasoned, among other things, that the entire industry should have expected litigation. That’s a very broad standard, don’t you think?

While you leave them to chew on that, you might want to register for a briefing by MyShingle’s Carolyn Elefant on the ABA’s position on cloud computing for lawyers.

Other tidbits:

• Your legal department is always in favor of more security, so here’s some good advice on securing your SSH server.
• There’s a cool new service called MailGun that lets you bake in mail services to your app. But if you’re going to be developing legal apps, you’ll really want to make sure that you pass on key features of the terms of service to your lawyer-users.
• There are interesting changes going on at Law Technology News.
• But the most exciting change is that Legal Tech Wire is now What Legal Wants!

Problem: in-house legal departments  are trying  to insource more of their work, but they don’t have the staff (or the customer service skills) to really handle it.

Solution: engineer a self help system that gives employees, especially managers, instant answers to questions while simultaneously routing the important questions to paralegal or attorney attention.

How to do it:

(1) Talk to the attorneys to find out (a) what the most often asked questions are that can be handled routinely and (b) what the most often not-asked questions are that create a lot of risk.

(2) Talk to employees in the company to find out what questions they have, but haven’t asked or have been frustrated when they ask.

(3) Create a form available on the intranet that starts high level and drills in.

(4) Once enough information has been captured, give the user some feedback so they can leave the system with some good general guidance.

(5) Store the question and apply workflow/business logic to route the question and the stored responses to the appropriate reviewer. Let the reviewer determine whether to follow up with the user, or to leave the user with the guidance already provided by the system.

A couple of days ago, LTW mentioned something  about Rocket Lawyer. Rocket Lawyer’s application looks a little clunky, but the legal health meter caught my attention.

Traditional lawyers will scoff at something like a legal health meter. Out here in the Real World, however, people bet their lives on visual indicators: like temperature gauges, speedometers, cross walks, and even money management software. So why not trust a visual indicator to indicate legal health?

There are some indisputable elements of a client, case, or matter that a computer can easily figure out:

• dates (when does the client have to file something with a regulator or court?)
• binary facts (did all counter parties sign the contract? is there a venue selection clause in the contract?)
• numeric facts (do you have enough signatures and enough debt to pursue and involuntary bankruptcy case?)

Then there are those facts that rely on some human judgment, but still can be reliably represented on a meter:

• all the same elements as above after they’ve been reviewed by a human (does the contract have the right venue selection clause?)
• scaled judgments (how strong is the client’s case given the facts and the elements of a Title VII complaint?)

Most of your legal application’s users are going to rely more heavily on graphics, so why not implement this kind of technology?

LTW just set up a Posterous site. There’s nothing on it right now, but the Editor is optimistic that the service will be a good place to house some of those thoughts that are way too big for a tweet, but not really ready for “Prime Time” on LTW.

The Posterous site is here: http://legaltechwire.posterous.com.

I started Legal Tech Wire one week ago today after I got a wild hair to do so. I gave the entire process about two hours thought, and so far, it’s already been a blast! I’ve met some interesting people on Twitter, and the week has really opened my eyes to how big the legal tech world is–and how big the legal tech world can become.

So now that I know a little more, and I’ve had a week to just play, where is Legal Tech Wire going?? I know for certain that I don’t want to be the BoingBoing of legal technology. As popular as something like that might be, I’m simply not captivated by gadgets and gizmos.

Instead, I want to write for people like me–even if there aren’t many of me. Before law school, I was a serious enterprise software developer, leading projects for enterprise IT (many of them Fortune 500 companies) for over a decade. As such, too much of the stuff I’m reading about legal tech is too lightweight to interest me. I don’t care how you use Word 2010, I don’t care about the latest version of Adobe Reader, and I think if you aren’t using an iPhone or a Droid device by now, there’s not much I’m going to say that you’re going to find interesting.

I want Legal Tech Wire to explore what’s under the hood–like, how jQuery Mobile will enable new legal tech solutions, what the code under predictive coding really looks like, whether new legal tech startups should be building on Ruby on Rails, whether you should be using Cassandra or MySQL, whether you should still be on Java (or at least Spring), or should just use plain old PHP.

I also want to find and celebrate the startups and technologies that seem marginal today, but may change everything tomorrow.

So happy birthday, Legal Tech Wire.

You have geeky tendencies, you’re surrounded by lawyers, and someone just asked you: “what is this HTML5 I’m hearing about?” Here’s the top three things I think you should know, for now anyway.

(1) HTML5 won’t really change much. That is, your ho-hum attorneys’ site will continue to work and look boring in the new world too. Even if you think it’s not boring and you’ve got some fancy Flash graphics, those will work just fine when HTML5 rolls out.

(2) HTML5 will mostly change the way you use applications on the web, which includes applications from legal tech vendors like Rule One Four. Most of the improvements seem geared toward rich applications on the internet. New HTML tags like <canvas> and asynchronous functions threaten to completely disrupt the way things are done today, and small new improvements like context menus will make rich web apps more useful and engaging than even before.

(3) HTML5 will come faster, and slower, than you expect. The last version of HTML, HTML4, has been around for a decade. A decade. That’s like 100 years in web time, maybe 1,000 years. And HTML5 has already been “around” in a sense for six years. The standards committee that approves seismic changes like HTML5 is still grinding through the process, but leading browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer are already beginning to implement some of the new features now. So while HTML5 may not be “official” for a while yet, HTML5 is already close to reality. Use your Chrome browser and visit HTML5rocks.com for an HTML5 odyssey courtesy of Google.

I am almost a lawyer like you (bar exam pending), I got great grades in school, and I’m a member of that new generation you’ve been warned was coming. Like the rest of my generation, I was raised digital. I was taught to challenge authority, to solve my own problems, and to trust only what comes from crowds, not so-called professionals–even lawyers.

Even more threatening, I was a heavyweight software developer before school. My job was to automate as many people as possible out of a job. And now I’m doing your job, and I’m using my software and internet skills to figure out how to do it faster, better, cheaper, and more creatively than you ever imagined.

I hope we can do it together. If there’s hope for the profession, it’s in software.