Robert Ambrogi Blog
Here is a brief round-up of some of the news I heard at LegalTech New York last week:
Carpe Diem Next Generation. Back in October, Tikit North America announced a major relaunch of the venerable timekeeping program Carpe Diem (which it acquired in 2010) as Carpe Diem Classic. The relaunch represented a major re-engineering and updating of the underlying programming, while retaining much of the look and feel that users were accustomed to. At LegalTech, Tikit announced that it is about six weeks away from launching Carpe Diem Next Generation.
Tikit North America President Peter Zver told me that this forthcoming release is focused on usability. The goal is to design a product so intuitive that a lawyer can “just pick it up and use it,” he said. The new version will work on all devices and will include passive timekeeping features that will hook into a lawyer’s activity. If the lawyer sends an email, for example, it will ask whether to record that event.
This new Carpe Diem will share much of the code and many of the features of the Classic version released in October, but will have a more modern and streamlined interface and some unique features. Tikit will support both products for the foreseeable future.
Worldox GX4. Another “coming soon” announcement at LegalTech is the next-generation of the Worldox document management system, to be called Worldox GX4. This will be a major new release of the product and its user interface, Worldox President Ray Zwiefelhofer told me. New features include one-click saving of documents without having to fill out a profile, full search functionality from directly within Microsoft Word and Excel, Active Profiling within Outlook to automatically assign client-matter information to emails, and a new interface to allow viewing up to three times more documents on the screen.
There will also be tighter integration with the Sony Digital Paper that Worldox distributes. A Worldox button will be added to the Sony interface that will push notes made on the Sony directly to the user’s Worldox account.
The Firm Directory optimizes expertise. Just after last year’s LegalTech, I wrote a review here of The Firm Directory from Neudesic, which I described as “like a law firm’s private LinkedIn.” This year, The Firm Directory rolled out various enhancements aimed at helping law firms and legal departments get greater insight into the expertise of their lawyers and other professionals. One new feature is the Expertise Finder which provides a new search capability based on practices, industries, skills, bar admissions and other criteria.
Another new feature is People Pivot, which allows users the ability to navigate among profiles based on common information within them. For example, if you are looking at a profile of someone who went to Boston College Law School, you can click on the school name to see others in the firm who also went to BC.
There are new back-end features as well, including a new Profile Approval Workflow that allows marketing and business development staff to monitor and approve profile content prior to publication.
Finally, there is new pricing for The Firm Directory. In an exclusive post here last April, I provided details on pricing for The Firm Directory. Now, Neudesic is introducing a new pricing model, subscription-based annual pricing based on volume. This will be based on the number of users in a firm (including lawyers and staff) and will be all-inclusive. Ramin Vosough, vice president of products at Neudesic, told me that for a firm of 1,000 users, this would work out to about $2 per user per month or $24 per user per year, billed annually.
There is still more to come as I continue to wrap up LegalTech, but that is all I have time for today.