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April 21, 2008

Patrick Cormier

Leg@l IT 2008 — Bringing Lawyers and Clients Together

At 9:40 am, the Conference moved forward with three simultaneous tracks:

  • Utilisation des technologies dans un contexte de droit transfrontalier (Me Patrick Gingras et Me Philippe Lortie)
  • Bridging the Gap: Collaborative Technologies that Bring Lawyers and Clients Together (M. Jordan Robert Furlong, M. Jason Mervyn and Me Dan Pinnington)
  • Litigation Management and Support (Mme Luisa Dodaro, M. Joshua C. Gilliland and Me Patrice Morin)

Not being able to follow all tracks (!), I chose to stay in the same room and listen to "Bridging the Gap: Collaborative Technologies that Bring Lawyers and Clients Together". Me Dan Pinnington opened this session by presenting the audience with a variety of tools now can improve communication and collaboration with clients, including:

Next, Mr Jason Mervyn discussed the business value of his law firm extranets ("Collaborative Technologies: The Experience at Gowlings") and noted the following driving factors for using extranets:

  • Support commodity work
  • Handle requests from tech savvy clients
  • Provide for self-serve clients
  • Develop client loyalty
  • Develop cross-selling opportunities
  • Leverage IT investments

Finally, Mr Furlong gave an example of what would represent a highly valuable lawyer-client model: the automated online legal information and training programs, customized and exclusive to each client, being in effect a custom CLE package with content adapted to each client and updated/refined with each lawyer-client interaction. Although the business case for putting in place such a system might be difficult for law firms to accept at first, Mr Furlong strongly believes that firms that offer such a service will be well rewarded for their investment.

[Note: the health industry is ahead of the legal industry as they already offer, or plan to offer, patient-centric and custom-tailored CLE and post-op online information - see for example HeartCare and Medem]

Former Legal Counsel and project director at National Defence, Government of Canada. Currently heading Government 2.0 Think Tank Inc., specialized in providing consulting services to governments in how to advance their web 2.0 agenda. You can get in touch with me at patrick.cormier (at) g2tt.com
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2 Comments on “Leg@l IT 2008 — Bringing Lawyers and Clients Together”

  1. Martin Baker says:
    April 21, 2008 at 10:41 am

    Here is another one we use in our firm. ShowMyPC.com lets us use our inhouse meeting server and also provides
    default service free.

    Read More or check out.
    http://showmypc.com

  2. Mrinal says:
    April 21, 2008 at 5:26 pm

    Thanks from this small team at CrossLoop for the mention, Patrick!

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