Relativity, Information Governance and the Future of Legal Tech #ILTA12

Walking the halls at ILTA it’s very clear how far the legal tech community has come. Wasn’t it just two years ago that vendors in the e-Discovery space were talking about how lawyers should get empowered to adapt new technologies into their workflow? And now, not only have they begun to adapt, they’re reshaping the landscape of legal tech.

This week, I’ve sat in on sessions that tackled practical issues of iPads v. laptops, wireless expectations and best practices for creating a mobile legal workforce. Even the conference itself launched a mobile app that helped attendees create their own agenda, submit session evaluations and network with each other.

By actively embracing and integrating cloud, mobile and social into legal technology applications, it’s hard to remember that it’s still about e-Discovery.

kCura and the Evolving State of Relativity

We had an opportunity to sit down with Nick Robertson, vice president, sales and marketing at kCura to talk about how the shift in the legal tech landscape is affecting how they approach case review.

Earlier this week, The Recorder placed kCura on its list of The Best Predictive Coding Solution Providers of 2012  (PDF) for its Relativity Assisted Review software. During ILTA, kCura offered demos of a few key components of Relativity — Assisted Review, Ecosystem, Fact Manager and Review Manager, which offer a variety robust application and workflow functionality.

According to Robertson, the legal community has become more educated about e-Discovery and its role in assisted review. But that doesn’t mean the challenge of managing big data has ceased to be. In fact, it’s only getting bigger as the volume of data collected increases, which means that there’s often more to review. But the increased data sets do give kCura the opportunity to make review smarter, faster and more efficient, by using text analytics search technology to identify similar documents to your case.

As well, kCura lets users create applications, without much programming experience necessary. Users can build applications designed to enhance the review, analysis, and production capabilities in Relativity. Furthermore, Relativity Applications can leverage Relativity’s APIs, allowing third-party software companies to integrate their technology with Relativity.

In fact, these advanced review capabilities are no longer only relevant to eDiscovery — they can also serve a broad range of IT trends, like records management, compliance and information management.

The Best Information Governance Framework is a Balanced One

Speaking of information governance, this week Iron Mountain released a new report, titled “A Proposed Law Firm Information Governance Framework.” The report, a product of a three-day working symposium convened in May, identifies best practices for information governance within law firms. Key themes of the report were presented during a panel discussion today called "Effective Information Governance Programs: Why Balance Matters."

How do you define Information governance?

It’s only recently that the legal industry has begun to embrace the merits of information governance (though none of the session attendees admitted to having a program already in place). Most firms generally consider information governance to be a way to manage information faster so as to stay out of trouble.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Commun.it Makes the Business Case for Twitter

Social media management gave way to community management which has given way to relationship management. It used to be that managing relationships was something your CRM did, but as social media becomes an integral part of business, you’ll need additional tools that can help cultivate your online followers and make important connections.

Give Your Twitter Feed Structure

Today, Commun.it, a free service that makes it easy for businesses and professionals who use Twitter to build and nurture relationships in a business context, has come out of private beta and offers users the ability to turn the stream-oriented world of Twitter to a relationship-oriented dashboard.

We all know that not all Twitter users are created equal. Engagement from an influencer has the same visibility for you as a random mention, which makes it difficult to prioritize your social media efforts.

Additionally, tweets lack relationship context — not many Twitter management tools can show how many times you engaged with this person in the past? What you talked about a month ago? or questions that user struggles with every day.

Commun.it solves these issues by bringing priority and context, that are inherent to real-world relationships, to Twitter. 

An example of the Commun.it dashboard

By analyzing all your engagements, deducing relationship status and significance, prioritizing those that matter to you and providing rich context for each incoming engagement, Commun.it makes the process of interacting with contacts on Twitter structured and business-focused, rather than a time suck that can easily distract.

Using Your Community to Build Better Relationships

With Commun.it, users are able to focus on high-value members, such as top influencers who drive awareness, supporters who spread key messages, as well as most engaged members and potential leads. Users can also glean actionable insights that can help them build meaningful relationships by accessing a complete engagement history with each member and members’ most-used hashtags, among others. The goal is to help community managers and relationship managers work together so one can focus on relevant people, while the other can focus on their content.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Drupal Gains Steam at DrupalCon Munich 2012 #Drupalcon

My travels from Austin to Munich all in the name of DrupalCon did not disappoint! Once again, it was filled with incredible speakers and collaboration. While there, the Drupal community saw another significant merger of leaders in Drupal, new products and proof that the community is just beginning to hit its stride.

Drupal E-Commerce Gets a Boost

Drupal for commerce made another breakthrough with a big announcement from Paris and Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Commerce Guys. The company kicked it up a notch with the launch of their Commerce Kickstart 2.0 — an accelerated launch pad for the open-source e-Commerce framework Drupal Commerce.

Mike O’Connor, president of Commerce Guys North America had this to say about it, “The new Kickstart is all about creating enterprise-level Drupal Commerce sites. It’s designed to provide a multifaceted, out-of-the-box baseline of functionality as a starting point for e-Commerce sites. It’s a great advancement for Drupal and our team.”

Dev Cloud Free for All

Acquia did not disappoint to bring more to the community at Munich. They announced a new pricing structure, if you call free a pricing structure! Acquia says their Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the great features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Women in Drupal

The Drupal project keeps its promise with diversity. To enhance networking and build a community of women Drupal experts, the Women in Drupal Facebook page launched at the Con with over 100 members in the first couple of days!

To boot, during Munich, the number of Drupal developers crossed the 20,000 mark.

It was another great Con — Auf Wiedersehen!

Editor's Note: Another article by Ben Finklea from DrupalCon:

Enterprise Drupal Takes Big Step Foward with Four-Day Merger #DrupalCon
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

News from the Front: Simpler, Mobile Drupal 8 Previewed #DrupalCon

For those in the Drupal community, DrupalCon is simply DrupalCon. For the rest of you: DrupalCon is a bi-annual Drupal conference put on by the Drupal Association. It’s a world-class tech conference, it is THE place for Drupal news and it’s happening this week in Munich, Germany. 

Lowering the Learning Curve with Drupal 8

Drupal is considered one of the most powerful Web CMSs available, but one of the biggest complaints about the open-source Web infrastructure is its overwhelming complexity. This is especially heard from non-technical users like copywriters, designers and marketers. In an effort to address this, the project founder and lead Dries Buytaert announced earlier this year that Drupal will be adopting the open-source PHP framework Symfony into its next major release, Drupal 8.

Initially, this announcement left many wondering why such a dramatic shift was necessary or what benefit it would bring to Drupal users. Since then, the Drupal core programmers have been busy and at Drupalcon Munich, a series of significant usability and feature upgrades in the works for Drupal 8 have been demonstrated. These improvements are sure to please CMOs and CTOs alike.

Content creation in Drupal 8 will be greatly simplified for less technical users. Drupal 8 will provide easier layout control and facilitate gorgeous designs with practically no coding. All of these features will greatly lower the learning curve for new developers.

Mobile and Beyond

Drupal’s next core iteration is poised to conquer mobile. With a friendlier admin in mind, a new and simplified pullout menu will leverage one toolbar that works on all devices enabling complete mobile Web administration. Drupal 8 is going to implement responsive design out of the box, even differentiating between phones and tablets. A responsive layout builder was showcased and it’s pretty revolutionary. Entirely new layouts can be created with drag and drop.

Authoring improvements were also on display. The form looked cleaner with most options moved to a sidebar. Inline editing with True Wysiwyg will eliminate the separation of focus between editing and preview modes. And staying in-sync with the responsive/mobile motif, viewport previews will allow you to see what your page will look like on different devices.

Drupal 8 is currently in early development and is expected to ship in 2013. There are more exciting new features planned for than can fit in one post. The key takeaway from Dries at Drupalcon Munich is that Drupal is gearing up to be more accessible and to address the Internet’s latest and greatest challenges. As the Web continues to evolve, Drupal is taking major steps to ensure its place as a leading CMS today and in the future.
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Granicus Helps Grow Citizen Participation with New Features

It’s not often the words transparency and citizen engagement are used in the same sentence, but they are essential elements if you really want to innovate and evolve your community into taking meaningful action. Which is why the folks at Granicus announced new features aimed at empowering its Citizen Participation Suite users to better collect and analyze feedback from their community.

Making Cloud-Based Government a Viable Option

For the past few years, Granicus has made the case for cloud computing at the government level. With cloud computing, they argued, government agencies can defer costs, improve productivity and increase collaboration. Furthermore, with their platform, Granicus provides the cloud-based government transparency tools necessary to spearhead community innovation.

Whether it’s thanks to the Obama Administration’s push for transparent government, or better availability and scalability of cloud software, there’s been a growing interest in online community collaboration within the government sector. Public agencies want to have more in-depth and meaningful dialogues with their citizens online, but traditional social media isn’t solving this problem.

Citizen Participation Thrives on Transparency

The new features in Granicus’ Citizen Participation Suite are focused on bringing together the right combination of crowdsourcing and other civic engagement tools with the aim of making social collaboration work for government. The new features are designed to help government staff members facilitate more productive discussions with members of the public, including:

Discussion Analytics — Users can analyze public feedback with tools like geo-coding, word tags and demographic filters, which can help government agencies understand where community feedback is coming from and what topics mean the most to them. In turn, these insights can help drive better government decisions and actions.

Projects - The new projects feature combines three powerful community engagement tools into a simple package for community planners allowing governments to educate their community about upcoming projects and allow for public input online through idea forums, discussions, and surveys — all for a single project.

Granicus lets residents submit ideas for community improvement. Citizens can vote, comment and share other ideas, helping local governments prioritize what’s most important.

eComment — Granicus also upgraded the usability and design of its flagship citizen participation tool called eComment. Now, Citizen Participation Suite users have an easier way to solicit participation in their public meetings using a “Feedback” widget on their website. This widget simplifies participation by allowing citizens to comment on upcoming meeting agenda items electronically before the meeting, through video or text, instead of attending the meeting in person. Current eComment users will have access to these upgrades for free.

eComment provides an easy way to add voices to the democratic process and makes participation in public meetings convenient.

A Civic Action

By combining Granicus’ public engagement tools into a single solution, governments of any size are empowered to streamline community collaboration workflows, simplifying how agencies manage and measure large volumes of citizen requests and inquiries related to projects, plans and public meeting agenda items.

At a time when the need for more public works are confronted by a need for a reduction in government spending, tools like Granicus’ Citizen Participation Suite help give citizens a voice and a chance to take civic action.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com