"Law Practice Today received the exclusive opportunity to publish the transcript from the Keynote Address at ABA TECHSHOW 2004. Co-presenting at this year's conference was Lou Andreozzi, President of LexisNexis North America, and Mike Wilens, President of West. Lou and Mike shared their vision on the future of legal technology in the practice of law to a standing-room-only audience."  Link to story -- PDF transcript available from there.

"So what we’ve seen here is -- and I think the best example of technology and its movement into the law firm is really these catch phrases that I have no clue what they mean. I can’t tell you what knowledge management is. We have a product -- it’s a knowledge management product -- but I don’t know what knowledge management means. I have no clue what imbedding in the workflow means, and I certainly could not tell you what metadata is."

"Now, we saw with, I think knowledge management is something that has many meanings to many people. We at LexisNexis, we sort of have this sort of strategy which is really we sit back and watch what happens."

"This guy came up with the idea of a real good system for electronic discovery. What they did was three guys got together. Guy number one was an attorney who had the idea. Guy number two was a technologist. You see a pattern here. You and I can make this work. Guy number three put guy number one and guy number two together. And basically what they did was in a year they built a company called Applied Discovery, which had created conversion programs to take everything that was electronic and put it into a standard format to be a standard database. They had the ability obviously to scan in documents so they created a fully searchable database of discovery documents .... But basically what it did was it created a fully searchable database on discovery documents. Not a profound idea, not technology that had to be created using some, you know, fancy system."

"From the standpoint of electronic discovery, to be honest with you, I thought I paid a huge premium for the company I bought until I came to last year’s ABA TECHSHOW and found that every single company in the world was doing electronic discovery now. Its companies that do sheet metal work and electronic discovery; they do trial work and electronic discovery. I think there are – Joe’s bar and grill do electronic discovery. So electronic discovery is the hot place to be."

"Those of you who are CTO’s are probably sitting there saying, “That’s why nobody ever understands because all they care about is how they used to practice law.” But at the end of the day that’s what it really is all about at LexisNexis."

"CRM’s require you to believe that giving all of your secret sauce to the firm is a good thing. That’s culture change one. Culture change two is the real point of CRM is to create a closed feedback loop so that every time someone touches that customer they record what was said so it can go into the soup, and the next time you touch a customer you’re a little bit better. From my knowledge management short of getting people to put documents in, getting them to record even a matter number is a major challenge, let alone a transcription of what happened every time you talk to a client. CRM won’t work there."

"So trying to come up with a workflow product that does step-wise or enforces any rigid paradigm on knowledge workers is fraught with peril. We’ve learned this to our -- we’ve tried watching products like that and we have not been very successful. One area is extensive document assembly. If you move very much out of simple documents it gets very hard to sell that to sophisticated lawyers."

"Well, let me just sort of finish up with my own final thoughts which is I think new modalities of communications will change everything over the next five years because I don’t think the velocity of it is sustainable."