Reinventing Professionals

I spoke with Noel Rath, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager, for HP TRIM Software in Brisbane, Australia, and Peggy Milovina-Meyer, Global Records Manager for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. We discussed the information explosion over the past few years and how different legal technologies, including HP TRIM, have evolved. We also addressed key considerations for developing a records management strategy, and the specific challenges of those facing them in the current market.

I spoke with Kaan Çaglar, the co-founder of Atdaa, a social travel platform about Istanbul, Turkey. We discussed his new venture, the convergence of social media, and local travel.

I spoke with Sean Regan, the director of product marketing for Symantec‘s information management group about the integration of Clearwell into his organization. We also discussed his unique background, including his role as Editor-in-Chief for The Sedona Conference’s International Overview of Discovery, Data Privacy & Disclosure Requirements, the reasons for the mainstream technology industry’s current attraction to successful e-discovery vendors, and, of course, why he says that “It is a dream come true for Clearwell to join this company.”

I spoke with Jay Leib, who leads the advice@kCura team at kCura, which makes Relativity. Leib’s team performs custom solution development and provides workflow guidance. We discussed the new Relativity Ecosystem, interoperability trends focusing on tools that solve business problems, and the buzz about creating apps for legal technology software at kCura’s annual user conference, Relativity Fest.

I spoke with Lisa DiMonte, CEO of MyLegal.com, a website that helps lawyers select vendors, about the site’s new Legal Vendor Deals program, in which a MyLegal member provides a discount on its services to those in the legal profession. In an effort to reinvent the typical daily deals model, MyLegal has combined these offers with vendor reviews. As such, the site offers information about an organization or individual, as well as access to any available ratings and commentary associated with that organization or individual.

I spoke with Chris Rider, an organizational sociologist, who serves as an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School to discuss his working paper – Networks, Hiring, and Inter-organizational Mobility: Evidence from Law Firm Dissolutions. According to the article, Heller Ehrman; Thelen; Thacher Proffitt Wood; WolfBlock; Dreier; and Morgan & Finnegan ceased operations in 2008 and 2009. Professor Rider tracked the employment of the 1,426 attorneys left jobless by the dissolutions of their firms by reviewing LinkedIn, Martindale-Hubbell and other online directories. He confirmed that 88% found jobs and noted that many of those positions were the result of proactive networking (he highlighted that more of them may have found jobs, but he could not locate them). Among other trends, he concluded that firms are more likely to hire a lawyer’s former colleagues and those from a particular alumni network. Listen to our interview in which he remarks that “the people you work with are in a better position to speak to your talent, your expected productivity and your ability to complement others.”

I spoke with Stephen Greenwood, the co-founder of EasySign, a mobile e-signature application for consumers that is reinventing the way individuals execute documents on the go without printers, scanners or fax machines, about the genesis of EasySign, the success of its iPhone app, the upcoming launch of its Android app, and the future of the mobile applications market.

I spoke with M. Cherif Bassiouni, current chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry to Investigate Violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law in Libya. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for his work in the field of international criminal justice and for his contribution to the creation of the International Criminal Court, M. Cherif Bassiouni, is the epitome of a global statesman. I had the privilege of interviewing him for an upcoming article and he made a number of inspiring comments during our conversation. This is an excerpt.

I spoke with T.M. Ravi, chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital, the division of Iron Mountain that provides electronic information management. We discussed Iron Mountain's recently announced information management strategy, e-discovery trends, ranging from cost reduction to client control, and location/media agnostic solutions for managing information.

I spoke with Ron Collins, the founder and CEO of Credenza, a practice management software company, as well as the founder of Gavel & Gown Software, makers of Amicus Attorney. We discussed the release of Credenza (described in this video), how it differs from Amicus Attorney, practice management trends, and what the introduction of Credenza signals about the evolution and the future of legal practice.