Recently in Software Category

In a press release posted to its website, Onit has announced that it has raised  USD 4.1 million in Series B funding led by Austin Ventures. Onit was one of the first companies to develop project and process improvement applications for the legal industry. While Onit's solutions apply to more than the legal industry, it strongly emphasized the application of its business and legal process management applications to legal work. Therefore, I see Austin Ventures's investment as an indication that investors are seeing real growth potential for legal-project management.Related articlesOnit Seeks Members for Advisory Group; Offers Members its Legal Project...

I am a big fan of project-based education. It turns students into problem solvers. The sense of accomplishment in completing a project, reaching a distinct goal, is far greater than that provided by doing well on a quiz. The planning and time-management skills alone are as valuable as the knowledge acquired. Therefore, I strongly support initiatives such as the Project Management Institute's Education Foundation and efforts to convince the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to add a project management merit badge.Recently, a colleague shared with me yet another example of the power for projects to motivate children. My colleague's 13-year-old son just...

I started writing this post when I was nearing the completion of my one-year, all-you-can-eat subscription to West LegalED and was deciding whether to renew for another year. I know many of you who read this blog are attorneys who have to meet MCLE requirements to maintain your license(s) to practice law, so I regularly post about events where attorneys can learn about legal-project management and obtain MCLE credits at the same time. Therefore, I thought I would share my experiences with West LegalED to help you in making MCLE-purchasing decisions. I original subscribed to West LegalED because had...

On February 10th, I co-taught two lessons for the Organization of Legal Professional's (OLP) Project Management for Litigation Professionals course. I enjoyed the experience and the course went well, but I re-learned some valuable lessons about preparation and risk planning for remote presentations. Since so much of project management involves communication skills, which often includes making presentations of one form or another, I thought I would share my experiences and lessons learned from this event. Something Will Always Go Wrong With the TechnologyFew things prove Murphy's law better than a power-point presentation. When you memorize a speech and deliver it without slides,...

The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is hosting a product demonstration of iFramework, a project-management software tool for litigation-support projects. Title: Project Management Software for Litigation Support - Product Briefing Date(s): 4/1/2011 Time(s) 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM U.S. EasternLocation: Web cast.Register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/988961642 Session Description: For e-discovery and litigation support, it is essential to have a project management tool that manages the multiple aspects of critical projects. It is time to re-think and re-tool your department so that you can have peak performance and manage projects more effectively. Use technology to your advantage and watch how improved processes and workflow techniques can produce better results...

My interest in project management grew out of my e-discovery practice and desire to more effectively manage large, complex discovery projects. So I always enjoy reading what others in the industry have to say about e-discovery project management. Today I look at an article on the topic that provides some good points to ponder. This post continues my discussion of the International Legal Technology Association's (ILTA) recently released white paper on legal-project management.[1] I've linked to the previous posts in this series at the end of this post. In their article for the ILTA white paper, Randal Girouard, Manager of Litigation Support at Haynes & Boone...

This post continues my discussion of the International Legal Technology Association's (ILTA) recently released white paper on legal-project management.[1] In the first post in this series I discussed Pamela Woldow's article on how legal technologists can use LPM to enhance their position in their law firms.[2] This post looks at an article by Jennifer Potter, a Project Manager at Fish & Richardson, which discusses her firm's rollout of Microsoft Windows 7/Office 2010.[3] Ms. Potter begins at the beginning and discusses the usefulness of breaking down the work into sub-projects to avoid "initiation block." In other words, a work-breakdown structure, although she admirably avoids...

I was recently asked a great LPM-career question and thought I would post it, and my answer, here. Feel free to add to or counter my advice in the comments section. The question is: I have over 20 years of experience in the legal arena on both the vendor and client side. I have been out of the market for about two years and will be returning. How do I quickly come up to speed on the technology side? Most of my experience has been client facing (which I enjoy the most) and some project management. I prefer to delegate...

If there is some all-knowing, all-seeing deity out there entering my every step into the Book of Life, I wish said deity would give me access to its pages now and then to assist with my time entry duties. The money I spent, time I labored, and pain I endured in testing, configuring, and managing time-tracking systems should have earned me such a boon. Tracking time is a necessary evil for Legal Project Managers, especially if they are practicing attorneys. Even if you do not bill by the hour, it is still important to track your time to understand how long tasks...

Onit is an on-line project management SaaS offering that that is targeted to the 1500 companies that are just under the Fortune 500. I first looked at Onit when I read that it was creating a "legal edition." I set up a demo account on the beta version and found it to be a simple-to-use collaboration platform, but I didn't see anything that made it particularly well-suited for legal users or anything that made it stand out from the myriad of other project management SaaS offerings.[1]  In a recent e-mail exchange, however, Eric Elfman, the CEO of Onit assured me that Onit would...