December 2011 Law Technology News Article

Click here to read my article, It All Comes Down To Trust.

Extranet - Coding Strategies

If you are considering building your own legal extranet, here are some quick do's / don'ts.

• Do be sure to manage your source code with a source code management system.
• Do be sure you have a strategy to manage and control software versions.
• Do be sure you have strong technical specifications written.
• Do be sure you write reusable objects to perform common system functions.
• Don't allow a single person to code the system without adequate backup.
• Don't forget to put together a solid project plan.
• Don't forget to have a skilled and knowledgeable technical professional perform code reviews.
• Don't forget the need to have developers perform unit tests that they prepare and are approved by a project manager.

They are many other considerations when running a software development project, these are just a few of them. More to follow in the future.

Web-Based Applications

Recently, there have been many interesting articles about the proiferation of web-based hosted applications for common, everyday use. There are many players in the market of providing on-line spreadsheets, work processors and presentation software. It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out in the world of managing legal and litigation data -- in a world where we all do on-line banking, manage our portfolios on-line, send emails using services like YAHOO, GOOGLE and others and where we soon might be creating all of our documents online and watching television online -- how soon will it be before we move more and more legal case management and document management applications out of technologies which require local installations, powerful PC hardware and a robust law firm intranet network (which is often a huge constraint to providing cross-office access to litigation data in multioffice law firms) into technologies which are common, hosted solution accessing in a secure and encrypted manner using the same internet backbone we use (or will soon use) for these other common, day-to-day activities.