I’ve been a little sceptical of how revolutionary “Tesco Law” will be. Sure I can see it in the personal injury and clinical negligence arena, for example, where there is a lot of standardised legal work. But outside that, I’m not sure. For existing businesses I can’t see beyond the move being like an IPO for the partners, what’s the incentive to grow that business after the “float”? Most entrepreneurs after an IPO of their business leave with their money and start again. In a law firm though the product of the business is the lawyer (unless it’s standardised legal work where processes and standard documents have been be created, but then we’re back to my first point!).

However, I read with interest the story of Liverpool’s Silverbeck Rymer which is set to be acquired by software and outsourcing firm Quindell Portfolio. As a Legal IT professional this move kind of excites me, a company with the technology and the processes taking over a law firm to get the legal expertise? The business process and IT systems being front and centre in building and growing that business!

The other interesting possible development could be for new entrants to gain the access to capital from investors. This could allow those partners from big firms to setup new firms or maybe entrepreneurs who see the opportunities that then work with some young lawyers to build the next generation of law firm?

It’s an interesting time to be in legal and could lead to some very exciting opportunities in legal IT. Maybe I’ll try and persuade a couple of friends who work in the IT dept of one of the aforementioned UK Top 50 to guest blog post in a years time on what changes ABS has brought to their dept!

If you want some further reading on “Tesco Law” there’s a good in depth commentary on Legal Week entitled “Reverberations and revolutions – change grips the market as ‘Tesco law’ finally launches”

Speech Recognition : Yes I know I predicted this in 2010 but I really think we will start to see more uptake of this technology in Legal. It’ll creep more into consumer and as such we’ll become more acustomed to speaking to machines. Read more of my thoughts on speech recognition in this post from November last year.

Windows Phone/Android/iPhone : Or more to the point, the death of the blackberry in Legal. After years of being the corporate tool of choice (remember when having a BB was a bit of a status symbol!!), RIM through major failure of service and also taking their eye off what they were really good at (email access) have gone the way of the fax machine. As for the replacement? Well the last two on the list are obvious, but I’m sticking my neck on the line and predicting the order as written! I’ll post up why I think this in an future post.

SharePoint : Now this is a tricky one. I’m going to sit on the fence for a little longer here as to which way it will go, but in 2012 I think we’ll conclude one way or the other whether or not SharePoint will or will not become a viable Legal DMS (Document Management System).

The return of the laptop/netbook : not that they ever really went away. I read a great post before Christmas that really chimed, it was entitled “If you want to look old, get an iPad”. I gauged my 9 year old’s opinion as to which tech he’d prefer, answer a laptop. Apparently roblox doesn’t work on an iPad! Seriously though, the iPad is nice kit and until I upgraded my Smartphone from Windows Mobile (old version) I hankered after one. But now, I’m with Larry’s 27 year old son (albeit a bit older!) I think they will have a place but for me a lightweight ultrathin laptop would be preferable and I think more will start to feel the same.

A new vendor emerging as a major Legal IT player : to me the market is ripe for a new Legal focussed player to emerge. I’m not sure where, but there seem to be plenty of opportunities for technology focus in Legal that aren’t being addressed or existing technology that is perhaps being forgotten as the traditional players diversify into other verticals. Now vendors don’t go spamming my comments with products, as I won’t allow them through! But feel free to let us know why you think this might be you without product placement.

That’s my top 5, nothing revolutionary for this year (although predicting Wp7 as a major player could be seen as beyond revolutionary!). There are things from the last few years that will continue in 2012, Office 2010 becoming the default platform and IM continuing to proliferate around Legal. But these feel more business as usual now. So, I’ve kept it fairly generic and it is probably geared more at mid sized firms and above. But would love to hear your comments on the above or what you think will be big in 2012 (especially from those in smaller firms).

My 2010 list was as follows:

• Mobile Applications
• Search
• Office 2010/Windows 7
• Instant Messaging
• Speech Recognition

And then in 2011 was:

• Glue Tech
• Microsoft Lync
• YouTube
• Mobile Applications
• Office 2010 and Windows 7

Now given the similarity between the lists it’s clear that things don’t move at a fast pace across the whole of Legal. But I didn’t do a bad job (alright some were bleeding obvious, but they still caught some Legal IT vendors on the back foot. Office 2010 anyone?)

Off the mark! OK YouTube hasn’t been the success I thought, but elsewhere it’s going where I thought it would (see YouTube in Schools), it makes sense to me and so maybe soon we’ll see something appear. Maybe one of the Legal IT vendors (HP Autonomy hint hint) could provide a YouTube channel with product videos (like WorkSite how-tos for example!!). Glue Tech is one to watch still, there is use of this technology of course, but I thought there would be a real rush to this last year. Speech Recognition I think I was a couple of years too early and Search, well let’s put that down as a bad idea!

Mobile Apps,  well the apps themselves haven’t really been making waves in Legal as I thought . Sure there are a few Legal specific ones out there, but I was thinking more of an internal Marketplace/Appstore for firms own apps. But there certainly is a move by lawyers to more personal/consumer devices (iOS, Android, WP7) and away from the controlled blackberry environment which may speed this up over the next couple of years.

Microsoft Lync/IM, now this is taking off in firms. It feels to me like email circa 1995 at the moment, contacting someone in the firm is now easy but outside is still a bit tricky and clunky. I’m sure we’re almost at a tiping point and corporate IM will explode like email did in the late 90′s.

Office 2010/Windows 7, come on who hasn’t implemented something or at least started a project to implement these two? For UK firms it was obvious this was going to happen, almost all of us were Office 2003 and XP and so it was bound to happen. Why then were so many Legal IT vendors caught out and behind the release of Office 2010? I could fill a blog post with the problems we found along the way, mainly with plug-ins to Office from 3rd parties causing issues!

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at 2012!

Speech Recognition.

Now before I get accused of following certain people or the current trend generated by SIRI let me first point out item #1 on this blog post of mine from the 1st January 2010!

But the feeling I got from the conference is that finally the tech, that has been around in Legal ever since I’ve been in this vertical, is finally reaching a point that it is useable. The latest version of the Bighand product (4.2) uses the new Nuance 11 engine and from the demo shown on the day is impressive (demo online too). The workflow with transcribe and proofing seems ideal and the tools given to the secretary to control the dictation playback with the resulting document for amendment is well thought out. I seem to recall in a previous Bighand session that this correcting by the secretary would help with the teaching of the speech recognition software for that author (I could be wrong on this one so check with Bighand first!)

With a bit of work with the API that Bighand now provide you could create a great Fee Earner interface from the DMS (document management system) that would ensure the document being created is started on the correct template, filed in the right place and transcribed ready for a secretary to finish the document.

There were some good case studies from law firms who had started to use speech recognition. Stating that the transition wasn’t difficult for existing Bighand users, but the lawyer had to want to embrace the technology (due to the initial time taken to teach the system and perhaps having to adapt dictation style for better results). Also feedback was not that this led to reduction in secretaries (those lawyer-secretary ratios were high enough already!) but to enabling the secretaries to do other work for the lawyer.

The key point that stood out from the day though were some comments generally on the technology. For a while I’ve thought that maybe dictation was a dying technology, after all the “younger” lawyer is used to typing his/her own documents right? Well this generation maybe, but the next generation is growing up with the likes of SIRI. Maybe this generation is a blip before lawyers throw themselves back at dictation and with the advances in the technology maybe speech recognition is now a viable solution to both improve efficiencies and to make those straining lawyer-secretary ratios work!

Vote for me in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011

I’d very high hopes for WorkSite 9. Admittedly a lot of these hopes I’d developed circa version 8.2 (i.e. before the Autonomy merger) so a lot has happened since. But because of this I feel just a little underwhelmed by what’s in v9.0.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is some good stuff in 9.0 that is going to be really useful for a lot of firms, but there were a couple of things that I’d hoped for that haven’t materialised. First off though let’s take a look at the things that are there:

Unicode: Now if you are a one country, one language firm that has no international offices nor international clients then this probably isn’t a big deal. But for everyone else it’s a big cheer of “Yes! finally”, no more agonising over the code pages of libraries and limiting the poor folks in the small office in Russia to using the Latin character set for everything! There’s the ability to handle the meta data of course, but also to handle dialogues in multiple languages based on the locale that Windows is set to.

Security: Two areas of security jump out:

• Security in the ACL (Access Control List) currently uses an optimistic model (or can be set at the server for an all pessimistic model). i.e. the higher or the lower security always wins if the person is in the ACL more than once (e.g. marked as an individual as well as in a group). In 9 you can have a hybrid model, where no access trumps everything. Basically no mimicking the way Windows file security works.
• Encryption. file encryption built in. So you can set specific documents to be encrypted at the file store level. In law firms I can see this being an increasing requirement in the near future!

Remote use:

• https support: an alternative access to having to set up VPN connections to gain remote access to your firms WorkSite setup. Similar to Outlook where you can set the client up to talk to Exchange via https enabling easier remote access.
• The other is not necessarily designed for remote access but will be beneficial for those on slow connections. It’s the utilisation of OffSite cache whilst you are online. So if there is a local version of the document that is the most recent, then that is used rather than fetching one from the server. Reducing network traffic (at least for large document transfer).

Client:

• 9 has features for saving native word comparisons into WorkSite and to allow you to compare WorkSite documents
• Integrated into the save as PDF functions in Office, allowing you to save to worksite (interesting these two seem to be an “attack” on Workshare, Docscorp & Litera territory!)
• In Office 2010 you can now view NRL link attachments within email (similar to standard Office attachments)
• Add-on available that plugs into the Outlook 2010 social connector that can show WorkSite activities.
• iPad client v2 – take a look at this post on Legal IT Professionals for full details.

Some additional features that help IT department more than the fee earner are:

• Easier desktop upgrades through automatic upgrade of custom configurations, handling re-install in the install package.
• FilesSite and EMM will become one package.
• v9 server compatibility with 8.5 schema to ease upgrades.
• Autonomy Control Centre – Allows managing of all IDOL components. Includes graceful start-up and shutdown, ability to edit config files etc. In future sounds like there are plans to include all WorkSite components in this!
• IPv6 support.

Finally there is a push to the cloud, where you can have Autonomy host the WorkSite infrastructure. There is also a hybrid cloud solution. Where your data centre would replicate to their cloud for disaster recovery purposes or just for backup purposes. Uses replication products from Autonomy’s recent iron mountain acquisition.

So what were those two things that I would have liked to be in v9.0 that weren’t?

I was hoping for a significant rework of the database schema. Something that would really remove any limitations on docmaster in terms of number of documents and give significant performance gains to workspace/folder navigation. Also an addition of a much more flexible custom field set up, allowing full user configuration of meta data.

The second area I was hoping for work on was to allow easier global working. We know latency is a killer for any global set up, so I wasn’t expecting the Chicago guys to perform miracles. But just add more flexibility to allow “on the fly” connections to other libraries. For example, I could create matter shortcuts to an Australia matter in the library in Sydney from within my UK system and the DMS servers would then manage the connection only on my entering that particular matter (releasing it once I navigated away). This would save me having to maintain a connection to the Australia DMS as well as my UK one. DocAuto have a product that does something along these lines, but can’t help feeling it should be in the core product?

I did say my hopes were high didn’t I!

But what we do have with v9 is a good step forward. Plus as they will be targeting Office 2007 and 2010 only, it will hopefully mean we see some further exploitation of Office 2010’s features and better integration as we move forward through 9.1, 9,2 etc. as well.

Separately, there has been a push in the enterprise towards Exchange 2010, as the Exchange Administrators are keen to make use of the CAS high availability and new Outlook Webapp amongst other features, the most obvious one being Outlook 2010

This blog post will take you through some of the things to note when migrating your mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and what the impact might be on your WorkSite user.

First the easy bit, the legacy WCS (SMTP) service that runs the filing via email address. There are no major changes to carry out here. The email filing functionality at the back end is still the same, with the SMTP service on the WCS picking up the incoming mail directed to it from your Exchange server using the mail connector The mail connectors from your Ex2003 environment will have automatically been migrated to your Ex2010 so things should pretty much remain the same, so any mail destined for yourworksitedomain.yourdomain.com will still go through. If you want to reconfigure the bounced email to be redirected to your new service account, (see below for why you need a new service account) you can make this change quite simply in the Communication Server Properties. A restart of the WCS service will be necessary, however the messages will queue during this time.

Things get a bit more interesting when it comes to the Email Filing Service (EFS). The EFS handles two of the main services, the FilingWorker (for Email Filing) & MarkingWorker (for Filing Folders). There are two key changes to be made within the EFS when the mailbox migration process begins.

First of all you need to review the Email Server Connection tab. Here you will have added the details of a Ex2003 service account which has relevant Send As/Receive As permissions. This service account field needs to be updated to a Ex2010 service account (a mailbox hosted within Ex2010). I guess you could also migrate the existing service account but I wouldn’t advise this, just so it doesn’t impact your current environment. Naturally, the Send As/Recieve As permissions need to be added for this account and should also have this access to the Ex2003 environment. In the Service Account/Server Name field you need to put in the name of your Ex2010 CAS name, whether this be a single server or an alias for the array and ensure you add this using the FQDN. All this can either be done manually or via the Email Filing Server Configuration Wizard, which will also change the local Outlook profile on the server to the new service account. If you use Trusted Login with the WorkSite administration account on EFS then you should ensure this has relevant NRTADMIN permissions in the database.

Secondly, depending on how many WCS’s you have and how they are individually configured, you may be filtering the Email Server Connection according to how you want each WCS to service Exchange. If this field was left blank, so the EFS could connect to any mailbox, then you can leave it like this. If however, you are using more than one WCS OR explicitly defining the Ex2003 mailbox stores, then you will need to add the same Ex2010 CAS name that you added into the Server Connection/Mailbox servers field. The benefit of explicitly defining what Exchange servers I want to filter on is it helps with troubleshooting and also keeps the WCS for the two Exchange environments separate. On the other hand you may wish to remain Ex2003/10 agnostic and want to leave it blank.

After you have saved the above settings you should run Test User Connections against both Ex2003 & Ex2010 users to ensure everything has gone through smoothly. Clicking on Marked Folder Management you should still see the listed of Filing Folders you had as before.

A subtle change to review is that any MarkingWorker or FilingWorker jobs carried over prior to migration will appear exactly the same in Folder Sync Monitor/Email Job Monitor lists. However, any new Filing Folders created or any new Filing jobs queued will have their mailbox entry prefixed by the Exch2010 CAS name.

So to summarise

• Have a new Ex2010 service account with relevant permissions
• Update the Email Server connection to use this account with the CAS name
• Consider how best you can use the Exchange filter, to help you with troubleshooting and splitting across multiple WCSs
• Set up a few test accounts with Filing folders, migrate, set up a few more and see how these differ in Folder Synch Monitor area. The same principle will apply in the Email Job monitor pane.

There were two areas of Law that I was thinking about when I first read it. First off this paragraph.

These changes happen because there are two kind of business competition. The first is where you try to be better at doing what the business next door is doing already. The second is where you create a ‘paradigm shift’, pursuing some entirely new ideal no one has focused on before.

This one got me thinking of the crossroads that a lot of law firms are reaching in these tough economic times. Do they try and do things better than their close competitors? Or do they create the “paradigm shift”? The majority of the press and many legal commentators would suggest that “Tesco Law” will usher in a new kind of law firm and the old firms that stick to the current model will wither and die. Is there room for the old style law firm anymore or will law pump out agreements “needlessly uniform and fast”? I suspect there’ll be room for both, after all the two businesses sited in the article (McDonalds and Starbucks) haven’t totally wiped out the “old diners” or the “old style cafés”.

The second area I thought of was after I read this.

I sometimes wonder whether it’s time for government to try a paradigm shift. If, instead of devoting all its energies towards huge, intractable problems such as wholesale NHS reform, our government were to establish a Ministry for Eradicating Trivial Irritations, some degree of success would be assured.

And this got me thinking of a few Legal IT vendors. How the clamber for larger firms through mergers and takeovers have led to a chase the next big thing. Whether it be the cloud, the latest in eDiscovery or Legal Hold or another big technology to sell to the law firms. My thoughts usually are that I wish they’d just look at what they do/did well and make it better. Ironing out those trivial but annoying “features” that drive the lawyers nuts.

Anyway, take a look at the article it’s worth a read in its entirety and perhaps read through some of the other articles by “The Wiki Man”.

It was this section that made me smile:

People who don’t speak to customers that often (and this gets worse the more senior that person is) are prone to taking every complaint that they do hear at face value. After all, if it wasn’t serious they wouldn’t have called the boss, would they?

So where more a experienced complaint wrangler has a range of techniques for getting angry people off the line so that they can do a proper investigation of the issues, the senior manager can think of nothing else but an immediate promise that Something Will Be Done. Thus expectations are raised and the lives of minions made harder.

It’s a generalisation of course and the seniority isn’t necessarily the issue in IT departments. But this does happen (I can even see where I’ve done it myself!) and you end up chasing problems that affect only a few people or delay other projects that could benefit many.

A few things spring to mind off this:

1) It’s going to be one heck of a case study for IT service failure. From the technology that failed, the (lack of) disaster recovery and what resilience was built into a critical system through to studies into how not to manage an incident (the failure in communicating to customers etc). No matter how much redundancy you put in place we know things like this do happen in IT. But for your core product, in RIM’s case, there seems to have been no contingency (although in the aftermath this may end up being something truly unavoidable) and worse still no method of communicating good up to date information to the customer in place. It’s even worse when you consider the mainstream 24hr news services have been carrying the story and would have surely loved to broadcast comment and updates direct from RIM.

2) It’s a real kick in the teeth for cloud computing. Another provider (Office 365 outage, Amazon outage, Google Apps/Mail outage, Apple MobileMe outage) suffering a major outage and thus clients seeing service outages for their own customers.

3) In the corporate email and smartphone arena it’s a big bonus for Apple, Google and Microsoft. The other three key competitors in the smartphone arena. Also for services like Good Technologies who provide app based email solutions for enterprise.

RIM were on the back foot as it was, their main benefit over their rivals was enterprise strength email solutions (although personally I don’t buy into the whole BlackBerry is less of a risk that ActiveSync type technologies argument, but there you go). This reputation though has been dealt a big blow with this incident and they’re going to need some excellent PR work and customer deals to stop a desertion of the enterprise to rivals.

There are plenty of lawyers that use Apple or Android devices already (more so outside the UK), and now Windows Phone has a release that puts it on a par with the others. So at the moment it seems like RIM’s days are numbered.

OK so let’s take a look at Word. Clicking on File Open brings up a WSP dialogue box replacing the native Word open dialogue.

This type of dialogue replacement will be familiar to a user of any DMS and you get obvious views (My Matters, Favourites, Recent). There’s a checkbox allowing me to keep the document checked out (allowing me to stop others amending the document whilst I’m working on it) which is set by default.

I can then make some amends to the document. If I then click save on either the quick access toolbar or the backstage I get a dialogue asking whether I want to save as a new version or save over the existing document.

Using Save As I get a similar WSP dialogue to Open, where I can select a new location and a new file name. If I cancel this you get similar behaviour to that of Workshare Professional when integrated into a DMS, in that the WSP (DMS) dialogue is replaced by a standard Windows dialogue allowing a local save. Quite nice consistency between the two Workshare products!

All the standard DMS functions are handled, but some areas still need some polish. For example the versions in Office 2010 on the backstage are integrated (presumably because it’s designed with SharePoint in mind) but the compare seems to jump to Microsoft’s version.

In other areas the native SharePoint use is a bonus for WSP i.e. the recent documents in the backstage (and the Recent Places) all link correctly to the documents and folders in SharePoint (i.e. the WSP versions). So if I open a document from a link and then click the Save button, the WSP kicks in and asks me what I want to do with the document as you’d expect.

Other things to note in WSP
In Outlook there is a ribbon for WSP and it’s in here you’ll find a few quick links to things like File Email and the WSP home page in Outlook mentioned earlier.

Also you’ll find the configuration option, as with other parts of WSP, this is kept simple. Basically you can say which Office products to integrate with, the name of the SharePoint server(s) and some simple configuration for things like number of items in the recent list.

A couple of things that jumped out as missing for me are matter creation and the afore mentioned meta data inheritance from the matter file. The former I suspect a lot of firms would like some basic “generator” out of the box, but then as the backend is vanilla SharePoint writing something to generate “matter files” from the practice management system should be straight forward. The inheritance though goes with the missing client/matter meta data and is something that is on the plans for Workshare to address. I just hope they create a flexible meta data model that allows customers to build in their own requirements (e.g. allow fairly simple meta data for basic matter documents or more detailed data for say know how documents)

A final niggle is the synchronisation with SharePoint for which there is an option to do so in various places, but in others there’s a refresh. Again it’s nothing serious just some polish that is required to keep consistency. Also I’d suggest that fee earners just won’t get the need to synchronise with the DMS, they’ll just want their document where they expect them.

Summing up
So let’s try to start and sum things up. Starting with a question “What is it that an Legal IT department want from a DMS?”

Well fundamentally it’s to provide the functionality required by the fee earners. Both that I’ve outlined at the start, but also some they may not want, but should be using – i.e. filing emails and documents correctly in the e-file! It should do this in a simple to use, quick and un-intrusive way. And then do it all as cheaply as possible with the least amount of support work required to keep it running.

Well in so far as what the fee earners want, WSP does most of the functions and where it doesn’t there looks to be plans to add that functionality. I did have to remind myself that this is early version, it does the basics well (and some bits very well – hook into compare for review, neatness of email send/file and attachment) but there is work still to do to make it polished. And I have to say it’s fairly simple, I was provided no documentation and yet I still understood it enough to find my way around the core DMS features you’d expect.

From a desktop management WSP of view it has a small footprint and at the moment has a nice simplicity about it, yes there are some things that look a bit techie but there are others that look simple and are well integrated.

There are some future features that look interesting too:

• Offline – the ability to mark folders (hopefully whole matters can be selected!) for cached offline use. And from what I gather the plan is that this will be part of the core app rather than an extra which is nice!
• There are plans to support SharePoint foundation which is good news for firms on a budget!
• Then what I think is the real interesting addition the move to look at Office 365 and SharePoint in “the cloud”. Workshare say they are looking to exploit by allowing people to simply connect to a SharePoint server online and still access that content via their office applications-just like WSP does now- except they will be connecting to a SP server hosted elsewhere.
  • Given the cost of 365 (£4 per person per month for SharePoint, email, IM and Office online!) this could be a real low maintenance legal app for small law firms

Finally the other aspect I mentioned was the fact Legal IT departments want to provide all this with the least amount of support work required to keep it running. Now this is the crux I think with the current buzz around SharePoint.

Is managing a SharePoint backend (after all WSP leaves pretty much a vanilla SharePoint backend) going to be any easier than managing one of the other major DMS’s? I’m not a SharePoint expert but I can’t imagine it will be, however finding the skills to do so may prove easier being a technology that goes wider than the Legal IT market. As for the as cheaply as possible, well a lot of firms already have a SharePoint licence as part of a wider Microsoft agreement or as an intranet (plus if the integration of SharePoint foundation is a success then all you’ll need is a Windows Server licence for the backend!).

But for large firms (and maybe the larger middle firms) that already have a DMS I’m not sure there is enough there to warrant a shift. This is not a fault of WSP, just that there is nothing really new in the DMS world and there is already a skillset supporting the systems in place. There is also the unproved nature of SharePoint.

Times are changing though; big firms are dabbling with SharePoint DMS’s (Clifford Chance springs to mind). In any case I like competition in markets as it forces all vendors to up their game. Microsoft was stagnant in the consumer PC world until Apple resurrected itself, they’re now playing catch-up Without Apple, Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as they are.

Overall what do I think of WSP? Well it does what a DMS should do (or at least it has the delivery of those missing parts on a roadmap). It does need some polish, but I’m sure that will come as it’s there in parts. I guess it then comes down to whether you’re convinced that SharePoint can be a DMS and whether Workshare can nail the price for the client to make it a very cost effective proposition.

Workshare have provided the test VM for me to use and kevin.docherty@workshare.com has been very helpful in answering my many questions on what is planned down the line. Apart from this they’ve left me to comment on the product as I saw it without any final review or editing.