|
Legal Technology News From the publishers of Legal Technology Insider
IN THIS ISSUE No.106 - 24.04.2002
WOOLF HAS FRAGMENTED CIVIL PROCEDURE ?
According to Professor Scott: "The CPR may have brought together the rules of court of the Supreme Court and the county courts into a single code of procedure but it is incomplete. Further, lawyers are witnessing considerable fragmentation of civil procedure governing, for instance, the Administrative Court, the Commercial Court, the Mercantile Courts, and the jurisdiction of the county courts over landlord & tenant proceedings in relation to land.
"Whilst conforming to the spirit of the Woolf management ideals, these in effect form quite distinct procedural regimes and this is a heavy burden for practitioners to bear. There has been so much change, it is no surprise that some practitioners think history is repeating itself," - a reference to the 1883 Judicature Acts which introduced similarly dramatic reforms on the conduct of civil litigation.
For more details about the latest edition of the White Book visit www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/major/whitebook
LOTIES BACK FOR ANOTHER YEAR
The LOTIES, the UK legal IT world's answer to the Oscars, retain their populist approach - it is the users of legal systems who have the opportunity to nominate the candidates for the awards and vote for the shortlisted entries - however this year four new 'merit' categories have been created for IT Director of the year, IT team of the year, Law firm of the year and Vendor personality of the year. The chairman of the judging panel is Charles Christian from Legal Technology News. There are plenty of opportunities for corporate sponsorship and an online nomination form can be found at www.inbrief.co.uk LEGAL TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY & VENDOR NEWS
iMANAGE OUSTS FILENET AT FLAGSHIP SITE - Freshfields Bruckaus Deringer has selected the iManage system as the basis for its new document & content management platform. The deal, which was secured by iManage business partner First Stop Computer Group, comes as a blow to FileNet which was the incumbent DMS supplier at Freshfields. FileNet now has just two sites left among UK top 100 law firms - Slaughter & May and Farrer & Co.
iManage has also reported its financial results for the first quarter ended 31 March 2002. Revenues were $11.8 million, up 36 percent as compared to $8.7 million reported for the same period last year and up sequentially from $11.3 million reported for Q4 ended 31 December 2001. iManage also reported Q1 pro forma net income of $165,000 compared to a pro forma net loss of $2.6 million in the same period in 2001.
NO NEWS ON SOLUTION 6 AND KEYSTONE - At the time of going to press, the first deadline for shareholder acceptances on the proposed Solution 6 acquisition of rival PMS software supplier Keystone Solutions had only just closed (3:00pm, 24 April) and with results still coming in, Keystone and its advisers were considering a possible (and perfectly normal) extension to the initial offer period.
ELITE RESULTS UP AND ON THE WEB - The Elite Information Group has reported revenues for the first quarter ended 31 March 2002 of $18.4 million, up 28.5 percent from the $14.3 million reported in Q1 2001. The company also reported a net income of $706,000 for the first quarter compared with a net loss of $303,000 for the same period last year. Based on the state of its order book, Elite expects revenues to increase approximately 15-to20 percent during the course of 2002. Elite has joined the growing number of US companies that now also announce their results via the web. The company made a live webcast of its first quarter earnings release conference call on Tuesday (23 April) and the webcast will continue to be played on the Elite site until 7 May 2002 www.elite.com
HELLO CIVICA, GOODBYE SANDERSON - As part of a major reorganisation of the UK IT services group Sanderson, the division that previously sold into the legal market has been rolled into the 'enforcement' business of a new wholly owned subsidiary called Civica Systems. The enforcement business will also be responsible for selling into the police, local authority legal department and parking authority markets. Another part of Civica - 'revenues & benefits' - will be responsible for selling mainstream financial and administration systems into the local government market.
Civica CEO Simon Downing told Legal Technology News that one of the main benefits of the new structure was that along with applications software, Civica would now also be able to sell a whole range of managed services, include ASP, web hosting, outsourcing, general systems consultancy and disaster recovery services into the legal market. Sanderson has already enjoyed some success in this area, with projects for such firms as Slaughter & May, Richards Butler and Freshfields, but with the new Civica structure the group is now hoping to give the likes of Tikit and First Stop a run for their money. All contact details remain the same, with Tim Spriggs now heading activities in the legal market as sales director-legal. www.civica.co.uk LEGAL WEB SITE & ONLINE SERVICES NEWS
BUTTERWORTHS SLASH CONTRIBUTOR BUDGETS - Butterworths UK's experiment with the brave new world of online legal information took a backwards step last week when it informed contributors to its Law Direct News service that it could no longer pay them for their contributions. This is the second, and most drastic, cutback in contributor budgets since the start of the year. The move coincides with increased competition in the UK online legal information market, which has seen a growing number of new entrants chipping away at established players' market shares. This in turn is having an impact on advertising where, regardless of what it may say on the rate card, there are clearly bargains to be negotiated with some high profile sites now selling banner ad space for as little as £30 a month.
DERWENT & WILA VERLAG MERGE - The Thomson Corporation has just announced the merger of two of its intellectual property information services - UK-based Derwent Information and Wila Verlag of Germany. The new venture - Wila-Derwent - is intended to become a "one stop shop" for patent information. www.derwent.com
RECOGNITION FOR JUDICIAL IT PIONEER - Judge Judith D Ford, a member of the California Superior Court, Alameda County, received the first-ever LexisNexis CourtLink Excellence in Legal Technology award at a recent conference in San Francisco. At the ceremony Judge Ford was recognized for her "leadership, innovation and championing of technology to deliver breakthrough advances in the efficient practice of litigation in the courts." Judge Ford, the former chair of the Court Technology Advisory Committee of the Judicial Council of California, has actively been involved in court technology issues at the local, state and national level for a number of years. Before becoming an attorney and then judge, she spent 15 years as a computer scientist designing online operating systems.
ONLINE COURSES IN WEB MARKETING - Well-known UK internet commentator Delia Venables has produced a new online course called "Selling & Marketing Legal Services on the Web". The course consists of five online tutorials - essentially guided tours on what firms are actually doing in 2002. In particular, the course looks at different ways in which firms are providing documents for sale, including the mailmerge method, Microsoft Word documents, Rich Text Format (RTF), Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), Capsoft's HotDocs and Epoch Software's Rapidocs.
The course also covers how some firms have made the most of their own special areas of work and have designed their site specifically to appeal to the corresponding interest groups including women's interests, debt collection, online business, landlord & tenant, the online games industry, minority language groups, accidents, and divorce. Other models of selling legal services are also covered including managing legal tenders, giving fixed price advice; providing "packages" of information, using an extranet and setting up a virtual dealroom. The course costs £40 + VAT and qualify for 5 hours CPD. For details email delia@venables.co.uk
YOU SPENT HOW MUCH ON A DOMAIN NAME? - TMP Worldwide, the owners of recruitment site Monster.com, have just bought the domain name Jobs.com and associated IP rights for the sum of $800,000 at a US court approved bankruptcy auction.
AND CHEAP WEB SITES FOR ALL!
Here at the Legal Technology News we recently tested the software and - despite ignoring all the user instructions - were still able to create a mini web site from scratch in under 20 minutes. Although the software is based on a series of design templates, users still have plenty of freedom as to how they use it, with the system supporting graphics, formatted text and tables - and none of it involving any exposure to HTML programming code. www.websiteit.com
LAWYERS CAN WIN PRIZES
The game has separate versions for attorneys and non-attorney players; both versions require Mr. Gallity's lawyer to successfully answer 12 questions about the law. Each correct answer convinces one juror. Throughout the game, players can search for answers on FindLaw Winners will be drawn from the pool of successful players. One winner will receive $500, and 11 others will win FindLaw merchandise. The FindLaw: Court of Justice contest runs until 7 June. To play the game visit www.findlaw.com/game
ONLINE SECURITY - WEB SITES LEAKING LIKE SIEVES
Further information is available at www.security-survey.gov.uk
LAYTONS LAYS OUT VIEWS ON PATENTABILITY OF SOFTWARE
Currently, inventions can be patented by applying to national patent offices, or the European Patent Office (EPO). Irrespective of whether an application is filed in the United Kingdom Patent Office or the EPO, the European Patent Convention (EPC) will apply to the application. When "European Patents" are granted they are not truly pan-European patents but in fact become individual patents in each designated country, and are subject to the laws and legal systems of each country.
"At present the legal position is ambiguous, and there is a degree of uncertainty regarding the patent protection of software," comments David Knight of Laytons. "The EPC determines the current patentability of software and related inventions. Under Article 52 (2) (c) & (3) of the EPC, computer programs as such (including business methods) cannot be patented. However, since 1978 when the EPC came into effect, over 30,000 patents relating to software have been granted, and consequently a substantial body of sometimes conflicting case law has developed across the EU as the validity of some of those patents was challenged."
The Commission has become increasingly concerned with the way differences have appeared in practice in the national courts, as significant barriers to trade could develop within the Internal Market, while certain inventions can be protected in some Member States, but not in others. The Commission therefore believes that clear markers need to be set as to what is patentable in the EU. The existing differences of interpretation are at their most extreme between the United Kingdom and Germany. In the UK a computer program related invention that is a method for doing a business or mental act, has been considered unpatentable, even if there is a technical contribution. In Germany however business methods having a technical aspect had been thought until recently to be patentable, even if the only contribution to the state of the art (ie the difference between the patent and state of technology preceding it) was non-technical.
Central to the planned Directive is the necessity of a "technical contribution" which will be a fundamental requirement of any patentable invention. This essentially means that the new innovation of an invention must be of a technical nature. David Knight continues, "At the heart of the proposed Directive is the notion that computer implemented inventions which make a "technical contribution" to the state of the art, which would not be obvious to a person of normal skill in the field concerned, are more than just a computer program as such, and are therefore capable of being patented."
An example given by the Commission where a "technical contribution" has been found was an invention in which an increase in processing speed in a computer was achieved by a new and non-obvious method. The patentability of business methods is not dealt with directly in the proposal, but "pure" business methods that have no technical character remain unpatentable. Examples of business methods include, for instance: the manner in which a web site interacts with customers or the system a company uses to manage the sorting of mail. The intention is to create transparency and legal certainty in an environment where innovation can be protected and fostered effectively. It would also emphasise that creations where there has been no technical contribution cannot be patented.
As the EPC is independent of the EU, the Directive will have no direct legal effect on the EPO. However, as European Patents become subject to national law after being granted, the laws in the various Member States implementing the Directive will apply to them. Before Member States implement the proposed Directive, it will have to go before the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament for adoption under the EU's co-decision procedure.
In the meantime, UK companies should continue to file patent applications for software related inventions. By the time the need arises, and should the need arise, to assert a patent right against a potential infringer, there is a fair chance that the Directive will be in force. This will increase the likelihood of a positive outcome in the UK courts, which traditionally have been more anti software patents than other jurisdictions within the EU.
|