What were the most important product announcements at Techshow?
ABA Techshow is a great place to reconnect with old friends, make new business contacts and stay on top of cutting edge trends in the legal technology realm. It’s also a great place to unveil or make announcements about products (and you don’t even have to be at Techshow to do it–Microsoft’s announcement on Thursday that they would release Office for iPad nearly brought Techshow to a standstill).
Bob Ambrogi of LawSites compiled a top ten list of product announcements that took place at Techshow. Among the highlights:
Clio gets $20 million. While it was announced a few days before the conference, Ambrogi states that cloud-based practice management Clio’s massive cash infusion was a dominant topic of conversation among conference goers. Whether this boosts the still-growing field of cloud computing in the legal field, however, is up in the air.
Sony Electronics and Worldox unveiled tablet/e-reader Digital Paper. With Digital Paper, users can take handwritten notes on the screen as well as annotate and edit documents. Lawyers can then sync their notes and documents with Worldox’s document management system,
Several document and practice management systems either launched or announced new features. MyCase’s enhanced document management system won’t be available for another three weeks, but Ambrogi was quite high on it, calling it “as close to a full-featured [document management system] as you will find integrated within a cloud practice management platform.” CaseTrek, meanwhile, demonstrated its new platform. Among its features are a metrics dashboard that keeps track of productivity, billings and practice areas within a firm, as well as automation options for setting up tasks and deadlines for specific types of cases and matters. The product won’t be available until later in the year, but interested people can sign up for beta invites. LexisNexis announced a new feature to its Firm Manager, which can help users recover lost money. Money Finder automatically searches through all a user’s tasks, meetings and documents to determine if there are actions that have not been billed. Users can then review each item to decide whether or not to send an invoice.
LawPal releases simple project-management tool. Created by founder Yael Citro after she found that the process of closing a company’s initial seed round was horribly inefficient, LawPal officially launched the program to the general public at Techshow. Ambrogi says that the cloud-based tool is simple and elegant that is part deal room and part project manager.
Finally, TheFormTool made a bold promise. The company guaranteed lawyers, firms and law departments that Doxsera 2.0 will cut total costs by at least 13 percent while boosting income by 11 percent or more in its first year of use. No word on what users get if they don’t hit those benchmarks.
