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.
