Speaking of mergers...

Pretty soon, everything will either be owned by West or Lexis, with Lexis just announcing their buyout of Interface Software today. Forget 31 flavors, we'll be confronted with the question of 'Would you like chocolate or vanilla?' As a consumer, I have yet to see real benefit come from any of these recent acquisitions and truly question the value they bring to anyone other then the two parties involved. Perhaps Lexis will be able to offer more content to contacts in InterAction through their Company Dossier product and with Factiva moving from OneSource to Lexis later in 2005, Dossier will have even more to offer.

What do mergers really mean to the industry?

Is merger mania still alive and well? The recent UK/US merger creates one of the world's largest law firms with more than 2,700 lawyers. This merger came on the heels of the Piper-Gray Cary deal in October and got me thinking about how mergers affect those other then the lawyers.

In the legal technology vendor community, there has been mass consolidation over the last few years, which has mirrored the trend for law firms to consolidate and merge. The vendor consolidation, in my opinion, has yielded mixed results as far as the benefit to the law firms who purchases these products and services. One thing is for sure, there are fewer options then ever for several major product lines and a couple companies are bordering on a monopoly at the rate they are going.

While law firm mergers look great on paper and in the press, they invariably cut jobs, many in the IT arena. I know of several very talents CIOs that are out of work simply because they were the smaller of two firms merging.

While law firms and technology vendors can't worry about these issues, a by-product of mergers and consolidation is less choice and job opportunities.

Southern California Regional Event

On December 16th, ILTA is sponsoring an event on Intrusion detection and Wireless Networking Security. The meeting is being held at Manatt in West LA. For more information or to RSVP, please click here.

ILTA (formerly known as LawNet) Announces Dates for Their Annual Meeting

One of the most eagerly awaited announcements has come. ILTA just announced today the dates of their annual conference and in conjunction with that, the hotel hosting the event (Scottsdale JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort and Spa) is now accepting MEMBER reservations (no vendors yet). The conference, ILTA 2005: An Empowering Experience, will be held August 22 - 25, 2005.

If you're a Member, please consult the recent 'LawNet/ILTA News Briefs' e-mail sent by Randi Mayes for more information on making reservations.

If you're not a LawNet member, I would encourage you to check out their website. The organization is by far the largest for law firm IT professionals in the world and their annual conference is usually the talk of the industry.

More on knowledge repositories

In an earlier post, I talked about a webinar detailing the pros and cons of various storage/retrieval methods for knowledge. It got me thinking about it in more detail and as a result I wrote a brief article on the topic.

At the end of the day, we have a hard enough time getting lawyers to contribute/use any form of KM system, so why make it any harder than necessary?

Hummingbird loses three clients while others progress to rollout

While on the topic of DMS, I found this article in the UK magazine, LegalIT, very interesting. That along with numerous posts on various listserves, leads me to believe that Hummingbird is losing marketshare. While probably not all that surprising to most, this article is one of the first where firms openly talk about their problems with Hummingbird.