2009 InnovAction Award winners

After serving two stints on the judging panel for the College of Law Practice Management’s InnovAction Awards, I spent this past year as Chair of the Awards. One of the great parts of that job is that I get to contact the winners, which I had the pleasure of doing last week. Now that the College has announced the winners publicly, I can do the same. Here’s the announcement post from the College’s blog — my sincere thanks to the judging panel (Merrilyn Astin Tarlton (Chair), Maggie Callicrate, Thomas S. Clay, Greg Siskind, and Tony Williams) and to everyone who submitted a nomination for this year’s Awards!

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Israeli legal organization New Family is the 2009 recipient of the coveted InnovAction Awards from the College of Law Practice Management, while New York-based legal services provider Practical Law Company, Inc. received the first-ever InnovAction Honorable Mention Award.

For the fifth year, the InnovAction Awards have recognized outstanding innovation in the delivery of legal services, demonstrating to the legal community what can happen when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, resolve to create effective change.

Meet our 2009 InnovAction winner!

New Family Organization
Family, Justice and Law initiative

Irit Rosenblum broke fresh ground defending a universal right to family as intrinsic to the practice of law. Rosenblum pioneered a new sphere of legal rights surrounding the family based on the conviction that the rights to marry, divorce, have children, bequeath and inherit assets, and conduct family life are human rights and must be attainable to all regardless of faith, nationality, sexual orientation or status. She founded New Family to fill a critical gap in the practice of law in Israel: to attain the right of every individual to establish a family and to exercise equal rights within it. For the two million people in Israel who are subject to discrimination due to family status, New Family’s achievements have been invaluable.

In addition, for the first time, the InnovAction Awards offered Honorable Mentions to entries that have taken an existing innovation in the practice of law, transformed it in a unique and valuable way, and made it better than before.

Here is our very first InnovAction Honorable Mention:

Practical Law Company, Inc.
Creating efficiency for business lawyers

Practical Law Company (PLC) is changing the way business lawyers work. It employ attorneys with significant experience practicing with the world’s leading law firms and legal departments (e.g. Davis Polk, Skadden, Pfizer, Sullivan & Cromwell) to provide practical, up-to-date resources that help business lawyers practice more efficiently and provide greater value to clients. PLC provides the practical, generic level of information needed by all business lawyers that allows them to get up to speed quickly, stop reinventing the wheel and focus on client and firm specific work. It launched its first US services in December 2008 to wide market acceptance. PLC began in the UK in 1990.

The 2009 InnovAction Awards will be presented on Saturday, September 26, 2009 at a special session during the 2009 Futures Conference held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in Denver, CO.