by David J. Bilinsky

Along with awards for lawyers and law firms, there are awards for legal software. Law Technology News (LTN), published by American Lawyer Media, has published the 2009 LTN Vendor Awards. These awards are calculated by the number of votes received by readers of LTN, which means that they reflect primarily U.S. firms. Here is a selection of the award winners:

Product of the Year (Gold) was:

Index Engines Unified Discovery Platform
This product is aimed at the e-discovery market and is stated to be able to index one terabyte of data an hour. It is able to index proprietary data formats and data on backup tapes, virtual tape libraries, network storage devices, desktops, laptops, hard drives, USB drives and forensic images. (www.indexengines.com/products.htm)

Dictation Systems (Gold) award went to:

BigHand for BlackBerry
This product allows a lawyer to dictate into a Blackberry (with editing functions) and transmit that dictation back to the office for transcription. Similar software exists for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices from Bighhand. (http://tinyurl.com/ye2df2f)

The Gold award for CRM systems went to:

InterAction
This software allows a firm to see its relationship network. According to LexisNexis, “Nearly 300 law firms of all sizes, including over 80 per cent of the AmLaw 100 and 30 per cent of the top U.K. firms, choose InterAction from LexisNexis.” (http://tinyurl.com/ye2rjfg)

In terms of Collaboration Tools, the Gold award went to:

Workshare Professional 5.2 SR2
This product allows for document review and document control for PDF and Word documents. It also allows Metadata removal and redaction. (http://tinyurl.com/39v2m5)

The Gold award for Document Management Systems went to:

Worldox GX
This product is the equivalent of the steel filing cabinet, allows for profiling, search and indexing of files in over 270 different formats. It also supports version control and other functions. (http://tinyurl.com/ybjvp25)

In terms of Litigation Support Software, the Gold award went to:

CT Summation iBlaze
This electronic discovery tool supports “search and sort” functions along with briefcases, online and offline access and “petrification tools” to preserve data. (http://tinyurl.com/ycaua2t)

One last category:

Tabs3 + PracticeMaster
This received the Gold award in both Practice Management Systems as well as Time and Billing for small and medium sized firms. We can only hope that these products are adapted to the Canadian market shortly! (http://www.tabs3.com)

There are many other categories as well: a full listing can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/ydfl6cq.

David J. Bilinsky Blog: www.thoughtfullaw.com.

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.