Who's buying what

City firm Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw has reacted to the new obligations on law firms under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2001 by selecting Semagix's CIRAS solution in order to bolster its compliance procedures.

CIRAS verifies the identity of prospective clients and enhances the data set to include key relationships held by that client, the transaction counterparties, and the risk represented by these factors.

This will help the firm determine whether it has reasonable grounds to suspect and report money laundering; failure to do so could be a criminal offence.

Partner Peter Richards-Carpenter, the firm's head of financial services, said: 'As a result of the Act, we have to be more proactive in understanding not only who our clients are and the nature of their business, but also their counterparties and others involved in a transaction.

Without Semagix, this would be a highly costly and labour-intensive process.'

City firm Charles Russell is to outsource its IT infrastructure to InTechnology's Managed Data Services.

The firm's IT servers are now held offsite in a secure data centre run by InTechnology.

IT director Jon Gould said: 'Rather than spend on business continuity services that we may never need, we are putting a smaller amount of money and getting all the security, resilience and flexibility we need for both business continuity and normal operations.'

Defendant insurance firm Keoghs, which has offices in Bolton and Coventry, has signed contracts to implement a solution comprising Elite's Practice Management System, along with Solicitec's Visualfiles case management system.

Central London firm Wedlake Bell has rolled out BigHand's award-winning TotalSpeech digital dictation system to all 130 users within a month.

Hertford firm Longmores has selected Pilgrim's Case Manage-ment system for its conveyancing department.

LawNet, a network of 55 law firms across the UK and Ireland, has signed a 250,000 deal to give its members access to the on-line legal information provider Lawtel.

Microsoft has selected Corprasoft Legal Desktop, a Web-based matter management system, for its in-house corporate law department.

The two companies have also announced plans to work together on future software development initiatives.