LJN Newsletters

Federal health care reform will significantly impact lawyers.From compliance to quality improvement to reimbursement, the changes are far-reaching.

Physicians who allow medical sales reps into operating rooms may be caught in the crossfire of litigation and liability that can result from sales rep presence and activities.

Analysis of a recent case of interest.

In a bad economy, a range of recent decisions can be cited to overcome the argument that an earning capacity in excess of current income should be attributed to a parent.

For many years, the firm managed its electronic documents and files without a document management system (DMS) by using Windows Explorer to navigate folders and Windows Search to execute searches when needed. However, we reached the point where we had approximately 1.2 million documents (mostly Word documents) across both offices, sorted by year, client and matter, and were not searchable in an efficient way. We wanted to select a DMS that could easily store client-related e-mails in the same repository as the other documents, and provide efficient searching functionality.

Aon experienced significant growth in the 1980s and 90s, both organically and through a series of strategic acquisitions. The growth brought about tremendous business gains, but created operational challenges that lingered for many years. One of these was the legal department.

When selecting and implementing new technology, many CIOs and IT professionals are challenged when the business process that the application is supposed to address plays second fiddle to focusing on a specific technology or product. With a new technology implementation, many key business sponsors (i.e., owners of the application or department leaders whose teams use the application) want to be involved in the selection process, weighing in on requirements, definition, functionality, "look and feel" and expected output. This is similar to building a new home: The new homebuilder wants to select the style of home, amenities, paint, etc. In both scenarios, the buyers are concerned with the output, which is very understandable, as they desire useable products.

This was the decade of electronic discovery. Rapid development of technology, law and business processes, both in and out of the courtroom, brought legal and technical issues involving electronically stored information (ESI) to the fore. Although the General Counsel's office was the primary recipient of this uninvited wake-up call, legal is not the only department impacted by this change. IT departments across organizations must now understand the impact of ESI discovery obligations and regulations. Collaboration with legal is needed to create and implement new policies, while altering existing policies to keep pace with the rapidly evolving data storage and communication methods coinciding with the rising tide of ESI.