Peer to Peer Magazine

June 2010

The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association

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Law2020™ The Future Starts Now and monitoring workflows. Total Quality Assurance and Six Sigma initiatives are but two of the many efforts to formalize such approaches. A few law firms have embraced, for example, portions of the Six Sigma standards. By the end of the decade, it seems reasonable to suppose that a dozen or more firms would have fully embraced the principles of process management. And the rest? One can imagine editors of the last decade peering into newsrooms asking, “How goes it?” Those are the papers whose doors have closed in recent times. Semantic Search Technologies: Other opportunities abound as well for those firms truly aiming to tackle this problem. How is it that most document review remains largely a human process? Various semantic search technologies have long been shown in academic research to be superior to human capabilities. Semantic search capabilities provide something far beyond the key word searching that is increasingly common in document discovery. Some of the determination of meaning is given over to semantic search processes. These days, if you have found a document with a particularly relevant meaning, you needn’t page through reams of documents to find others of similar meaning. That is a process perfectly well manageable by machine. If you can make a quick cut through a repository and find nearly all meaningful documents, you will have dramatically reduced the time required to assess that repository. These technologies can be leveraged to render human reviewers more effective and faster. Some forward-thinking firms are already addressing both the technical and the legal problems associated with technology-enhanced review. In a decade, we might imagine a few firms having utterly mastered such technological streamlining of review. The economics of such efforts would make those firms unassailable. Concept-search-enabled review can proceed at two to ten times the speed of unaided review. At ten times, the $1.2 million pricetag of the Smithers review becomes just $120,000, and a review of four executives might cost as little as $200,000. Such costs are much more to the scale of an ordinary business dispute. Couple the technological streamlining with workforce realignment and workflow management and, suddenly, everything changes. A Decade of Sea Change The amalgamation of such change has restructured many other industries besides the newspaper business. Think about high-priority transportation. Three decades ago, overnight movement of hard-copy communications and freight seemed an impossibility. Today, it is the foundation of the Internet business model. To effect that change, nearly moribund businesses had to restructure entirely. Technology leverage, staff realignment and careful process management made such transformations possible. Over the course of the next decade, expect to see comparable change in the law business — among a few. As for the rest . . . we leave them to the historians. ILTA John Alber, Bryan Cave LLP John Alber is the Technology Partner at Bryan Cave LLP. He joined the firm in 1981 following a judicial clerkship. John left the firm in 1988, and he served as CEO for a software and database company in the transportation sector from 1988-1998. In 1999, he rejoined the firm to set technology strategy. The firm’s award-winning Client Technology Group develops innovative web-based, client-facing decision support, training and client communication tools. It has become widely known for client-centric applications. The Client Technology Group also develops internal decision support, knowledge management and client intelligence systems for the firm. John has written and spoken widely on legal technology subjects and received a number of technology awards, both in the legal field and in information technology generally. Among other awards, he was named American Lawyer Media’s first ever “Champion of Technology” in 2004, and recognized as one of the “Top 25 CTOs” by Infoworld in 2007. In addition, the firm received recognition as a “Top 100 Company” in 2007 for work pioneered by the Client Technology Group. John has worked with ILTA’s conference planning committees over several years, and he is instrumental in the creation and development of ILTA’s Law2020TM initiative. He can be reached at john.alber@bryancave.com. Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 51

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