For the past few years, the world of document assembly and practice management as be S.O. (or same old …). There have been a number of interesting upgrades to existing products. There have been some exits (notably GhostFill). There have been a few acquisitions (Lexis’s purchase of PCLaw and Juris, to name a few). Into this “void” there are 3 new players who I will be examiniing: Zunesoft (maker of WordFusion, a document assembly platform), RocketMatter (www.rocketmatter.com) – a cloud-based legal practice management system- and Clio (www.goclio.com) – another cloud-based practice management system.
The CLOUD, for those who don’t know, is a word for software services that are made available through the internet where the data is stored, not on your server, but the server of the software service provider. It is called the internet CLOUD because in the cloud you cannot see where the data is actually stored. And, in practice, the data may be stored on dozens of different machines in multiple locations, and can be accessed from anywhere. More on these systems later.