One
of the fun things I've been able to do this year, even though I usually
can't write about it, is to get the grand tour of some new legal tech
programs and services that are still in beta testing.
Thanks to Doug Hoover and Kyle Christensen I got a Webex look at Thomson's new Firm360 service that will be unveiled later this year and permission to write a little bit about it.
To
the extent that category descriptions are useful, Firm360 will be
Thomson's entry into the world of competitive intelligence, market
intelligence or one of the other catchphrases for this area of
information services.
However, I don't like to get too hung up on categories.
What
I saw was a service that can give a lawyer or a law firm the kinds of
information I've always wanted to have about my firm, competitor firms,
clients and potential clients to make solid business decisions based on
facts and not speculation.
Of course, the service gives you
access to a combination of Thomson and public databases, but what got
my attention is the way you can look at information in a variety of
different and useful ways, look at trends as well as details and put
information together in ways that actually help you make decisions.
At
the end of the demo, Doug and I were talking about getting “actionable
intelligence,” which, of course, is as incomprehensible a term as
“competitive intelligence” or “knowledge management.” However, by the
end of a demo, you might appreciate why we thought that term really
explained the benefits of what I saw.
One of the most interesting
applications of this service is to take advantage of easy-to-produce
reports to provide exactly the kinds of information that corporate
counsel are always saying they want. The ability to quickly assemble
reports in a few minutes that might take a hundred or more hours to
produce by hand is very attractive to me and will probably catch the
attention of law librarians and others who are now producing these
types of reports.
Firm360 has a website, but the offering is really more at an alpha, not even a beta, stage. Doug Hoover, Director of Marketing for Firm360, is the person to contact if you want to get more information about this service. [DennisKennedy.blog]