Blogs

Blogs

Press Release |ILTA 2020 Technology Survey is Open for Participation

By ILTA News
For Immediate Release: (Chicago, IL):  May 29, 2020: The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is pleased to announce the opening of the ILTA 2020 Technology Survey. ILTA's most prestigious publication each year is our annual Technology Survey. It provides substantive data against which you can benchmark your organization's technology implementations and future plans. This year’s Survey has incorporated a new section related to COVID-19 and the Executive Summary’s narrative will address some of the lingering, and possibly enduring, effects that COVID-19 has on the legal technology landscape. A survey link with a passcode for each firm will be ...
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ILTA CEO guests on podcast "Legaltech Events in Times of Corona"

By ILTA Publication
Earlier this week, ILTA CEO Joy Heath Rush was a guest on Legal IT Professional's podcast, " Legaltech Events in Times of Corona". Additional guests on the episode were  George Katrivesis (Marketing Director, Chilli IQ), Steve Parrott (Co-Founder, Alternative Events), Sasha Urry (EMEA Director of Marketing, iManage) and Gareth Thomas (Practice Group Leader Marketing & BD, Intapp). The podcast  touched on the Corona pandemic affecting almost all sectors worlwide. The discussion covered social distancing measures and how the events industry is coping with the many events that been canceled or postponed.  Listen to the podcast here .  ​
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Press Release | ILTA Partners with Suffolk Law to Offer Critical Online Training

By ILTA News
For Immediate Release: (Chicago, IL) May 27, 2020: The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA ) has announced its endorsement of an educational opportunity for its members to enroll in Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Certificate . The Certificate is a first-of-its-kind online program consisting of six courses designed to prepare legal professionals to work more effectively and efficiently in a rapidly changing legal marketplace. The heralded program is ideal for attorneys and legal professionals (e.g., legal operations professionals, law librarians, paralegals, technology specialists, legal project managers, legal ...
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ILTA's Leadership Book Club - Simply Said

By Brian Donato
On Wednesday, May 20 th , over 90 people were treated to a book club discussion about “Simply Said: Communicating Better at Work and Beyond” hosted by the author, Jay Sullivan. The book covers a variety of practical tips on how to communicate with others in person, via presentation, or in writing. Jay focused his presentation on several key themes.  Themes such as “Focusing less on yourself and more on others”, and “Delivering effective messages” were both timeless and resonated especially well with a membership dealing with the challenges of being thrust into a work from home environment.  Members shared their challenges with this situation including: ...
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#CreatingtheFutureTogether

By ILTA
Check out this introductory piece around #CreatingTheFutureTogether, brought to you by @Jackie Nagtegaal , one of  ILTA's 2020 Influential Women in Legal Tech  awardees, Futurist & Managing Director,  Law for All .  What immediately comes to mind when you read this?  Share your thoughts in the comments here or within the blog post. COVID-19 is a seismic event, reshuffling our carefully planned strategies, rearranging our societies and changing human behaviour in powerful ways. It has thrown most of us off-kilter, challenging the confidence we started the new decade with. As we kicked off in January, we believed we had the luxury of ...
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Artisanal Legal Documents Need to Die Now

By John Alber
First in the Future-Proofing Series “[I]f your firm is rising to meet the new demands of a post-pandemic legal economy, and, in particular, if you expect to embrace the increased risk-shifting toward law firms that now seems inevitable, you will be best served by investing soon in document automation. Document assembly platforms and expert systems will become the foundation of the fixed price and alternative fee economy. They are essential tools in separating value from hours. And, as such, they are also indispensable for extracting profits from a legal economy with precipitously falling demand.” Future-Proofing.   The future advances on us in fits ...
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Tip of the Week - Never Do this in Word - Any version

By ILTA Tips
Never do this in Word: Use Format Painter as a replacement for styles If you find yourself using Format Painter a lot, stop. Instead, create a custom style or modify one of Word’s built-in styles accordingly. Formats applied directly (manually) have a way of causing problems because they take precedence over styles. Later, when applying a style doesn’t have the desired effect, you might not know why. Format Painter isn’t the only culprit though—any direct formatting has the potential to cause problems. Always use a style when possible. OR this either: Use two returns to end a paragraph When using block style for content, users often hit Enter ...
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Blood from a Turnip: Cyber Security for the Resource Challenged

By David Forrestall
Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by  David Forrestall , CISSP CISA, Managing Partner, SecurIT360 and David Oxley , CLM, CISM, Director of Information Technology, Messerli & Kramer. Introduction Everyone agrees that cybersecurity is absolutely essential.  However, many firms still do not have dedicated security resources.  And, if you are a smaller firm, do you really need to do as much as the larger firms?  If you look at NIST, ISO 27001, or other frameworks, there is a lot to do, and much of this is still thrown over the wall to IT.  Does all of that apply to us and if so, how in the heck can we get it done?  Security for the new WFH ...
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Does my outside patent counsel care about me?

By Eric Tuttle
As in-house counsel, your priorities are to develop a high-quality patent portfolio for your company while staying within the company's IP budget. By contrast, the priority of outside counsel is more closely tied to basic economics. A law firm desires to maximize its profits, but higher quality work at a lower price may reduce profits. As in-house counsel, it is important to take action to ensure that your outside counsel is taking care to do high-quality work.  This is especially the case with fixed-fee billing where there are higher incentives for law firms to cut corners. One way to get higher quality work from your outside counsel is to carefully ...
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IVIONICS Information and Technology Stimulus Program

By Robert Hunt
As we open another week bringing us closer to a sense of normalcy, the rippling impact of the economic downturn continues to touch many in the legal community. With the financial strain impacting law firms of every size in need of IT services,  IVIONICS  has put together a stimulus program that will allow your attorneys and staff to focus on business while maintaining a secure and supported workplace. As part of this program, IVIONICS is offering new clients impacted by the crisis: Up to two (2) months of technical support services and the ability to defer up to six (6) months at a rate of 1% annually with prior approval. For more detail and application ...
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Tip of the Week - Don't Depend on Recall

By ILTA Tips
Don’t Depend on Recall If you send a message you want to withdraw, you can try Recall, but don’t hold your breath. It seldom works. If you want to try, here’s how: Open the message you hope to recall. In the Move group, click Actions and select Recall This Message from the dropdown. In the resulting dialog ( Figure D ), choose one of the delete options and click OK. Now, this feature is great in theory, but the reality is, it will probably fail because: The message must be unread. You and the recipient must be in the same Exchange organization. The recipient must be using Outlook. The message must be sitting in the recipient’s Inbox—if ...
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Fresh Voices of Legal Tech: Nada Elfaki, Business Development Manager – EMEA, DocsCorp

By ILTA
Welcome to ILTA’s new blog and podcast series to showcase the new voices of legal technology. This series highlights those who have one or less years of experience within the community in hopes to showcase and educate the future of the legal landscape. Here is the abridged conversation between Mercedes Brown , ILTA UK Membership Engagement Manager, and Nada Elfaki, who has a little more than 13 months of experience in the legal tech community with her position at DocsCorp , a trusted ILTA Business Partner. Want to hear the entire conversation? Tune into the complementary ILTA Radio podcast (less than 20 minutes) to learn more about her career path, ...
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To Pause or Not to Pause?: Why Law Firms May Want to Consider Keeping Their Existing Technology Projects on Track

By ILTA Publication
This article is Part 1 of the To Pause or Not to Pause series, authored by Trevor Bell, Chief Customer Officer at ZERØ. The next article in the series will appear in the Summer 2020 issue of ILTA's Peer to Peer . In the legal tech world, we are currently trying to balance two different, seemingly paradoxical realities.  On the one hand, predictions abound that law firms need to hasten digital transformation. As those of us in the industry have seen, many were unprepared for the reality of working from home for an indefinite period of time and incurred significant expenses in the form of lost productivity and buying sprees of the hardware and ...
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Tip of the Week - Creating LINKS To Places In Same Document in Power PDF

By ILTA Tips
Creating LINKS To Places In Same Document in Power PDF   On the Edit ribbon in PowerPDF, click on Link A + will pop up, so select the word or prhase you want to link something to. This box will pop up:   Here you can choose whether the box around the word/phrase will be visible or not (usually, you do NOT want it visible).  Change Visible Rectangle to  Invisible Rectangle. On the Link Action: for linking to INSIDE the SAME document, change it to Go to a page view.  Then your box should look like this:   Then click on Next You will get this instruction: Do what it says – leaving that box up , use the scrollbars, ...
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Evolving Skill Sets in Law

By Martha Breil
Evolving Skill Sets in Law There is ample evidence that the practice of law is evolving. It is a topic covered frequently in industry publications, educational programming, blogs, and in the mainstream media. An increasing number of Am Law 100 firms are marketing not only their legal services but also their legal-operational services to their clients. Alternative Legal Service providers are now in the mix even in the United States. Practice innovation leaders and teams have become relatively common as many traditional knowledge and/or practice management teams have shifted their focus to encompass innovation as well as traditional KM responsibilities. It ...
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Developing a Standard of Testing for Covid-19 using Data Modeling and AI

By Pete Afrasiabi
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently stated that the Coronavirus behind the current COVID-19 pandemic “is very efficient,” meaning it has the ability to protect and advance itself through its environment with explosive propagative efficiency. This quote demonstrates that viruses have a billion-year evolutionary head start compared to humans. Where a virus may have simply infected a horseshoe bat with little to no affect with their longer evolutionary traits, humans on the other hand do not have the same evolutionary advantage. The process of natural selection overs eons has given the virus the power to proliferate at the rate of millions of human host infections ...
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Tip of the Week - Rolling Credits in PowerPoint

By ILTA Tips
Rolling Credits in PowerPoint If you need to give credit to multiple people who contributed to your PowerPoint presentation, you can add rolling credits to the final slide by using the scrolling text animation. Here’s how to do it in your next presentation. First, navigate to the final slide of your presentation and insert a blank text box. You can do so by clicking the “Text Box” icon in the “Text” group of the “Insert” tab. Your cursor will turn into an arrow and, after you click, a crosshair. Click and drag the cursor to draw the text box. Since credits are typically aligned in the center of the page or screen, we’ll set ours up the same way. ...
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Ripped from the Headlines: Staying Human While Zooming

By Alice Locatelli
DISCLAIMER: This is not an endorsement of any product or platform. Ripped from the Headlines: Staying Human While Zooming DISCLAIMER: This is not an endorsement of any product or platform. With many organizations thrust into videoconferencing like never before in the midst of a global pandemic, new norms and tools are being developed by organizations across the country and the world. The first weeks were spent trying to ramp up to productivity, but as organizations settle in for what may be a long time, it’s important to consider how to thrive in this new environment. A critical element of the new norms being created is the importance ...
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Empathetic Human-Centered Design Overlay on Design Thinking Post COVID-19

By Amy Monaghan
Please enjoy this co-authored blog by Amy Monaghan , Senior Practice Innovations Manager, Perkins Coie and Mike Ertel , Practice Innovation & Knowledge Attorney, Paul Hastings. The purpose of this blog post is to encourage using empathetic, human-centered design as an overlay on Design Thinking when creating solutions for your law firm.  We decided this was an important topic earlier this year before COVID-19, when we could still meet in person and were not confined to working at home.  Now, after COVID-19 has changed our reality, we think empathy is more important than ever.  Human-Centered Design vs. Design Thinking Design Thinking ...
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Ripped from the Headlines: Flower Shop or FBI? Your Security Settings in Zoom

By Alice Locatelli
DISCLAIMER: This is not an endorsement of any product or platform. Ripped from the Headlines: Flower Shop or FBI? Your Security Settings in Zoom   DISCLAIMER: This is not an endorsement of any product or platform. Zoom has experienced unprecedented growth in the past three months; in the first three months of 2020, Zoom added more users than in all of 2019. [i] Undoubtedly, this growth is suddenly testing Zoom’s performance and security boundaries, and new users are thrust into quickly getting up-to-speed on this software. In considering best practices for Zoom, each organization needs to assess its balance on the Usability-Security spectrum, ...
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