April 11th, 2012 • Posted by George May • Permalink
Exemplify is pleased to announce the members of our Advisory
Board. The Exemplify Advisory Board has
been formed to provide our new company with a group of industry leaders to help
guide the development of our business and products. We feel very strongly that the group will
help us to bring to market products that will provide significant benefits to
legal practitioners.
The Advisory Board members are:
Denis
Hauptly - inventor of Westlaw.com (the first-ever Web version of Westlaw)
and countless other product innovations in the legal industry; CEO of Information
Innovators Group, LLC; member, Board of Directors, American Arbitration Association
Janet
Kerr - Executive Director, The Geoffrey H. Palmer Center for
Entrepreneurship and the Law and Professor of Law, Pepperdine University
Forrest
Rhoads - inventor of KeyCite, West km and countless other product innovations
in the legal industry; former Chief Strategy Officer at Thomson Reuters Global
Resources
Jeff Rovner -
Managing Director for Information, O'Melveny & Myers LLP
Marsha
Stein - Chief Information Officer, Ropes & Gray LLP
Meredith
Williams - Chief Knowledge Management Officer, Baker, Donelson, Bearman,
Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC
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April 3rd, 2012 • Posted by George May • Permalink
Exemplify is prominently featured in the cover story of the April issue of Law Technology News entitled "Is There a Second Act in Legal Technology?" (Completion of a free registration with
American Lawyer Media is required to view the article.)
The article profiles Graham Smith (founder of LiveNote) and our own Bill Bice
(founder of ProLaw), telling the story of how they built their original legal
technology businesses and eventually sold them to the Thomson Corporation (now
Thomson Reuters).
Both Graham and Bill are involved with new ventures in legal
technology these days. Graham is at the
helm of Opus
2 Magnum litigation support software. Bill is Chairman of LiquidPractice,
which provides the means to move the practice management of a small or medium
law firm entirely into the cloud. Bill
is also CEO of Exemplify. Both
LiquidPractice and Exemplify are ventures backed by Verge Fund,
a New Mexico-based super angel fund with a strong track record backing
successful technology companies.
The LTN cover article includes a separate feature on
Exemplify, which we hope will make for interesting reading for those in the
industry following our story.
An accompanying podcast is also available via the Web here
and via iTunes here
(look for the "Act Two" entry).
Our thanks to Monica Bay, the unparalleled Editor-in-Chief of
LTN and author of the articles, for the coverage of our exciting new venture.
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February 29th, 2012 • Posted by Robert Anderson • Permalink
If you're in charge of technology, knowledge management or
practice support at any large law firm, you know quite well that some of the
things you do fall under the heading of "thankless task." After all, attorneys can be a rather
independent-minded lot. They don't
necessarily take to the tools provided to them, and they tend to stick to the
tried and true when it comes to their work methods. This seems true regardless of the quality of
the initiative or tool provided to them; attorneys tend to do what they think
works.
In the world of knowledge management, thoughtful
practitioners have always longed for the day when contracts would be driven by carefully
crafted model forms instead of seemingly ad hoc precedent documents. KM professionals look at transactional law
practice and see the promise for leveraging best practices in existing work
product, but don't usually see that leverage deployed in the firm. The vision is one in which the latent
knowledge in the existing work product would coalesce into model forms that in
turn could lend themselves to contract automation and document assembly. But that vision has never arrived, at least
not on a large scale.
Certainly there has been no lack of effort or expertise
applied to the vision of model forms. In many cases, law firms have expended significant
resources on model forms initiatives and other types of knowledge management. Hours are piled up examining best practices,
market standards, and expert perspectives, resulting in model forms collections
and the technology to drive them.
Likewise, there are a variety of commercial endeavors built around the
idea that model forms can be created, either by technology or by expert
editorial selection.
But the thought-leading professionals behind the forms
initiatives are often disappointed to learn that the forms tend to
languish. Attorneys often don't use
them, continuing to draft in the same way they always have-duplicating
precedents from a recent deal, de-customizing them, and re-customizing them for
the present deal.
Is this because the forms systems and collections don't work
as intended? Not necessarily. In short, transactional attorneys usually
want to start with a precedent, not a form, and there are good reasons for that
practice. In all but the most routine
transactions, the model form requires substantial modification to suit the
transaction at hand. Complex documents are
not fully modular, so one cannot simply insert provisions for each type of
deal. In such cases, it is generally
simpler to find a reliable precedent with most of the features desired than to
customize the model form. Moreover,
sometimes one has to deal with the precedent or form chosen by the other side
when they have control of the document.
Neither form-based drafting nor precedent-based drafting has
everything a transactional attorney would want.
Each offers its own advantages, each with the same goals of efficiency
and quality. A precedent allows the
attorney to build off of the customized provisions someone has crafted in a
similar transaction, saving time and promoting quality. A form allows the benefit of tested language in
the generic provisions over many, many transactions. Thus, there is a tradeoff, and for anything
but the most routine transactions, the win tends to go to the precedent-based
approach.
With Exemplify, that tradeoff is obsolete. An attorney can start wherever he or she wants,
choosing the precedent document closest to his or her own deal. We bring the form to the precedent,
leveraging the latent knowledge in millions of documents. Yet no matter where the attorney starts, he
or she can draft with the confidence that comes from visibility into market
standard language.
We at Exemplify have great respect for the KM professionals who
have sought creative ways to support their attorneys with new tools and
technologies. We look forward to working with you so we can help make your task
just a little less thankless.
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February 15th, 2012 • Posted by George May • Permalink
Exemplify is pleased to announce the addition of Shannon Brown Janicki as Vice
President of Client Services. As you can
read on our Bios page, Shannon
brings over 20 years of experience in managing software and technology implementations
and support to her new role with our company.
Shannon is especially skilled at working with large professional services
organizations, including law firms.
Shannon will be in charge of our Client Services
organization, which includes client support, implementation and any product
customization needed to meet the needs of specific clients. She brings a long and successful track record
of meeting the needs of clients in our target markets.
We at Exemplify are very happy to welcome Shannon to our
executive team. We know our clients will
also be pleased to be working with Shannon.
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January 25th, 2012 • Posted by George May • Permalink
In my previous post, I offered some background on the historical
tilting of the legal technology playing field toward litigation offerings. Though transactional practitioners have
certainly been under-served with technology solutions by comparison to litigators
over the years, we have seen a little more activity and innovation directed
toward the transactional side in the last decade or so. Product offerings aimed at transactional
practice at present fit broadly into several categories:
Knowledge Management
(KM) Systems
These offerings are focused on allowing the attorney to find
a reasonable precedent - some appropriate starting point for the work they are
doing. These products are typically internally
focused on ingesting and providing access to the organization's own work
product. Such systems still find favor
among organizations who value internal experience as a store of value that
should be shared as widely as possible.
But naturally, such systems don't provide the ability to find out what
is happening outside the organization's walls.
Research Services
Traditional computer-assisted legal research (CALR) has been
a part of transactional practice for quite some time. A number of information providers run
businesses built on ingesting public filings (such as those in the SEC's EDGAR
database) and providing broad access to search the entire collection. Most services have comprehensive content and
solid search tools with documents that are often lightly categorized. While these services have wide adoption, they
tend to have two problems. First, they
are typically priced in the same way as litigation research tools (i.e., more use
usually means more expense). This might
have worked well when clients universally accepted pass-through billing for
research expenses. This is certainly not
a reflection of today's cost-conscious reality.
Second, comprehensive search services place the onus on the attorney to
find the right documents among the millions available. Transactional attorneys rarely are afforded the
time to spend hours searching the volume of transactional content in these
services. Even if they choose to spend
the time (and the firm's money), clients are unlikely to pay for it.
Editorially-Driven
Services
This category of product uses experts (often attorneys no
longer in practice) to select, update and (sometimes) annotate example
documents, forms and other content to guide the transactional attorney to the
right approach for typical kinds of transactions. These services can be found both via internal
departments (staffed by practice support lawyers, KM professionals, or even
practice heads) as well as commercial services.
Editorially-driven services have great appeal to attorneys and firms who
wish to guide the less-experienced practitioner down the right path. But it is difficult to administer such a
service in a current, comprehensive and cost-effective manner. Language and standards are not static. The state-of-the-art can change. And every deal is different - perhaps
different enough not to follow a model.
Perhaps most importantly, keeping a staff of experts at the task can be
expensive.
Exemplify was created to fill the gaps left by these
solutions via an entirely new approach, one that is:
-
As comprehensive as a review of a full EDGAR
search service
-
As exacting as an expert's detailed review
-
As current and timely as the market allows
-
As easy to use as a word processor
We will be at LegalTech along with the many other vendors
and consumers of legal solutions, providing private demonstrations of our
technology and product. If you'd care to
follow our story and learn more about how Exemplify can transform transactional
law practice, please return to this space for further updates after the
LegalTech show. You can also reach us
via the contact information elsewhere on this site.
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