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.

Maybe the biggest news today is the news we missed yesterday: the start of the Prolaw conference in Albuquerque (spelled it right the first time -Ed.). LTW is impressed that 300 people could find their way to Albuquerque without accidentally going to Scottsdale. The conference should wrap up today, and since hardly anyone tweeted anything about it if anyone has anything interesting to report, send it to editor@legaltechwire.com. Thanks.

Paralegal-job-killers HotDocs announced that they’re bundling in a web server to make it easier to  generate automated documents on the web. Good for the forward move, but the clock isn’t ticking fast enough on the document paradigm. The Editor wishes the courts and everyone else would just go paperless–for real paperless. PDFs don’t count. They may lack paper, but they still have the paper form factor. Editor demands pure text so that it can be shaped and molded to any view (paper or otherwise)!!

Ron at Strategic Legal Technology gave us five past and future technologies (that’s ten total-Ed.). His most important, but least comprehensible, prediction is for “Renewed growth in practice specific intelligent tools, both for lawyers and for clients, e.g., contract analysis, interactive advisory systems, document assembly.” Interesting, but what does it mean?And why now? (Why don’t you just try the comment feature on his blog? – Ed.)

Tidbits:

1. The Clio guys posted some results from their #cliomeetup in Austin. Previously, your Editor tweeted his lack of surprise by the turnout, but that’s because he’s been to SXSW Interactive and seen the Austin tech vibe up close.
2. Looks like the Editor missed a webinar on recent case law from Mary Mack and Ralph Losey, but didn’t miss Ms. Mack’s swan song on the Fios blog.
3. Something called Cleversafe raised money from the CIA. Hmmm.
4. Get ready for the Open Data Alliance in the cloud.
5. Your editor is really looking forward to web fonts in HTML5.

Your Editor is calling in sick. If you want to send something to perk him up, consider an iPad, or one of those Google TVs for developers.

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?

Of course, the biggest thing to hit Twitter yesterday was the #accam10 tag broadcasting all the updates from the Association of Corporate Counsel conference in San Antonio. It sounds like a fun conference, and if only Legal Tech Wire were more than 10 days old, your Editor might be attendee No. 2,301.

Iron Mountain make two splashes therein. First, they announced the new Discovery Suite. No, it’s not a typo, the cool kids are dropping the “e”. Second, dropped something else with this video:

But they were by no means the only vendors to make some news and some announcements:

• Serengeti and the ACC announced their 2010 Outside Counsel survey here.
• Applied Discovery reminded us that they’ve got an iPhone app that covers eDiscovery law and news (probably much better than LTW’s feeble attempts  -Editor). More important to most LTW readers, Applied Discovery was also promoting Leverage. This is one we’ll have to write up in a separate post.
• And Autonomy was apparently handing out some interesting sounding whitepaper for which they provided no goo.gl (or even bit.ly) link. Whatever. I can wait.

Some other tidbits:

• Hardly a tidbit, Firesheep was a big deal in the techspace today. Take a look at Techcrunch, they’ve got some advice on how to defeat the Firefox add-in that threatens to steal your entire social profile.
• InsideLegal says that Supreme Court advocate Larry Lessig will be a keynote at the ABA TechShow.
• Clio and the Mac Lawyer want you to take their survey on Mac usage in the firm (here).
• The Bow Tie Blogger has a monster post on a spoilation case here.
• And why not? Who needs Iron Mountain’s Discovery Suite, or Applied Discovery’s Leverage, or Autonomy, or Recommind, or any of that?Just do it yourself.

Of course, the big news today was Iron Mountain’s announcement of its new Discovery Suite. (No, not eDiscovery, discovery. Actually, there were quite a few announcements today, but more about that later.) In its own words, here is Iron Mountain’s T.M. Ravi:

Earlier today, I asked the company for some more technical details and/or screen shots of the new technology. When I get them, you’ll be the first to know!

For now, we’re left with the high-level: the new suite seems to represent a shift by eDiscovery vendors away from just providing spot discovery solutions to blurring the line into the general GRC category. Put more simply, it seems to be a way to create the data stores you’ll need before you need them so you can respond more quickly to litigation or regulatory calls. Ex-ante, if you will.

It seems like this study (reg. req.) by IDC may be informing Iron Mountain’s shift.  The study says that companies are looking a platform that can accomplish the following:

That looks like a giant enterprise-wide computational problem! My guess is that most IT organizations would love to be able to pull off such a feat, but that they’re going to need a whole lot of stakeholder support within the company because they’re going to be willing to implement it. That and a lot of cold hard cash to pay for the hardware, software, and implementation costs.

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 got you, admit it. Of course there’s no sWire fund. I’m just freeloading (and who isn’t?) on Kleiner Perkins’s announcement of a $250 million VC fund for new social media ventures called “sFund.” The philosophy behind sFund is that today’s social companies are mere “dial tones” to connect all of us. Supposedly, the “real fun” of social will start in five years.

Finally, some word from at least one of the EDRM attendees. Doug Austin, of Trial Solutions, at the eDiscovery Daily reports that there were over 300 attendees (none of them on Twitter, apparently) and they “made significant progress in developing survey questions designed to gather and provide typical metrics experienced by eDiscovery legal teams in today’s environment.” Might be interesting to see the results of those survey questions, huh?

And that Fullbright Litigation Trends Survey sure has a long tail. Craig Carpenter at InfoRiskAwareness observes that the rainmakers are still dancing at Recommind because “the energy sector – which is a particularly strong vertical for both Fulbright and Recommind – seems to be squarely in the crosshairs, with a whopping 42% of respondents anticipating more disputes [next year] (up from 35% in 2009).” Barry Murphy at eDiscoveryJournal drilled deep into the report to conclude that continued “reliance on custodian self-collection points to a continued immaturity in eDiscovery programs at the corporate level.”

While we’re talking litigation, we might as well talk regulatory compliance too. There’s a detailed post over at the Hospital Review on how the HITECH Act of 2009 strengthens some of HIPAA’s already detailed requirements.

A variety of tidbits:

• IBM pushed deeper into the GRC space when it bought Clarity Systems which automates “the process of collecting, preparing, certifying and controlling financial statements for electronic filing with the SEC and other regulatory agencies.”
• Arizona-based nQueue Billback seems to be doing pretty well.
• Adobe has an interesting announcement about a fall-back widget for browsers that aren’t ready for HTML5.

Your Editor was lucky enough to catch up with the founder of PaperChace, Jacob R. Ruytenbeek, to ask him a few questions about his ambitions to fundamentally change the way litigators assess their cases.

Most lawyers went to law school to avoid terms like “decision trees,” but Jacob says it’s not so complicated:

PaperChace answers the age-old conundrum: “Should I settle now?” Both lawyers and clients struggle to figure out whether they should take the settlement offer, or leave it on the table. For lawyers, it can be very hard to explain what clients should expect: they’re usually newcomers to litigation and stare blankly at their lawyers when they mutter something things like “summary judgment.” They’re thinking Law and Order, but they’re not grasping the reality of their case. PaperChace makes the reality more clear.

In the next few years, Jacob hopes PaperChace will be “the go-to settlement software for mediators and litigation attorneys.” Victoria Pynchon said PaperChace gives realistic guidance and reminded us that “Laywers love numbers in the way only people who don’t understand them can.”

So, how is it that Jacob thought about changing the way lawyers think?

I was involved in litigation a few years back with my family’s business. We received an offer to settle the case and didn’t know if we should take it. There were so many possible ways of looking at it: financially, emotionally, as a commitment of time. . . it became obvious to me that we needed a structured way of “valuing” the case and making a good business decision.  So we made a decision tree, entering information about our case, possible jury verdicts if we went to trial, and–of course–the costs of continuing litigation. And it was incredible to see that even under the best circumstances, we were going to spend another $50,000 if we went to trial and the potential for high damages in our favor was really low—despite what our attorney said.

The attorney on the case would often say that the case could fetch upwards of $1 million dollars at trial. We focused on that in our discussions, but it was way too optimistic. When the decision tree forced us to get real about the possible outcomes, it was clear the case just wasn’t worth that much. We decided to settle. Even though we didn’t win $1 million, we ended up ahead by focusing on the structured decision.

One of the things you’re really going to like about PaperChace is that you can get started on it right now. It’s a web application, and it’s really easy to sign up and get started. Go to http://www.paperchace.com. Personally, I think a mobile feature (app or web) would be a great addition because I think cases often get settled at the last minute, sometimes even in the attorney-client conference rooms in the courthouse where passions are running high.