No Option for Law Firm

I’ve been thinking about communication within law firms for a while, thinking there has to be a better way than email. For a few years in my new year top 5′s I’ve had instant messaging within law firms or more specifically Microsoft’s Lync platform, this is starting to take off now and I suspect for those adhoc short emails it is slowly becoming a replacement.

But I tweeted last year about how Lync still feels like email systems back in the early 90′s, they were mainly internal mail systems with no link between firms and people external to the firm. It was only when email was “set free” that it really took off and became the deluge it is now, so I think until federation really takes off linking Lync systems between firms and individuals (via Microsoft’s Skype) it will only make a small dent in helping reduce our email mountain.

Another Microsoft product that is making some waves within law firms is Yammer. For those not used to Twitter, Yammer can bring some confusion. “How is this different to sending a message via Lync?” I’ve heard asked. I answered this in a tweet last year, Internal “broadcasts” = Yammer, Conversations = Lync, What’s left = email. There is some overlap between them all off course, but primarily I think these are what should be used for each type of communication.

You do need to be a little wary with Yammer though. First off it’s in the cloud, it isn’t solely stored within your firm. The second issue is the security. The free model has a method of authentication that allows access as long as you can confirm your login via an authenticated email domain. So if you are using the free version care needs to be taken about what is communicated. To explain in some more detail how the free model works, lets take a firm jasonplant which has an email domain of jasonplant.co.uk. So if I sign up with my email I will get an authentication link sent to my jasonplant.co.uk email address, so there is a check to see whether you work for the firm. However, if I leave the firm my email stays valid. Others in the firm can mark that I have left and this will trigger an email to re-authenticate (if I’ve truly left my email will have been retired of course and/or I won’t have any access to the firms email system). Of course beyond the free version there is a paid for enterprise version of Yammer, here security ramps up with IP filtering, synchronisation with the firms user access systems, single sign on, enterprise administration etc

This weekend I’ve been involved in an important piece of work, something that started off in a very sudden way on Friday afternoon and involved people from Leeds to Melbourne via Amsterdam, Dubai and Hong Kong. Looking back at how this played out I think it would have been great to spin up a Yammer type ”community” to allow all the relevant people to communicate and share information around this specific piece of work. Once completed the “community” could have been dissolved. In this case email was our tool, but as most people will agree with it isn’t the ideal tool in this situation.

I think Yammer could be an answer to this “community” communication, there is also some fantastic work being done by HighQ Solutions which hopefully will be great at bringing these communities together allowing the relevant communication to take place and reduce our 20 year dependency on email!

However remember, as one presenter at these years LawTech Futures said “If a community doesn’t communicate well at the moment, they won’t start to communicate just because you give them a wiki, blog etc”

The Spectator Magazine – 9th March 2013 – “In praise of rude nerds” by Mark Mason

Around this time last year I wrote a post extolling the benefits of a good first contact with Legal IT when providing good customer service. One of the points I mentioned was “be polite”, however I read an article this week (again in The Spectator) that suggests the “rude nerds” are where the good service is. Or as they put it “rude is the new polite”.

Have a read at the article, it stereotypes a little but effectively it’s about those that man technical helplines that “have the social skills of a breeze-block — but by Christ can they tell you how to defrag a hard-drive”. I suspect it’s intended to be a little tongue in cheek, but the sentiments are right. We’ve all been on calls where at some point you know whether a) the operator is reading a script and doesn’t understand your problem or b) you’re going to get a resolution.

At least with the Sheldon’s* of this world you know where you stand and ultimately your problem is fixed! So maybe the last line is right.

“This man hadn’t been rude, he’d just been true to his nature. A nature that, yes, shuns small talk, but also — and more importantly — lets him do his job brilliantly.

Give me that over futile, scripted politeness any day.”

Send & File is a fantastic way to get email into your HP Autonomy iManage WorkSite DMS (Document Management System) – surely that brand name needs condensing!! But there is one small issue with Send & File that can crop up and bite you and that is the efficiency of the InboxFiler. Let me explain with a scenario:

John sends a email to his team about a project and uses Send and File to file that email to the project workspace. Each of the team (Sarah, Joe and Lisa) receive the email, Worksite nicely dedupes the emails in the workspace. All good so far.

Sarah then forwards on the email to a colleague, lets say with a legitimate question on the project. Because the email still has the “luggage tag” ie that part of the subject that looks like [TEST-LIB1.FID1234] when Fred receives the email the InboxFiler files it in the project workspace. Meaning John could still read this email in the workspace. Still OK as that email was related to the project and thus the project workspace holds a record of all communications on the project.

However, Fred thinks the question was a bit stupid and forwards on the email to Claire. In the email he writes a little note about how much of an idiot he thinks John is along with a few other choice words. In a normal email conversation John would never know. BUT in this example Fred left the “luggage tag” in the subject line, as soon as Claire receives it the InboxFiler picks it up and files in in the project workspace! John (who has full access to the project workspace) can therefore read this email, oops!

Thankfully in later versions of the WorkSite HP Autonomy allowed things to be configured to strip out the luggage tag if you chose “Send Only” on the send and file pop up. But if your version is not yet configured this way (How would you know? Try doing a “Send Only” to yourself and see if the “luggage tag” is still in the subject line) then be careful. You can also just remove the “luggage tag” by deleting it in the subject if you are making comments that are no longer relevant to the original subject, this will stop it being filed by the recipient automatically!

As a slight aside, I recently discovered Vine from Twitter. A rather neat App available on only the iOS platform at the moment. It allows you to record small video files and share them, a bit like Instagram for video really. Anyway whilst playing around with it I decided to knock up a short video of the above Send and File scenario, you can view it here.

For more info on Send & File see this previous post.

This last week I’ve just started reading “Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future” by Richard Susskind. It’ll take me a while as I tend to have a few books on the go at once and this one will only get a look in on my commute in between reading the Metro and re-watching the WestWing on my phone! But as I’ve just finished part one I thought I’d write up some thoughts.

For those that are unfamiliar with Richard Susskinds works, he basically points to radical changes in the legal market and has been future gazing in this way for some years. In fact I recently bought his 1996 book “The Future of Law” off eBay, this was the year I started in Legal IT and I’m intrigued to look back to what he predicted then and compare it to the journey I’ve been through within Legal IT over the last 17 years, but that’s a post for another day.

The first part of this latest book really sets the scene of what is to come in the later two parts. The first five chapters that make up part one are as follows:

• Three drivers of change
• Strategies for success
• Commoditizing the law
• Working differently
• Disruptive legal technologies

The “three drivers of change” are the drive to cut costs, the changing legal model (ABS etc) and IT. It’s hard to argue against any of these, it’s just what will be the rate of change and how big a change will it be. The second chapter I thought was very interesting, low costs and alternative fees were discussed as “no brainers” and the chapter moved to how firms will need to work very differently. The final three chapters expand on what he sees as the options; to build an efficiency and collaboration strategy, the only viable strategies that he sees for law firms to remain competitive.

It’s interesting reading the first part how far from this vision a lot of law firms are, seemingly concentrating on cost cutting and alternative fees alone as they strive to keep profits high (example, “Eversheds set to cut up to 166 jobs in latest redundancy round“).

Although I don’t necessarily agree with everything Richard Susskind predicts for law firms, I do agree that the winds of change are blowing through the industry. And the more stories like the front page on today’s Metro paper (see below) hit the mainstream media, the more outsiders will see a huge opportunity to deliver legal services in new, customer benefiting ways!

Metro Front Page – Thu 28 Feb 2013
Click picture to enlarge

 Metro newspaper

Last Wednesday (13th Feb) I attended the Bighand user conference in Manchester. First off a big hand for Bighand, finally a vendor puts in a lot of effort to hold a quality user conference outside of London and well done to the firms that turned out and made it a successful event!

I like the Bighand events, they have a good mix of general business/legal keynotes, product information and specific breakout sessions. It’s like what Interwoven used to do with their Gear Up conferences, but sadly no longer do under either their Autonomy or HP guises.

The keynotes on Wednesday were from Dame Sarah Storey and Neil Rose (Legal Futures). Dame Sarah’s talk was about her journey as an athlete which was fascinating, a Paralympic who’s won gold medals in two sports. Neil had to follow with a talk on ABS’s (Alternative Business Structure) which wasn’t quite the talk of an olympic athlete but was a great introduction to ABS’s in the legal world. One point I noted mid talk was when he was discussing a firm in Silicon Valley that offered advice in a relaxed coffee shop atmosphere, lawyers like “Apple genius’” in the jumpers with the firms logo on. It caused a chuckle in the audience which to me shows how far the UK has to go to rid itself of its stuffy suited image and really embrace new business models.

Next up was the product information and below I’ve written up the key product take aways that I noted:

First off were some mobile offerings:

FreeMe was a dictation app for iPads, built from the ground up rather than a port of the iPhone app. As well as the obvious dictation functionality it allowed iPad “open in” functionality from emails that then open the attachment in FreeMe for review with dictation controls on screen, to allow you to dictation notes to send back to BigHand.

Then it was the turn of their new BlackBerry 10 App. When this was announced I thought it was an odd launch. After all BigHand hadn’t launched a Windows Phone 8 App yet, a platform that was released some months ago. “But it’s a small market share” I hear you say, very true but the BBX platform has zero market share at the moment. My guess is RIM (or BlackBerry as I guess we should call them now) encouraged enterprise app developers to produce BBX apps for launch, something Microsoft really should have done! But it’s all a moot point as it was mentioned that a Windows Phone 8 app is in the pipeline from Bighand.

Next up was some info on Bighand 4.4 for the desktop:

Here we have some nice integration with Lync to show presence information when sending dictations. Handy if you need to ensure you send to someone who is available.

For the speech recognition module there were a couple of new wizards demoed. One that helps you to set the optimal recording levels for your microphone and another for training your voice to the system.

Last up was some work Bighand are doing on workflow. Integrating WorkSite and Speech Recognition into one workflow. You right click in FileSite, select dictate, it auto profiles the dictation with data from WorkSite and then once you finish the dictation and document are linked together for future reference. It’s a shame I didn’t photo the slide as it shows it much better than I can describe it (maybe if someone from Bighand is reading this they can send me on the slide?).

The afternoon was set aside for the BigHand breakout sessions. I attended a couple, one on speech recognition for which Charles Christian tweeted a nice summary “is speech recognition a marmite technology – some love it & some hate it“. Then one on mobile device management, led by MobileIron. The take away here was that BigHand are developing their mobile apps against MobileIron’s app management API’s to allow you to manage and control their app using the popular MobileIron platform. I hope they will also look at the Citrix app management platform next and provide a BigHand mdx for use in the Citrix platform!

Overall a good day. Thankfully my exit from the conference was timed perfectly as I missed the spectacle of Big Mills in lycra at the very end!

A Matter Centric Document Management System or MCC (apparently the other ‘C’ is for collaboration, who knew!) isn’t it all a bit old hat? I see the ILTA competitions still and wonder who isn’t doing MCC now?

I think maybe this is a US v UK thing? Maybe having using Legal IT for longer and in particular Document Management Systems (DMS) the US have lived in a profile driven DMS world for a long time and thus “searching” is more the norm, whereas in the UK we came to the DMS party late and are more tuned to browsing through folders. Therefore maybe for this side of the pond the concept of MCC made sense and we adopted it like ducks to water?

Either way though a few conversations and emails recently made me think that maybe some best practice is worth revisiting as the volumes of documents on matters increase.

To start with its worth stating something I’ve said before, Simplicity Rules! If you’re moving to MCC then I strongly suggest you start simple, there will be enough challenges to get lawyers to file documents and emails without making a hugely complex structure for them (nor is it worth getting bogged down in endless meetings to try and reach a decision on such a complex structure! What will suit Litigation will annoy Corporate etc)

But, it is worth planning in a degree of flexibility. We started with 4 or 5 “top level folders” and restricted the creation of additional top level folders to “Matter Administrators”, these were a small number of admins within the business who could control the folder structures for their depts. matters. Thus we aimed to keep a level of control and consistency. Other approaches I have seen have been to allow a specific set of additional folders to be added to matters, ie to open up the creation process to a wider audience but restrict what can be created.

When coming up with your short list think retrieval, make it obvious where things are. Correspondence, Bills etc. These can each be tagged with meta data in most DMS and so the documents placed in them will inherit this information making searching easier. The tricky issue is the Miscellaneous folder or Other documents, there are pros and cons to this which I’ll leave to you all to discuss in the comments!

To me though, documents is easy. We’ve tied a lot of our filing into the template system now. So if you create a letter it will automatically try and file this to the Correspondence folder for you. The tricky part is email!

How do you file these? Technically they are correspondence, but combining into a single document/email folder will unleash a whole heap of trouble. Just don’t! So a separate email folder is the best option, but then some matters can have thousands of emails and if you’re a “browser” this can be a nightmare. This is where you probably want to think about some best practice rather than create a default structure. You could get people to create sub folders by date, fee earner etc

Overall though MCC is not just about the folder design, care needs to be taken in training and instilling best practice. Also you won’t get it right first time, you’ll look back a few years later and wish you’d done things differently. But then it’s worth diving in as you’ll only learn this through observing and getting feedback from real world use!

Well it was only a few days ago that I re-iterated my prediction that BBX would be a flop and that the BlackBerry would fade away in Legal IT. For me a big part of this were the rumours that the first devices would be touchscreen, to me this removed the whole raison d’être for a BlackBerry, the hard keyboard. I mean if you want a touchscreen smartphone then why oh why would you go BlackBerry? (Think Playbook, everyone asked the same question re: tablets and went and bought iPads!)

But then this got leaked on N4BB.

The BlackBerry X10

If RIM release this as the first BBX device at the end of January then I have to say that the BlackBerry may still have a place in law firms. Having a good keyboard device would be a great reason to stick with the OS, a lot of lawyers use the BB as their primary email device and love the physical keyboard.

I still think it would be a pair of NHS spectacles (see my Top 5 for 2013 for the explanation!), albeit now they’d be a rather good pair and ones that a fair few people would actual be more than happy to wear!

Next I think bespoke systems (or at least flexible systems) will start to make a come back. Remember Hatton Blue anyone? The modern versions of this and the rise of ABS law firms will see firms look at their processes and find more efficient ways to do things. This will be much more than case management software, more a mix of case management, online communication and document automation.

Cloud storage I think will be a big topic still through 2013. In particular for Legal IT it will be a specific cloud offering that will be all the rage, a simple dropbox or skydrive type solution. In this area in Legal there are two big players that already have their hat in the ring. Workshare’s SkyDox and HP Autonomy’s LinkSite, at the moment I think the later just has the edge. But there are also smaller vendors offering integration of your DMS into products like box.net. I’ll put up a blog post about this in the coming weeks.

And finally that big one, Windows 8 makes it to the top of my top 5 for 2013. Sure no law firm will run a desktop refresh with Windows 8, but all those replacement laptops and desktops at home WILL come with Windows 8. People will use it and (eventually) start to realise the potential, software vendors will write for it and the hybrid laptop/tablets will start to become the big BYOD item of 2013. Law firms by the end of the year will need to cater for Windows 8 whether they like it or not!

So that’s it my top 5 for 2013.

5 – Death of the BlackBerry, rise of the other three (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) in law firms

4 - BYOD

3 – Bespoke systems (Q: are they still 4GL’s??) make a comeback

2 – Cloud storage, specifically ”Legal dropbox”

1 – Windows 8

This is a bit of a departure from my usual posts, but please read on! It’s more a cry for help or advice in the Legal IT world (in fact anywhere in the IT world).

In South Korea there is a proprietary word processing (WP) application called Hangul which is published by the company Hancom Inc. This WP application produces documents in its own file format (with a .hwp extension). The latest versions of Hangul can save documents in .doc format, but Microsoft Office cannot open .hwp files.

Now for international firms this becomes tricky as .hwp has widespread use in South Korea (particularly in the government), meaning difficulties when sharing, filing, collaborating on documents with the rest of the world which is wedded to Microsoft’s file formats!

So I’m asking if people can share this post as widely as possible. Email colleagues, put it on linked in, tweet it out, facebook it etc. Someone out there must be working in this dual world and have some tips and tricks they can share. So if you’re one of those people please use the contact form on this site to get in touch, contact me via twitter @planty or simply respond in the comments of this post.

Many Thanks

Yesterday I listened in on what I’m sure is a fairly new idea in Legal IT, a panel discussion on a conference call! Sounds odd when you put it like that but that’s effectively what it was.

It was billed slightly differently :

LEGAL TECHNOLOGY OBSERVER SHOWDOWN – KNOWLIST’S DANIEL BROWN AND ORANGE RAG’S CHARLES CHRISTIAN WILL DEBATE LEGAL TECH TRENDS FOR 2013

Christy Burke to Moderate Vigorous Discussion on December 11th between Noted Global Industry Experts, Event Free to the Legal Community.

So what was it like? Well it wasn’t quite the vigorous showdown at dawn, but it was an interesting discussion. And moreover it was a concept I really hope continues. The format like I say was like a panel discussion and could be a perfect host to a number of Legal IT topics. It was at a suitable time to catch UK and US callers and short enough to be able to listen along to whilst working.

Anyway don’t take my word for it.

There was a live blog by Ron Friedmann that you can read.

Better still have a listen to the whole thing here.