LJN Newsletters

Collecting bills from firms that exist only on a computer server and monitors is becoming as much a part of Main Street in the 21st century as selling to the corner store was in the19th, and as selling to the mall store was in the 20th century. Suppliers to e-commerce firms, whether of inventory for resale online, or of servers or other equipment used in operations, must be paid, or they will cut off credit or sell only C.O.D.

One of my most daunting tasks as the firm's first marketing director was how to tap into the attorneys' 'knowledge base' of clients and contacts. To put it simply ' nobody could decipher who knew whom. E-mails would fly around asking if anyone knew an attorney in California, or an employee at ABC Corporation. The e-mails were cumbersome and often sent at the last minute. Each attorney's contacts were essentially islands for which we needed a way to bridge. The conclusion we arrived at was that we needed a CRM system for the firm.

Last month, we identified select law firm issues that can significantly impact the cost and speed of the entire case lifecycle. In addition, we offered some viable solutions to these problems. In Part Two, we cover some of the concerns related to outsourcing versus in-house handling of certain litigation goods and services and how firms are operating.

Effectively managing, sharing and securing information can help corporate legal departments and individual law firms reduce administrative costs, protect case records and improve levels of customer service. Improperly managed, case information creates unnecessary risks, and is a huge drain on productivity as employees are forced to sift through an ever-increasing number of documents to (hopefully) locate the critical information they need to do their jobs.

Depositions in civil litigation serve multiple purposes. If one thousand litigators were polled, one would probably hear as many different opinions on the various purposes of depositions and the relative importance of those purposes. But one thing that all litigators should agree on is that real-time transcription and deposition transcript management applications can be significant tools for accomplishing whatever goals one has in a given deposition.

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry.

The economy racked up another apparent e-commerce activity record in the first quarter, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. The government says that e-commerce sales, which include Internet and other electronically conducted transactions, rang up at a little more than $31.5 billion from January through March, plus or minus a 1.3% margin of error.

For clients whose primary presence is in the United States, including e-commerce businesses, cross-border cooperation among law-enforcement organizations raises distinct and difficult issues. An effective defense requires knowledge of treaties and criminal law in two or more jurisdictions and collaboration among defense counsel in different countries.