Fresh Intelligentsia is launched as another “pocket venue,” within the CodeX blog—a place to showcase news items and other posts of interest to our CodeX crowd. [I briefly started it as Fresh Intelligence, but unfortunately, I quickly realized (via a quick Google query) that someone else beat me to the punch to that kewl title.] But I think Fresh Intelligentsia is also rather fun.

So here we go: Microsoft Office Extensibility making Matter Center available to developers through GitHub and CLOC’s upcoming conference addressing legal tech innovation.

1. ComputerWeekly.com‘s Open Source Insider, by Adrian Bridgwater, reports about “Microsoft Office Extensibility: did legal technology just get interesting?” Bridgwater outlines the announcement by Microsoft Corp. that Matter Center is now available to developers through GitHub.

Here’s an excerpt from the post (slightly edited because I still stubbornly refuse to use the word “solution” in a blog post or article unless we are discussing math or the end of global warming):

“Office Extensibility is all about opening up Office to (often third-party) developers so that they can create new services and functionality. In this regard then, Matter Center is an Office 365 add-in and SharePoint-based document collaboration solution tools that seeks to increase productivity for legal professionals while supporting seamless access from any device. Microsoft has now made Matter Center available to the community of developers through GitHub.”

“Matter Center allows developers to deliver solutions tools for users in the legal space and (so says Microsoft) demonstrates the capabilities of Office as a ‘solutions platform’ in its own right. By posting Matter Center on GitHub and opening up for Pull Requests, Microsoft hopes to extend innovation.”

• Hat Tip: Donna Payne (CEO, PayneGroup) [Disclaimer: PayneGroup is an “implementation partner” with Microsoft Legal Resources.]

2.  Corporate Legal Operations Consortium leaders—Stephanie Corey (Flex), Connie Brenton (NetApp) and Mary O’Carroll (Google)—are featured on a video discussing “How legal departments are becoming incubators for new technology.” (The video was produced by the San Francisco Business Times).

The group’s annual Corporate Legal Operations Institute will be held May 2-4 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. CLOC members are finding that legal technology is expediting many functions within companies and law firms—in financial management, planning, vendor management, data analytics, tech support, data governance, lit support, knowledge management so forth and so on, freeing up lawyers and other professionals to be far more productive.
• Hat Tip: Sean La Roque Doherty (Analyst, 451 Research)

3. CodeX FutureLaw 2016: Speaking of May events, mark your calendar for Friday, May 20 for the fourth annual and watch for more details.

Got a tip about a new release, important event, great blog post? Ping Monica Bay at mbay@codex.stanford.edu.