Here’s a short piece from Laew.com
LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters recently announced new tools for corporate counsel that focus on simplifying access to relevant
information.
http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202550764192
Lexis has added a tool for making and sharing notes called Matter Journal to its CounselLink software. Announced on Monday, it came as a result of customer requests, officials explained.
“We had a previous feature called matter notes that was fairly limited in that you could only put in a limited amount of text. You could share it with your law firm but you could not format it in any way and you could not categorize it,” said Ted Best, senior director of product management. But, he said, “What we found with some of our customers was they were actually writing down some of these entries in Microsoft Word but they wanted to cut and paste [into CounselLink] ? that just wasn’t cutting it for the attorneys.”
As such, the new CounselLink 5.7 lets users who are involved with matter management attach documents, catagorize comments, include hyperlinks, perform formatting, write an unlimited amount of text, and preview types of tasks likely to be associated with each matter on a new dashboard, Best said. CounselLink is a hosted service, so it’s automatically upgraded as of now, he noted.
In addition, the service now has immediate synchronization between its own calendar and a separate calendar in Microsoft Outlook. Older versions only let users email appointments to Outlook, and lacked the dedicated matter calendar — customers didn’t want matter deadlines mixed with their standard appointments, Best said.
In a future version, users will be able to make custom data fields, which apply to invoices, law firm profiles, and matters, Best said. That will probably be version 5.9 in November, he added. New York-based Lexis is still evaluating how to make CounselLink mobile applications, which was disclosed during last’s summer 5.4 release, but probably won’t be ready until 2013, he acknowledged.
Meanwhile, on Friday Thomson Reuters announced GC Advisor — a new app for the Apple iPad that aggregates news, research, and online CLE information. The application is free, and successive versions will add content that’s exclusive to it. Thomson will launch an electronic newsletter aimed at general counsel in June or July, said Bernadette Bulacan, manager of market development. The newsletter’s name is not yet being announced, she said.
