Sep

4

The Way Lawyers Work Now

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Comments Off on The Way Lawyers Work Now

I can remember my excitement on first encountering PLC (Practical Law Company, http://uk.practicallaw.com). My five years as a law publisher had taught me two things. The way lawyers described their work was very different from the work they did and from which they derived the bulk of their fees. And the stalwart group of excellent lawyers working as editors in my own office were of little use to me if I wanted to find out what lawyers did for a living, since their backgrounds were academic and their interests were in the law itself, not the far less interesting dreary practice of the same. So PLC was a shocking revelation: built by practitioners for practitioners, almost merciless in its attention to practical detail, it provided the safety net that ensured that the right forms had been completed in the right way, and that just enough legal expertise was available to steer practitioners whose nightmare was coming face to face with the naked words of a statute without being told what they meant. While the great players at Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) and Lexis (Reed Elsevier) concentrated on the lucrative pastures of legal research for litigation, PLC built its niche, and did so in a country where the avoidance of litigation was a primary legal objective. Then they exported the concept of process by process guidance to the US, where they have had a very considerable success despite a slow start. Now the upstart competitor is a mature and profitable player, and an acquisition target for its larger peers and many others besides.

Yet this is still a competitive game. Markets like more than one player in each niche, even if they do not want three. In the first decade of PLC, Lexis and WestLaw have busied themselves with almost everything else – law practice marketing, practice management systems etc, etc – almost as if they knew the difficulties of taking PCL on directly and shied away from the challenge. But the workflow processes of legal practitioners – the junk of forms, procedures, due diligence, compliance, precedent – that attends any legal process is still the high ground. Litigation is important, and being able to research online is vital, but it is not the oil that legal wheels need in the everyday world. And as the downturn moves the focus to cost and time, law practices seek to hold price levels and even reduce them by ensuring that more and more process is done by less expensive, newly qualified, even paralegal staff members.

So market conditions are fairly good for an attack on PLC and a new look at law practice workflow. And the new competitor entering its UK market has a tried and tested look. LexisPSL (www.trialpsl.com) is a completely new take  on Professional Support, and to create and maintain it Lexis have recruited a team of over 100 practitioner lawyers. I had the privilege of an up close demo last week, and found myself looking at a service that certainly emulates all the qualities that I associate with PLC – and something more. Lexis has long had some clever software in-house (remember VisualFiles, which we all heralded as the tool for jobs like this?) but it never before moved its concentration from law as research and authoritative commentary for long enough to see the workflow woods from the research trees. Now, looking at LexisPSL, you can see how  all of that authoritative material can act as a support to the workflow interface. 25 LexisPSL practice areas are launched (including key areas like Banking and Finance, IP and IT, Corporate, Dispute Resolution, Employment, and Property). We can now see the shape of what is emerging here. The strategy has been to match PLC up front with service elements that perform similar functions, and to back everything with the potential deeper dig implied by LexisLibrary. So here are over 2000 high value precedents, here are the practice module quick tips and here are the workflow models which show you how to create seamless process to complete, for example, a sale and purchase agreement that complies with the regulations and with best practice. The bits that go beyond PLC at present are also clear; you can move seamlessly through to All Englands, to Halsbury, to Tolley’s tax guides or anything else from the Lexis publication cycle  if you want or need to do so. And the process automation is beginning to heat up nicely – over 300 of the precedents have automated features. Complete a one-time questionnaire and its data will be automatically seeded  from it into any of a multiplicity of documents that you may have to produce in the Share Purchase Agreement or Asset Purchase Agreement suites. Use the Companies House link and draw down formal company descriptors into your forms as you compile them. LexisPSL claim that some 80% of the time of compiling standard documents can be saved in ways like this.

So where do we go from here? My guess is that workflow in law markets, as elsewhere, will become ever more collaborative. As competition between PLC and LexisPSL heats up, we shall see further third party data sources contributing. Lawyers use more non-legal information than law content, so I expect to see client status checking, PEP compliance, money-laundering checks, credit referencing and other data brought into play. And those forms will get more automated and compliance checking software will be used to validate them. And the junction between this work and the firm’s own precedents and data resources will need to be developed. And beyond that? Well, this market will go tablet/mobile and, given its dictation background, voice service driven. And CPD needs to be built into these services so that practitioners can learn on the job, using webinars (largely in place) and video tutorials,  and the results audited.

It is now possible to see a framework for a competitive future here. LexisPSL have a market to win, and are addressing it with commendable vigour. PLC will benefit from the competition. Thomson Reuters may reflect that they have much of the third party data which PLC may need, which may in turn make the high asking price which PLC’s owners have traditionally maintained easier to consider. Whatever happens, LexisPSL is a very worthy product to join a long history of innovation in law markets.

Aug

23

Strip Billiards joins Ecosystem

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

In truth, I thought it a dull week of post-Olympic depression, but for the professional grinch it had some brighter moments. I watched England losing a Test Match that they might have won but for the lack of something extra-ordinary. I hear that something extra-ordinary took place in a Las Vegas hotel room, leading to a potential new Olympics sport. But between the sports pages and the gossip columns it felt like a really “silly season” sort of week. Except that it wasn’t. At all. Two things fell to Earth which exemplify where and how quickly we are going in the information services and solutions marketplace. Two routine announcements, but read them as confirmations that the changes we have been tracking here are market-wide, deeply embedded and worth real investment.

The first that caught my eye was the purchase of Adeptra by Fair Isaacs (FICO). Now, the credit rating sector has never been at the leading edge of workflow delivery, though in other parts of the same wood companies like Experian are foremost players in data analytics, and the whole risk management sector is in the vanguard when it comes to service solutioning. So an outfit like FICO  (www.fico.com) knows all about solutions, and its FICO Score service is currently said to be the US industry standard for consumer credit risk assessment. Adeptra (http://adeptra.com), a UK software house, with almost 20 years of experience in its market, has emerged as a leading power in customer connectivity in this sector. Cloud based, SaaS configured, and running in voice, SMS, mobile and email to resolve credit-based issues in real-time. In other words, this is technology used by banks to improve customer engagement, and if those banks are (and they mostly are) using FICO scoring systems, then a bigger solution is possible, more dots join up, the banks get to gratefully outsource a bit more functionality, and everyone gets to go home happy, except for players like Equifax who now have to think about what the competitive response may be.

And the reason this intrigues me so much is the timing. FICO have known Adeptra since 2002. In 2007 they became strategic partners as FICO Falcon Fraud Manager was integrated with Adeptra’s package. And of course, as the world has gone mobile and these two players move globally into younger, and thus more mobile-dominated markets, the importance of partnership grew. But acquisition in a $115m cash deal? Only a few years ago that would have had managers talking up the cultural and geographic differences instead of emphasizing the importance of full workflow integrated answers for customers. This is a real step forward in competitive positioning, and could precipitate an arms race in acquisitions in the credit and risk management sector. And  I wonder what the FICO Score is on a Royal Prince in a gambling joint?

And my second choice? The Thomson Reuters Life Sciences Partner Ecosystem. Did I miss its real significance when it launched in April? Probably – the title is a long one and so many things are now called Ecosystems that the word has slightly lost its bearings: hence the ironic title of this piece. But I did not lose track of the news that GenoSpace had this week joined this club, which now boasts six members (Accelrys, Entagen, IBDS, INOVA and Symbiosys being the others. GenoSpace (“Own your own genome” www.genospace.com) was a last year start-up which has a passion for the ability of individuals to store and control access to their own genomic data. Others in this group are also users of Thomson Reuters’ Life Sciences data. Particularly interesting to me is IDBS, the lab notebook player, but they all have something in common: they can use Thomson Reuters data to help them build a service and cross-referencing component within their own services and solutions, so that the T-R data becomes an “Intel Inside” element which helps each service sell a more complete solution to each chosen party. This then is a real club, co-operating around the Thomson Reuters Cortellis platform. Here is how they describe it:

“If you are an innovative services and technology-based company with a vested interest in the life sciences, a partnership with Thomson Reuters could enhance your client offerings with comprehensive and timely scientific data and competitive intelligence.

Thomson Reuters supports access to the company’s life sciences information at the point of customer need through application-specific solutions developed by third party partners, creating a mutually beneficial solution for users. These solutions can potentially include data ranging from ontologies, to biological target information and information to support pharmaceutical business development activities.

For more information on how to join the Thomson Reuters Partner Ecosystem for Life Sciences, please email us at: Partnering.Ecosystem@thomsonreuters.com

Note — Thomson Reuters Life Sciences Partners are not resellers and are not authorized to resell Thomson Reuters solutions.”

I included the note at the end deliberately. This is about co-operation and forming communities of interest. Just as FICO must now own its communications pathways to compete, this unit of Thomson Reuters must form collaborative relationships with small or specialized players to intensify the seamlessness of delivered solutions. Both critical trends. And they even go forward in a news free summer break – news free unless you are a Prince, that is.

 


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