Blogs

Blogs

Outside Counsel Guidelines: Law Firm Electronic Billing Challenges

By Jess Van Wyhe
 Outside Counsel Guidelines: Law Firm Electronic Billing Challenges   BY JESS VAN WYHE Electronic billing or e-billing has become commonplace throughout the legal industry and has evolved into becoming the dominant way for corporate law departments to reduce outside counsel legal spend. The adoption of e-billing is largely sold to corporations on the premise that it will save time and money, improve audit and analysis procedures, as well as provide a place to contextualize legal data to help make better decisions. However, it’s impact to law firms has undoubtedly increased complexities in the billing and collection departments along the way. ...
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ILTA Roadshow Atlanta

By Barry Steel
Please join us in Atlanta on October 23rd for our CoreTech Roadshow.  It is being hosted by Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, at  171 17 th Street NW, Suite 2100, Atlanta, GA 30363. It starts at 12 Noon, and lunch is included.  We hope to see you there! Contact Madison Mugnola @ mmugnola@coretechleasing.com to sign up! We hope to see you there! Barry Steel. CoreTech Leasing​
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ILTA CEO Joy Heath Rush Named Recipient of the Fifth Annual Monica Bay STEM Leadership Award

By ILTA News
For Immediate Release:  (Chicago, IL): October 8, 2019: ILTA is pleased to congratulate CEO Joy Heath Rush on her selection as the winner of the fifth annual Monica Bay STEM Leadership Award. The Monica Bay STEM Leadership Award recognizes outstanding leadership qualities and innovation achieved in the legal technology industry. Rush will receive the award during Legalweek New York , February 4-6, 2020.  On receiving the award, Rush shared, “I am humbled by this award. I have admired Monica Bay from the day I first read one of her columns. To be recognized in Monica’s name makes me prouder than I can express. It is truly an honor to join prior award recipients!” ...
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Avoid Email Phishing

By Katie Desir
In support of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, ILTA is sharing new and repurposed content to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity throughout October. The following piece is written by ILTA Member  Mark C. Palmer , Chief Counsel, Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism.  You wouldn't let a stranger walk right into your home, so why do we do it with email too often? Use caution with all emails . - U nfamiliar “From” address : Make sure the sender’s name coincides with the email address and isn’t from an unfamiliar domain. Hover over the email address (or links in the email) to see a more detailed description ...
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Tip of the Week - View Emails in Outlook 2016

By ILTA Tips
Email Reading Format in Outlook 2016 is Stretched-Out   Reading emails had become a chore because, for most of my emails, I have to use the scroll bar to read the content. The email body is positioned at the center, with a large amount of space on both sides of the reading pane, resulting in having to constantly use the mouse to scroll to the right to read them.  This seems like a known issue when viewing HTML emails in Outlook. "Microsoft has noticed this issue and our product team are working on it." I hope this issue will be fixed soon. BUT – the following works for me:  Go to File > Options> Mail. Uncheck the option "Reduce message size by ...
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Grayed-out print button in Outlook 2016

By Rob Shaw
Hello - We've had Office 2016 and Windows 10 in place for months now, and we continue to experience the grayed-out print button in Outlook.  For us, the issue occurs with any version of the HP Universal Print Driver.  If we switch to another driver, the issue goes away.  We'd really like to resolve this with the UPD since our tray settings and macros are all configured with that driver.  So far HP and Microsoft have not been much help, essentially blaming the other for the issue. I know others have experienced this, and I'm just wondering if there are any further developments.  Has anyone made any progress on this issue?  Thank you!!
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Tip of the Week - Section Break clarification

By ILTA Tips
Section Breaks   Control what goes BEFORE (not after):   So if you delete  a section break – the pages AFTER the Section Break will take on the formatting properties (margins, etc.) of the pages BEFORE that section break.   Header and Footers are Section properties.    Note the toolbar that comes up:     Each Section Header and Each Section Footer has its own formatting and various optio
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Now Available: ILTA Technology Survey, Executive Summary

By ILTA News
(Chicago, IL) September 27, 2019 – The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) today announced the publication of the 2019 Executive Summary, part of the annual ILTA Technology Survey.  This free, detailed Executive Summary begins the discussion this year around the Technology Survey. The full Tech Survey will publish in late October 2019, reporting the input of 537 firms, representing more than 116,000 attorneys, and 240,000 total users.  Once published, all ILTA member organizations will receive an email on how to access their copy (if they participated in the survey) or how they may purchase a full download of the survey.  The Executive ...
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Tip of the Week - Word Footer Tabs

By ILTA Tips
Documents often have footers that have   right -aligned information at the right margin. This information is aligned through the use of tab stops. (The footer contains information aligned to the left margin and to the right.) If you change the margins for the document, the footer no longer aligns at the right margin; it aligns at the old right margin (the one you changed). Have you ever wondered if there is a way to have Word change the tab stops in your footer automatically whenever he changes the right margin for the document.   There are two ways that you can approach this problem. One way is to use a two-column, one-row table in your footer. Set the ...
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Fight Data with Data: Participate in the 2019 Mattern Litigation Support & e-Discovery Cost Recovery Survey Today

By Robert Mattern
Drop 20% from your litigation support costs in 20 minutes. Discoverable data volumes keep growing exponentially–industry forecasts predict electronically stored information (ESI) will see a 5-fold growth between now and 2020  alone . This is, of course, the driving factor as to why enterprises across verticals are spending more on e-discovery:  an aggregated view of publicly available data projects values the industry currently at $10.1 billion and tracks the trend to nearly double in the next three years to each almost $19 billion. Firms are struggling with a legacy practice of writing off litigation support/e-Discovery and related costs.  That’s why ...
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Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Populate Knowledge Management Repositories

By Gwyneth McAlpine
Among the Knowledge Management (KM) community, one question we commonly hear is this: “How can I use artificial intelligence (AI) to populate KM repositories?”  I have good news and less good news.  There  are  pockets of success out there, but you need to be realistic about what AI excels at today. The Problem KM can involve significant manual effort that entails subject matter expert involvement.  Developing forms banks, practice-specific content, and matter and experience databases requires someone familiar with the area of law to parse through documents and matter information to identify standard practices and relevant data points.  ...
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Cleaning Up Your CRM Data - Ideas to Get You Started

By Christina Fritsch
These days, we keep hearing a lot of buzz about big data, but what we really need isn't more data – it’s better data. Research shows that up to 30% of our key CRM and other data degrades each year as people get hired, fired, promoted and change jobs; move and change addresses; get married and divorced; retire and even die. At the same time businesses are opening and closing; merging and being acquired; moving and relocating. Without our constant attention, all this can add up to a huge pile of data that is missing or mistaken, duplicative or dated, incorrect or incomplete.  These data issues can be a particularly painful problem in professional services ...
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The OCG Compliance Revolution is Here – Do Your Part

By Gabriela Isturiz
You may have heard the exciting news that Bellefield has teamed up with ALA to launch the 1 st Annual Law Firm Leader Survey on Outside Counsel Guidelines . This is the first time the impact on law firms of outside counsel guidelines, e-billing and billing compliance will be measured.  This is data that is desperately needed.  The vast majority of clients now use outside counsel guidelines to manage their outside counsel; however, most firms are so challenged by compliance that non-compliance is now being written off as a cost of doing business. What many firms may not be cognizant of, however, is just how high this cost is.  In just one Am Law firm ...
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Tip of the Week - Outline View in Word

By ILTA Tips
Who knew about Outline View? I didn’t – but Dave did!  This follows up from last week’s tip on Styles:   Create A Document Outline In Outline View When you have a complex document to organize, Outline View ( View   >   Outline ) helps you focus on its structure. You can use Outline View to create or edit headings, adjust heading levels, and rearrange the content until everything is right where you want it. It’s just a standard view function part of the Word Ribbon under the View Tab..I guess a little hidden gem as not many are aware of it but I use it all the time to catch ToC errors before creating one Available in all versions of Word since ...
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Recap of ILTACON Data Privacy Sessions

By Karen Allen
  Now that I’ve finally (mostly) cleared out my inbox post-ILTACON, I have a few minutes to ruminate on the two data privacy sessions I attended.  Tuesday’s session, titled Data Privacy:  Everyone’s Getting In On It , featured Michelle Merola as the moderator and panelists Lauren Doerries, Tsutomo Johnson and Joshua Lenon.  Thursday’s session, titled Data Privacy:  The anniversary of GDPR and the shape of things to come , featured Terri Garland as moderator and panelists David Hansen, Richard Hogg, and me.   Both sessions looked at the current state of data privacy and the impact it’s having on all our organizations, whether law firm or corporate, ...
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iManage - User Carry Adoption

By Missy McDonough
At a recent ILTACON iManage Company Update, Work 10 user adoption methods were reviewed. Considering the large number of ILTA members utilizing or moving to iManage Work 10, the ILTA Technology Solutions Content Coordinating Team asked Missy McDonough, Strategic Business Partner Liaison for IManage, to summarize the discussion to benefit not only those in attendance but those that were no able to participate. Thank you Missy for providing the following summary: At the ILTACON 2019 iManage Company Update, iManage introduced the concept of dividing DMS users in to three personas: power users, modern professionals and those who refuse to the use the DMS. ...
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Tip of the Week - Why Use Styles in Word??

By ILTA Tips
WHY USE STYLES? I.               Modify one, update all If you’ve used a Style to format a heading (or a paragraph or a numbering scheme or … whatever), rather than using direct formatting (where you painstakingly apply all the formatting to every bit of text individually), you can re-format whole swaths of text merely by  updating the Style . Don’t like that Style? Right-click it and Modify! You want to change the font on   everything , including the footnotes and headers and footers, all at once?   Right -click on the   Normal   Style on the Home tab and hit “Modify”, then change the font in the drop-down on that dialog box. And it all updates ...
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Tip of the Week - Custom dictionaries

By ILTA Tips
Word (2010 and up) How to add a custom dictionary Use one of the following methods to add a custom dictionary. Method 1: Create an additional custom dictionary To create an additional custom dictionary, follow these steps: 1. Start Word. 2. In Word, click File , and then click Options . 3. In Word, click Proofing , and then click Custom Dictionaries under When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs. 4. Click New to create a new custom dictionary. 5. In the File name box, type a name for the new custom dictionary, and then click Save. 6. The custom dictionary is added to the Dictionary list. The location is: 7. In the ...
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TimeSlips SME

By Will Crosby
Can anyone recommend a TimeSlips SME? A small NYC firm is seeking a contractor to help them out.
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Tip of the Week - Calendar Appointment Colors

By ILTA Tips
Here is the tip for Outlook Calendars (2016 and up):   Is there a way to change the whole color of a particular appointment (NOT using categories)? Yes – from the Calendar pick the View Ribbon, then  View settings . Then choose   Conditional formatting . Click   Add   and add your new condition, i.e., Birthday. Click   Condition , and choose from the options your “condition” for coloring that appointment. Make sure you delete “Free” and “Busy” or your other calendar items will change color! Example:   Thanks to Chad Conrow of Perkins Coie for this tip
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