LJN Newsletters

Once considered the realm of Rube Goldberg contraptions, medical technology is now a key feature of patient care. Longer life expectancy corresponds with the growth in entrepreneurial device companies making everything from tongue depressors to Jarvik-7 artificial hearts. Patients often expect perfect device performance along with flawless medical outcomes. Medical devices now comprise a multi-billion dollar industry, with vigorous growth forecast well into this century.

Before the clinical trials are run, before the Food and Drug Administration approves, before hope is held out to millions of patients, new drugs start with scientists asking elemental questions about human life. Now, the pipeline that leads from their laboratories through drug development to the FDA may be shut off at the source.

The most recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.

Litigators have seen massive technological changes occur during the past two decades. Perhaps some of the greatest of these changes have taken place in the time-honored discovery tradition of document production.

For our mid-sized law firm, having a comprehensive and powerful practice management system is critical to day-to-day operations and continued business success. At Hopkins & Carley, a 45-attorney firm located in San Jose, Javelan is the practice management system we put in place for managing client accounts and firm accounting and finance work. Besides managing our financials, the software also allows us to provide our professionals with the information and reporting details they need to manage our firm and client business effectively and efficiently.

AutoCorrect is a Microsoft Word feature that allows you to automatically detect and correct typos, capitalization errors and general misspellings as you type. If you consistently type the word "can not" as two words (it should be typed as one word), you can have AutoCorrect change it to "cannot." This is an especially important example, since the mistake you made "can not" will not get picked up when you run Spelling & Grammar (both words "can" and "not" are correctly spelled).

In 1999, two law firms, Piper & Marbury and Rudnick & Wolfe, merged to form Piper Rudnick, a business law firm that today consists of over 925 lawyers. One of the challenges the merger presented was the unification of our word processing applications. Piper & Marbury was using MS Word and Rudnick & Wolfe primarily used WordPerfect. Our internal IT staff was charged with transitioning this newly formed union into a predominately Word organization. To help with the physical conversion, our team turned to Levit & James Inc., a software company that specializes in document conversion and add-in products for Microsoft Word. Levit & James suggested CrossWords, a WordPerfect to MS Word conversion utility.

I am sure that everyone knows the name Microsoft. I am guessing that many of you, however, are not familiar with Microsoft's portal product "SharePoint." SharePoint presents an interesting opportunity for two reasons. First, it is a Microsoft product and chances are that your IT infrastructure and policies embrace Microsoft technology. Second, SharePoint is a relatively inexpensive portal solution. Okay, I know what you are thinking, another article about legal portals and how they will reduce your costs to nothing and increase your revenue by 2000%. I hope to provide something different here. The purpose of this article is to share my experiences working with SharePoint and provide some insight in how it can be used strategically in your law firm or law department.