In December I offered readers the opportunity to respond to the 2016 Start/Stop Poll in which they could vote for the best new products and features and highlight the products that they planned to say good-bye to. The results of the process part of the survey are posted here.For the second year in a row Ravel Law Analytics has won the Dewey B Strategic Readers  “Start Stop Poll” for best new product. Lex Machina’s New Securities Module placed second. Ravel Law tied for best product in 2015 with Wolters Kluwer’s Cheetah search platform.

Ravel Law’s Court Analytics
 Additional products ( in alphabetical order) nominated by readers include:
  • Audit Analytics
  • D&B Onboard
  • Docket Navigator which is actually a patent analytics product
  • CARA from Casestext which reviews documents for missing precedent
  • Cheetah – Wolters Kluwer’s new platform replacing Intelliconnect which tied for first place last year.
  • iPad Pro 9.7/Pencil
  • Lex Machina’s Securities Module
  • LitIQ – linguistic analysis of documents
  • Luminance for product review and due diligence
  • Newsdesk – the LexisNexis news aggregation and curation platform.
  • Practice Point

 

 What was the best FEATURE/FUNCTION added to an information resource in 2016?
Lexis Search Term Mapping and navigation bar was voted best new feature added to an existing product.
LexisNexis Search Term Mapping
Additional features recommended by readers:

 

  • PDFs of significant complaints included in Court
    Wire emails for attorney self-service
  • “GRAB A” from Bloomberg Professional
  • Lex Machina Apps
  • Westlaw Answers
  • Practice Point
  • Bloomberg Law’s new business intelligence and
    analytics platform
  • Lexis Predictive Legislation
What PRODUCT did your department/organization STOP using in 2016 or plan to stop in 2017?
The perennial products on the chopping block are print materials as well as the high ticket Westlaw and Lexis enterprise contracts. As enterprise contracts for Lexis and Westlaw come up for renewal law firms grapple with the challenge of cancelling one and relying exclusively on the vendor. Only one respondent reported taking the sole online provider plunge by cancelling their enterprise Lexis contract in 2016.
Law firm budgets remain flat. The easiest way to bring in a new and innovative product is to cancel an existing subscription. The variety of products listed below suggests to me that resources monitoring platforms have enabled the surgical targeting of under-performing products. Information professionals are taking an active role in the strategic management of digital resources.

 

  • VC Experts
  • Hoover’s
  • RefTraker
  • InfoNgen (news aggregation platform)
  • West KM
  • CCH Cheetah
  • Practical Law
  • Lexis Publisher (moved to NewsDesk)
  • Courthouse News Service Jumbo
  • Checkpoint
  • ROSS
  • Debtwire
  • Intelligize
  • Capital IQ

 

What NEW INFORMATION/WORKFLOW PRODUCTS do you expect to be rolled out in your organization in 2017?
Electronic Resource Management products ( Research Monitor and Onelog  and Research workflow products  ( Quest and Reftraker)  were the two categories of products mentioned
most often as 2017 product implmentations to improve workflow.
Additinoal initiatives include:

 

  • We are looking at KM products
  • We have purchased a new intranet product and will be rolling it out in 2017.
  • Enterprise Proview for desk books from Thomson Reuters
  • Adding more Law360 modules.
  • BigSquare
  • Single sign-on/SSO/SAML for a variety of our legal research products, to eliminate the need for lawyers to have to enter credentials.
  • Lex Machina Antitrust Smart Tasks
  • Kira
  • Research Hub
  • Clarion BNA convergence dashboards
  • NewsDesk
  • I’m working on posting some of my technology
    sessions online using Panopto’s new quizzing feature.
  • Courtroom Insights
  • iManage — Document management system

 

 What product would you most like to see developed in Legal information technology area?
Improvements to access to litigation analytics from both state and federal courts with enhanced coding to improve strategic insights emerged as the leading product demanded by information professionals.

 

  • Access to all state court documents online, similar to PACER.  But better, and preferably free.
  • I would love for a way to be able to search across all the platforms we subscribe to, but I would even settle for a way to locate specific titles or products via a search. As long as that search doesn’t require us to catalog a vendor’s entire offerings!
  • State court complaints and dockets are coming online too slowly.  Disruption would be welcome in this category.
  • More transparent search engines.
  • We need a better financial system for tracking our expenses that goes deeper than our firm’s financial system allows.  An invoice often contains many titles, a mix of print and electronic, a mix of book versus subscription, and a mix of individual and department users.  We need a system that enables us to track AND REPORT at the granular level, preferably one that ties to Research Monitor usage and includes contract images, contract terms, licensed user info and more.
  • A litigation landscape tool that would allow you to more easily identify the high value cases (as opposed to the commoditized work) pertaining to a particular company. Lex Machina and Bloomberg are heading in that direction.
  • An easy-to-use “know your client” product that can produce reports and be used by “non-researchers”
  • Something that searches across all of our online subscriptions.
  • A low-cost news aggregator that provides info law schools need (and that we can afford)
  • I would like to see companies continue to improve access to dockets that have not been electronically filed and at reasonable cost.
  • Easier classification of emails into the document management system
  • A biometric device that will eliminate passwords.
  • Analytics

 

 What is your favorite app for personal use? (What do you use it for if it has multiple functions?)

 

  • Shazam
  • PocketCasts. I can organize podcasts by category (fun and work-related), sort and play podcasts set at specific speeds.
  • Words with Friends.
  • MTA bus time
  • Waze
  • Every Dollar
  • Google maps
  • Kindle app
  • Selfie Editor
  • Tile  app
  • Asana -online team and task management
  • Pinterest
  • Pokemon Go
  • “Find my IPhone”
  • Gas buddy locates gas stations and prices on a map.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their wisdom and insights with their colleagues.