Document Management
Interwoven continued to inspire consumer confidence with the integration of Vivisimo’s search engine, a new easy method of filing emails and a host of third parties announcing that they will integrate their products with Worksite.
Their only real competitor in the legal space, Open Text aka Hummingbird, gave a series of somewhat confusing messages, culminating in the announcement of DMX, their next generation front end that allows DM5 users to “continue to manage content on their current eDOCS DM repository as well as content stored in other repositories such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Livelink ECM”.
Not surprisingly, the market remains somewhat reticent to buy into this vision, and in 2008 we can only see more firms jumping across to Interwoven.
Contenders
The only possibly fly in Interwoven’s ointment is if law firms take up Microsoft’s promise of Sharepoint as an enterprise DMS. While it’s very unlikely that we’ll see any largish firms go down this path, some smaller outfits may find Sharepoint adequate, especially when and if more Sharepoint based products like Macroview’s WisdomDMF hit the market.
Outsiders
While unlikely, it’s possible that some of the big vendors (Filenet, Documentum) will enter the legal market with a customised offering, however the small number of seats in law firms will probably preclude this.
One player to look out for is Alfresco. While law firms are usually very wary of open source offerings, Alfresco comes with impressive pedigree, having been founded in 2005 by John Newton, Co-Founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects. And with clients like the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, Endeca, Harvard Business School Publishing and H&R Block it looks like it’s ready for production use.
If someone can package it up for law firms and add some “matter centricity”, Alfresco may be a viable option.
Practice Management
Most of the news on the local market this year has been about Elite’s 3E offering, followed by a recent splatter of Aderant Expert wins.
It looks like 2008 will once again be a battle between these two products with both companies looking to move into the mid-market space currently occupied by CLO and Locus users.
Contenders
While Aderant and Elite have most of the high end sown up, it could be more open in the mid tier. As Axxia’s new DNA product is based on the enterprise class JBoss framework there’s no reason why it wouldn’t scale well beyond the size of any regional (or even international) law firm. Locus have never really had a presence in the mid and top tiers so it will be interesting to see whether their new LexisNexis connections will give them any better inroads.
Outsiders
The big possibilities for practice management lie in someone producing a customised version of one of the big ERP products (Oracle Fusion, SAP) or producing a legal friendly implementation of Microsoft’s Dynamics.
In Short
CRM: While Interaction has the legal market pretty much wrapped up, it may be worth looking out for Microsoft based products like CRM4Legal.
Search: 2008 could be a big year for enterprise search. Law firms have learnt that the big search engines require a huge amount of customisation so we may see more firms move to more out of the box solutions like Microsoft’s Search Server or Google Search Appliance.
Document Comparison: Workshare continues to be the lawyer’s choice for document comparison, but Docscorp is moving quickly to gain market share and seems to be adding new features at a rapid rate.
Case Management: Case management is slowly taking off in the region with a number of firms piloting or installing Axxia and Visualfiles. 2008 will probably see more of the same, unless one of the other UK products make a serious commitment to enter the market.
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