In the continuing battle between Fastcase and Casemaker to win over the hearts (and business) of state bar associations, score one for Fastcase. And a big one, at that.
Today, the North Carolina Bar Association announced that, effective June 1, Fastcase will replace Casemaker as the legal-research service it offers its members.
Making that particularly notable is that the NCBA has been with Casemaker since 2001, when it was one of the first bar associations to provide access to a legal research service as a member benefit.
One of the factors cited in the announcement for making the switch is that Fastcase provides native apps for iPhone and iPad.
Leana Fisher was an associate in the financial restructuring practice group at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius the first time a partner asked her to draft a reorganization plan for a debtor. Uncertain of what to do, she dove into PACER in search of examples and burned the midnight oil cobbling together a plan. When she presented it to the partner the next morning, he questioned why she had included various provisions that were inapplicable to their client. She had no good answer.
Flash forward many years, and Fisher is now the director in charge of a product she believes will help other lawyers avoid a similar fate. The second in the new Lexis Practice Advisor series, this one focuses on financial restructuring and bankruptcy. It is being officially released today.
The idea behind the Lexis Practice Advisor series is to provide transactional lawyers with one-stop shopping for information and tools they need for their practices. The first in the series was focused on business law. This financial restructurings module is the second. The third, due out this summer, will be a California jurisdictional module.
The Forms tab within Practice Advisor.
In developing this module, Lexis executives sought to address three “pain points” they identified through customer interviews, Suzanne Petren-Moritz, vice president and managing director of Lexis Practice Advisor, told me. The goal of the product was to help attorneys:
Simplify the routine aspects of what they do, without requiring them to reinvent the wheel for every new matter.
Get up to speed quickly when dealing with new transaction types.
Provide starting points for drafting documents.
Fisher and Petren-Moritz gave me a tour of the new module earlier this week. I do not have my own log-in so I have seen it only as they presented it to me.
When you sign-in, you arrive at a landing page from which you can either browse or search for a topic. The page also includes a small “what’s new” pane showing what is new, added or changed within the module.
The browse menu is organized by topics and subtopics relevant to financial restructuring, such as “Plan of Reorganization and Disclosure Statement,” “Exit Financing” and “Asset Purchase Agreements.” This is notable, Fisher says, because other bankruptcy resources are often organized by Bankruptcy Code section, making it harder to find what is needed for the matter at hand.
Once you select your topic, you come to a page with seven tabs across the top. These tabs form the heart of Practice Advisor:
Overview. A descriptive overview of the topic and discussion of key considerations.
Practical Guidance. Practice guides written by actual practitioners in the field that describe how to handle the matter and that provide practice notes. Contributors come from some of the top firms in the field, Fisher proudly notes, including Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.
Forms. A collection of forms and model documents with annotations by experts in the field. Some of these forms come from practitioners, some from actual filings and some from the treatise, Collier on Bankruptcy. Forms are annotated with drafting notes, offering guidance on the use of particular provisions. This section also includes briefs, pleadings and motions.
Legal Analysis. Commentary on the topic selected from key treatises, including Collier. “We’ve scoured Collier for all the relevant material,” Fisher says.
Cases. Key cases selected based on their relevance to the topic and organized by topic. For example, within the topic “Contents of a Chapter 11 Plan,” cases are organized under subtopics such as “Mandatory Provisions” and “Classification of Claims and Interests.”
Codes. Sections of the Bankruptcy Code and rules, selected based on their relevance to the topic.
Emerging Issues. Highlights and analysis of important, emerging legal issues to consider, selected based on their relevance to the topic.
Notice how many times I wrote “selected” in the bullet points above. It is important to understand that, while the Practice Advisor promises to cover a topic thoroughly and in-depth, it does not provide a complete library of every reference you might want.
The Legal Analysis tab within Practice Advisor.
Instead, the editors have compiled what they judge to be the most relevant to the topic. Thus, you get selections of topics and forms from Colliers, but not the full Colliers. You get sections of the Bankruptcy Code, but not the full code.
If you want to go deeper, you will need to jump into the full Lexis database. Throughout Practice Advisor, it provides links that will take you to the pertinent sections of Lexis.com, if you want to go there.
But Fisher says that, as a practice-focused tool, Practice Advisor has the key information a lawyer would want. The cases and code sections selected for inclusion are presented in full, with all headnotes and hyperlinks (links that function within the module). Forms are presented in full and can be downloaded, printed and emailed.
“There will be no dead ends,” she said. “If it is relevant, it is included.”
This Practice Advisor module for financial restructuring and bankruptcy is sold on a flat-fee, annual basis. The price is $120 a month, per practice-area attorney. Note that that is not a per-subscriber price – if the firm’s financial restructuring practice area has 20 attorneys, it is charged for 20 attorneys, no matter how many of them want to use this. Of course, Lexis will consider pricing discounts for large practice groups or firms with other Lexis accounts.
It’s been at least two decades since I last handled a bankruptcy matter. That said, I remember well feeling the uncertainty Leana Fisher must have felt as a young associate drafting her first reorganization plan. Based on my tour yesterday, this looks to be a product that can help relieve that uncertainty, pulling together key cases, laws and treatises and combining them with practical guidance and commentary from actual practitioners.
Warning: You might just go ape over ContactMonkey. It lets you provide your contact information to others in a way that makes it easy for them to add you to their contacts — no matter what program they use for their contacts and no matter what device or operating system they are on.
Visitors to my profile need just click to add me to their contacts.
You get a unique web address for your contact information. Put the address in your email signature, on your business card, on your website, or wherever. When someone goes to that page, they see your full contact information.
But the better part is what they see on the right side of the screen. It shows a list of 19 common contacts applications for Mac, Windows, Web and mobile. (See image to right.) The user need only click on the one he or she uses and, voilà, your information is added to the person’s contacts.
Reports. You get reports showing downloads of your contact information. If the downloader was a registered user of ContactMonkey, you see the name. If not, you see only the downloader’s browser type and location and the time and date of the download.
Web page widget. Put your ContactMonkey information on your website or blog.
Notices of updates. When someone downloads your contact info, the person is also given the option of “subscribing” to your profile, so that if you make changes, the user gets notified by email.
QR code. You get a QR code for your contact page that you can add to business cards or elsewhere.
Everything I’ve described so far is free. ContactMonkey also offers a “white-label edition” for businesses at a price of $3 per user per month. The white-label service includes:
A branded contacts site for your company that is reached through a subdomain of your URL. Thus, your company’s main contact page would be http://contacts.yourcompany.com and each employee would have a unique URL for his or her contact info, such as http://contacts.yourcompany.com/JohnSmith.
The ability to manage your company’s contacts from your own server, using either Active Directory (for Windows servers) or a custom integration using ContactMonkey’s API.
The ability to designate administrators to manage your company’s contacts and track the reports.
One other point worth noting is that you can set the privacy level of your contact information. There are three choices:
Public, meaning anyone can see your contact page and search engines can index it.
Discreet, meaning anyone can see your page, but search engines can’t crawl it.
Private, meaning you must give someone your privacy code (which you create) before they can view your page.
There are other tools that let you share your contact information — the classic vCard being the most ubiquitous. But the others lack the versatility and ease of use of ContactMonkey. I like the ability to add a contact with just one click. You might even say I’m bananas about it.
I will admit that I have been among those who wonder why some lawyers adhere so loyally to WordPerfect. I was once one of them, but I went with the tide and made the switch to Microsoft Word long ago. Today, however, as I read the announcement of the all-new WordPerfect Office X6 released today by Corel, I wondered anew why we all so quickly abandoned WordPerfect.
You can say this about WordPerfect: It tries harder to meet the word-processing needs of lawyers than any other word processor out there. In this latest version, one of the major new enhancements is the addition of Bates numbering. Now, lawyers can easily insert Bates numbers in WordPerfect documents, individually or as a batch, giving each page a unique, incremental number for quick identification.
I have not tried this new version of WordPerfect. But as I read some of its features, I like what I see. For example, among the new features of this version:
Multiple monitor support lets you open as many copies of WordPerfect as needed on separate monitors.
Advanced preview lets you preview WordPerfect files in Windows Explorer and as attachments in Outlook without having to open them.
And then there are the features it already had, such as redaction tools; strong PDF capabilities, including support for PDF/A; and, of course, that longtime favorite of lawyers, Reveal Codes.
Within WordPerfect, you can open, edit, and create files in all Microsoft Office formats, including DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, as well as Open Office XML documents.
On top of that, it comes bundled with other useful tools, including Nuance PaperPort 12 SE, for scanning, OCR and document management; and WinZip, for compressing files and email attachments. And, for all you aspiring authors, it now includes a new WordPerfect eBook Publisher for laying out and publishing ebooks.
Do you encrypt confidential client email? You should, of course. But do you? The problem with encryption is that it can be cumbersome. In fact, both encryption and decryption can be a hassle.
Now there is a free application that makes encrypting and decrypting emails so easy that, well, even a lawyer can do it. Called Enlocked, it works with Outlook, web-based email clients and even Apple and Android mobile devices.
Enlocked adds a "Send Secure" button in Outlook.
To use it with Outlook, simply download the plugin, install it and restart Outlook. Now, when you compose an email, a new button appears on the tool bar, “Send Secure.” Compose your email as you normally would. When you’re ready to send it, use this new button. Your email is encrypted and sent.
Of course, encryption requires decryption at the other end. To read your email, the recipient will also have to have the plug-in installed. If you send an email to someone who has not installed Enlocked, then he or she automatically receives a separate email explaining that they are about to receive an encrypted message and describing how to install the app in order to read it. Recipients no longer receive this message once they install the app.
Once the recipient has installed Enlocked, then he or she is able to read your encrypted email just as any other email. The decryption is seamless and invisible.
For Web-based email programs, such as Gmail or Hotmail, Enlocked provides browser extensions. Extensions are available for Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
For mobile devices, Enlocked has apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android. A BlackBerry app is “coming soon,” the website says.
You can install Enlocked on as many devices and in as many browsers as you like. Besides installing it in Outlook, I also installed the Chrome extension and tried it in Gmail. Just as in Outlook, when you compose a message in Gmail, a new button appears, “Send Secured.”
Worth noting is that Enlocked uses the OAuth protocol to work with your email. This lets it work with your data without ever having direct access to your data or to your email passwords. If you should ever lose a device, then you can block access to encrypted messages on the device simply by changing your email password.
For encryption, Enlocked uses PGP, which is the original and, safe to say, most trusted encryption program.
In January, I wrote here about MyPocketAttorney, a website that lets lawyers build their own smartphone apps using templates designed for law offices and legal professionals. Now there is another company offering something similar through its website, but this new entry, called Barrister App, is different in several ways — some good, some not.
On the plus side, Barrister App was created specifically for the legal profession. By contrast, MyPocketAttorney came from a company that did the same thing for any number of professions (MyPocketInsurance, MyPocketRealtor, MyPocketChurch and MyPocketFuneral, to name some). Further, Barrister App comes with a simple content management system (CMS) on the back end that lets you add content about your firm and its attorneys, customize the look of the app, manage your information, and even send notifications to your clients.
Even so, there are limits to what you can do. Your design is confined to the template of the app. You can change its color, but only from a choice of six colors. You can add your own logo and your own firm’s information, but every law firm that uses Barrister App will end up with an app that is built on the same basic design.
But for me, the most puzzling aspect of Barrister App is that, before anyone can use it, they must contact you outside the app and request a login and password. This befuddles me, because Barrister App advertises itself as a tool for helping law firms “connect with would-be clients.” Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
If someone interested in your firm went to the iTunes, Android or Blackberry store looking for your app, their search would be fruitless. The app appears in the store only under the name Barrister App, not under your firm name (as it would if you developed your own app). The potentially interested user would have to know to download the app and then to contact you for a password. Only after you give the user credentials can he or she log in.
This might make sense as a client-communications tool. In fact, the Barrister App seems to have been designed with communications with current clients in mind. Its CMS dashboard prompts you to enter client names and contact information so that you can give them passwords. It includes a push-notification feature that lets you send notices to individual clients or to everyone whose name youve added in the dashboard.
But as a marketing tool, it makes no sense. If someone is merely interested in learning more about your firm, he or she is highly unlikely to call you and request permission to use your app. To the extent Barrister App calls itself a tool for reaching “would-be” clients, it is a shallow promise.
How It Works
When you purchase the Barrister App for your firm, you get access to a back-end CMS that walks you through the set up. Set up is easy and straightforward.
Your app will include these components:
Who We Are. This is where the app lists your attorneys, their contact information and their practice areas.
Where We Are. This shows your office or offices on Google Maps.
What We Do. The list of your practice areas.
Notifications. As noted above, you can sent notifications to clients — anything from appointment reminders to firm news.
My Notes. Users can make and store notes here.
My Profile. The client inputs information here.
You set this all up in the CMS, where you start with a tab labeled “My Firm Profile.” There, you enter basic information about the firm, add a description, and upload a logo. You then go the “Address” tab and enter the addresses for each of your firm’s offices. This provides the information for Google Maps to show your location.
The next step is to create “Categories,” which are your firm’s practice areas. From there, you add each of your attorneys. As you do, you associate the attorney with the appropriate practice areas. You can include an attorney bio and photo.
As I noted, there is also a tab for adding clients. This allows you to set them up with a password.
The last tab is for sending notifications. Simply select who to direct it to, fill out the information, schedule it, and you’re done.
What it Costs
The cost of this is based on the size of your firm:
1-9 lawyers: $395.
10-25 lawyers: $995.
26-99 lawyers: $1,995.
100+ lawyers: $2,995.
In addition, you must pay an annual support and maintenance fee equal to 20% of the purchase price.
The Bottom Line
Given the constrictions I described above — that you can’t market this app under your own firm’s name and that potential users must contact you for a password — this app is of little use for marketing to new or “would-be” clients. Of course, marketing also involves engaging with current and former clients. As a way of keeping in touch with existing clients and of giving them ready access to your attorneys, this could be useful.
Well this is interesting. For as long as I’ve been a lawyer, the name ALI-ABA has been synonymous with high-quality continuing legal education. Now, after 65 years together, ALI and ABA are going their separate ways. ALI gets custody of the kids.
Here’s the announcement that went out this week from the ABA:
The American Law Institute and the American Bar Association today announced that they have agreed to end their joint arrangement to provide education for the legal profession via ALI-ABA Continuing Professional Education. This change will increase flexibility as each organization continues to offer legal education programs that help lawyers navigate the rapid changes in legal developments and technology. Staff members who operate ALI-ABA will continue to work for the ALI.
Meanwhile, ALI put out its own version of the announcement. It said:
The American Law Institute has begun a new chapter in its efforts to provide education for the legal profession. Since 1947, the ALI has cooperated with the American Bar Association to offer CLE through ALI-ABA Continuing Professional Education. Now the ALI will begin producing CLE separately, under its own name, as will the American Bar Association. Staff members who operated ALI-ABA will continue to work for the ALI, producing hundreds of live courses each year and offering thousands of hours of on-demand CLE.
At the helm of ALI’s new CLE division will be Nancy Mulloy-Bonn, who has been ALI-ABA’s acting executive director. All of the former ALI-ABA products — which include live courses, webcasts, telephone seminars, on-demand courses, and periodicals such as The Practical Lawyer — will continue, the announcement said. No word on whether there will be a change in the www.ali-aba.org URL.
According to the ABA announcement, the relationship started just after World War II.
The joint arrangement between the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association started in 1947, when a demand for legal refresher courses for returning World War II lawyer-veterans revealed a need to ensure the continuing education for all lawyers. The American Bar Association asked the American Law Institute to undertake the first national program of continuing education and the two organizations formed ALI-ABA.
No doubt, these are challenging times for CLE providers — not to mention for bar associations.
Members of Congress and their staffers who travel at the expense of private organizations must follow a long list of legal restrictions and requirements. However, a little-known law, the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, allows the same federal employees to travel with virtually no accountability and very little transparency.
In his recent report, Law Shrouds Details of Congressional Trips Abroad, ProPublica.org reporter Justin Elliott revealed details about how this law works and who it benefits. On this week’s legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, Elliott joins us to discuss his article. Also joining us is Washington University Law Professor Kathleen Clark, a leading scholar in government ethics, whistleblowing, national security law and legal ethics.
I’ve been so swamped since ABA Techshow that I have not had much time to write about what I saw there. Many of the product announcements at the show involved upgrades or new versions of existing products. But there was one major new product unveiled at Techshow that is worth noting: JuraLaw, a cloud-based case, calendar and docket management application.
Techshow’s Chicago venue was the perfect place to launch JuraLaw, given that it is the creation of Chicago-based Law Bulletin Publishing Company, publisher of newspapers, magazines and technology products for the legal profession. For a number of years, the company has operated DM2000, a Windows-based case and calendaring program that enables law firms to connect their cases to the calendars of the Northern Illinois courts, giving them direct, desktop access to court calls and other key events.
In a sense, JuraLaw is the next iteration of DM2000. But that’s sort of like saying that the iPod was the next iteration of the Walkman. JuraLaw has several major differences that set it miles above DM2000:
It will be national in scope. This is no longer a product focused solely on Northern Illinois courts. The plan is to take it national and cover the entire country.
It is software as a service. Because it is SaaS based, there is no software to buy, install or maintain. Use it through your browser.
The interface is cleaner and more intuitive. JuraLaw has been designed from the ground up to provide a clean and simple to use interface.
Apart from those design elements, JuraLaw’s content will be far more extensive than anything the company has offered before. It will include:
Calendar event management. It will track critical court dates and case events, focusing on managing court deadlines to mitigate risk and professional liability. It will integrate with Microsoft Outlook Exchange calendar and email.
Docket management. It maintains complete histories of cases. Firms can record all important events associated with their cases, and they can subscribe to court docket data.
Court rules from across the nation. JuraLaw is collaborating with CalendarRules to provide up-to-date federal, state, appellate, bankruptcy and agency rules from jurisdictions across the nation. As of Techshow, the states it covered were: AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, LA, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, NC, NU, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI, and WY.
Illinois court calls. This is the same as was provided through DM2000.
Global docket searching. The application will include a global docket search feature, for searching case information within JuraLaw. on in JuraLaw.
Although JuraLaw was announced at Techshow, you may have noted that I have been talking about it in the future tense. JuraLaw has not actually been rolled out yet to customers, although some law firms have been using it as beta testers. David S. Glynn, vice president of docket management technologies at the Law Bulletin, tells me that it will go live with its first customer in May and then gradually roll out to additional customers.
Also, the initial roll-out will focus on Illinois (and on transitioning current DM2000 users to the new platform). Although it will include calendar rules from the states listed above, it will not have any direct linkage to dockets or court calls in other states to start. Other states will be added over time as new versions of the product become available.
The Association of Corporate Counsel today launched ACC Contract Advisor, a contract-drafting tool built on what is described as a “vast collection” of sample contracts and thousands of real-world clauses. Launched in collaboration with kiiac.com, the new resource is, unfortunately, available only to ACC members.
Contract Advisor offers four primary features:
Model contracts. These standard contracts are described as a synthesis of the most common language and clauses drawn from a collection of sample contracts and from member-submitted forms and policies. For its initial launch, Contract Advisor includes 10 contracts and policies. New forms and policies will continue to be added, the site says.
Clause library. For each contract type, select from a wide range of thousands of clauses. It is organized by agreement and clause type. For each clause, it shows you both a model clause and a full selection of other clauses within the database.
Benchmark tool. Use this to compare a contract you drafted against the Contract Advisor database. It will show you matching clauses, divergent clauses and missing clauses.
Source documents. A user can access any of the source documents contained within the system.
Contract Advisor is fully searchable, so that a user can search all documents for specific language. Model contracts and clauses can be downloaded in Word or PDF formats.
Even if you are not an ACC member, you can see more about it via a series of tutorials on the Contract Advisor landing page.
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Even so, there are limits to what you can do. Your design is confined to the template of the app. You can change its color, but only from a choice of six colors. You can add your own logo and your own firm’s information, but every law firm that uses Barrister App will end up with an app that is built on the same basic design.
Members of Congress and their staffers who travel at the expense of private organizations must follow a long list of legal restrictions and requirements. However, a little-known law, the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, allows the same federal employees to travel with virtually no accountability and very little transparency.
Techshow’s Chicago venue was the perfect place to launch JuraLaw, given that it is the creation of Chicago-based 
