Fish Wins National Award For Most Innovative Use of Technology

Proprietary Software Solution Has Four Patents Pending for Innovative Functionalities

Boston, MA, March 24, 2009 – Fish & Richardson recently received the “Most Innovative Use of Technology” award from Law Technology News for its proprietary patent-pending software. For the past six years, Law Technology News has recognized leaders in the field, both in innovation and implementation, through its annual LTN Technology Awards.

Fish’s software was chosen as the most innovative over 30 other nominees from leading U.S. law firms. Conceived and developed by a team of Fish attorneys and IT developers, the Fish software is an integrated user interface that allows attorneys to seamlessly access client information, documents, data, dockets, and financial information.

“We developed our Fish software to provide our attorneys and technology specialists with an easy and intuitive interface that facilitates collaboration and enhances productivity,” said Peter Devlin, President of Fish & Richardson. “As a result, we can provide even better service to our clients and deliver even greater value.”

Like most law firms, Fish uses a variety of legal software including ProLaw, Elite, Pattsy, and SharePoint. While some software programs allow interfaces between some systems, they each have limitations. Fish’s software has the ability to read and write data from all other systems overcomes those limitations. The Fish software is a fully integrated user interface built inside of Microsoft Outlook that accesses all systems from within the workspace, eliminating the need to navigate from one software program to another when working on a client matter. For example, if an attorney receives an email from a client, the Fish software automatically links to the client’s file, enabling the attorney to quickly pull relevant information from the file, and sends a record of the communication back to the client file. This information also goes into the document data repository so that it is available to all attorneys to facilitate collaboration on any client matter.

To further enhance information sharing and collaboration, all documents relevant to a client can be viewed within customized workspaces, within the Fish software. It also utilizes Microsoft’s SharePoint search engine for robust full text searching of the firm’s nine million documents.

Law firm award recipients were selected by an independent panel of three jurors, all members of LTN’s Editorial Advisory Board. The jurors were Andrew Z. Adkins III, director of the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Fredric Lederer, professor of law and director of the Courtroom 21 Project at the College of William and Mary, and David Whelan, director of the Law Society of Upper Canada.