Law.com report on two Lexis Nexis? Law Software updates announced this past week
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They report that LexisNexis have? this week released a pair of law software upgrades —
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CounselLink 5.4, featuring Microsoft Outlook integration,
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and
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Concordance Native Viewer, for examining and redacting documents in their original context.
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Here’s what they say.
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http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202509355101
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Both applications are designed to help lawyers solve real-world challenges, officials at New York-based LexisNexis noted.
CounselLink emerged 8 years ago as a hosted service to help corporate counsel manage their relationships with outside firms. It originally focused on billing and legal holds, while 5.4 adds matter management and the ability to simultaneously change many records, said Jeff Schuett, vice president and general manager, corporate counsel solutions.
“Lawyers live in Outlook. What this integration does is allow a client to push out the counseling functionality to lawyers without having to learn anything new,” Schuett explained. They can drag-and-drop documents into a CounselLink panel inside Outlook, he said. However, “It was not something that our corporate legal departments were asking us to put in the product until relatively recently,” he added.
CounselLink has more than 100 customers, he said, and a wide price range — it can be $30,000 for a small department or more than $1 million for a large corporation. Upcoming versions of the fifth-generation software will add support for mobile devices, while future generations will be applied to related industries, he said.
LexisNexis has other forms of technology standardization in mind beyond just using Outlook and other Microsoft products such as Dynamics CRM, Schuett said. There is already a programming interface, however, “We want to expose it to where customers using any kind of device can access the system. It’s a first step. There’s additional things coming,” he said, declining to elaborate at this time.
For the Concordance desktop product, Native Viewer is a downloadable application starting at about $1,000, with the cost varying based on the number of Concordance seats and users, explained Deborah Jillson, vice president of litigation tools, services and hosting.
What’s unique about Native Viewer, Jillson explained, is that it’s not a one-way system — users can also redact documents in their native formats. That saves money on the use of review tools, although viewing native formats does require also having the native application, she acknowledged. That could add costs to cases if they involve uncommon file types.
