Today's law firms, like many other businesses, are struggling to stand out in an increasingly crowd-ed and competitive marketplace. When it comes down to brand differentiation — or creating a brand image in the first place — most law firms struggle with how to creatively market what boils down to mostly an intellectual property service business.

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A few months ago, I was having dinner with an acquaintance, a world-famous professor at one of the most eminent business schools, who asked me: 'What's a blog?'

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Use the once-chilling phrase 'vendor consolidation' around anyone who has been watching the enterprise software market for the past few years, and chances are you'll barely elicit a goose bump. Headline-grabbing deals such as Oracle Corporation's 2005 takeover of PeopleSoft, Hewlett-Packard's recently unveiled plan to acquire Mercury Interactive, and a host of less splashy mergers and acquisitions have gotten us used to the idea that the marketplace may well coalesce around a handful of large vendors. But in the legal-tech sector, this already long-in-the-tooth IT trend has just started teething.

The wisdom of Confucius enlightens. although it usually takes a very long time to figure out the meaning of a select Confucianism, you know the wisdom is there somewhere. But it takes a lot of thinking to figure out the benefits of his wisdom. The same has been said about client-relationship management technology (CRM).

Pre-existing relationships ' whether with clients, former colleagues, or law school classmates ' are every law firm's number-one source for new client development. As large firms know firsthand, the strength of having a vast network is offset by the struggle to effectively search and access those relationships. Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton is a full-service AmLaw 100 firm with 1000 employees in nine nationwide offices. To support our business development and marketing efforts, we must be able to leverage our strong network of contacts and immediately identify everyone within our firm who has a valuable pre-existing relationship and can make an introduction.

The phrase document assembly can refer to the automated process of creating a simple letter from a letter template to a more complex series of interview questions that assemble a multi-page document, complete with content that is ready to deliver. The industry definition refers to compiling documents from a re-pository of stored paragraphs, clauses and document packages that are selected based on interview responses. Document assembly products provide users with marked improvements in turnaround time, consistency, accuracy and quality.

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Most people shiver at the first mention of the word 'conversion' during a system implementation. For some organizations, conversion may be the key factor when determining whether to undertake a new system implementation. The dread associated with the term stems from unpredictability and uncertainty in time, cost and data quality. There is no cookie-cutter conversion ' no two conversions are the same, nor should they be handled in the same manner. The conversion effort can be big or small, manual or scripted, stem from a single system or contain legacy data from multiple systems. In any case, there are some key steps that apply to all conversions that should be taken into consideration to execute them successfully.

According to a recent report by the Alta Group Latin American Region ('LAR'), equipment leasing volume in Latin American countries increased by more than 50% on average in 2005. The Alta LAR 100 report, which includes the firm's second annual ranking of the Top 100 leasing companies in Latin America, has expanded with new information revealing the region's fastest-growing businesses, key multinationals, and growth in each country. Rafael Castillo-Triana, principal for The Alta Group LAR, noted that 'Brazil, which has the largest leasing industry in the region, experienced tremendous growth and almost doubled in size.' In addition, 'The report also shows that Argen-tina's leasing industry is recovering from the downturn following the country's economic crisis of 2002.'