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The Innovators Among Us

The 2008 InnovAction Awards have been announced. Ron Friedmann provides the pointer via his blog, Strategic Legal Technology. These awards, from the College of Law Practice Management, honor lawyers, law firms and other legal professionals for "extraordinarily innovative efforts." Without further ado, I give you this year's three extraordinary innovators:

• Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman was selected for its ValueChain outsourcing methodology. ValueChain is a unique system that visually displays client objectives, capabilities, opportunities and risks to Pillsbury lawyers. This helps the lawyers better understand the impact on clients' business of outsourcing business functions such as HR, customer service, and IT accounting, as well as how the outsourcing of such operations can best be designed and structured. Pillsbury was recently granted a business method patent for ValueChain by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• Mallesons Stephen Jaques. Mallesons Stephen Jaques of Sydney, Australia was honored for PeopleFinder, the technological spearhead of ClientFirst, a program of continuous improvements to the firm's standards of client service. PeopleFinder gives individuals who contact Mallesons using a BlackBerry the ability to determine whether the person they're calling is available, and if not, when and where they can be found. PeopleFinder has rerouted more than 10,000 phone calls per month from voice mail to a person who can provide assistance. Mallesons also won an InnovAction Award in 2007 for its TalentNet initiative.

• Novus Law. For the first time in InnovAction's history, an award was given to a non-law firm -- in this case, a company that provides services to law firms. Novus Law was selected for its documentation of the e-discovery process. Novus developed a program that documents and captures the e-discovery process (a significant cost in litigation) to give clients, attorneys and courts a reliable and predictable method for efficiently completing an important part of the litigation process.

Congratulations to all.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on July 30, 2008 at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)