It left me thinking that anyone waiting for the current tech savvy trainees to give us Legal IT professionals an easier time ought to stop reading this post now as I’m about to depress you!

In fact if this trainee was typical of those joining law firms then the demands on Legal IT are going to get worse (or better if you’re up for the challenge). A couple of points stood out:

1. Frustration at the pace of change in corporate IT. The bemusement at why law firms can’t keep up with software like he could at home. “We were still on Office 2003!” he commented as though this was a ridiculous situation. My comments on the difficulties of upgrading thousands of PC’s got a kind of “So what?” reaction.
2. They do understand the IT dept but only the roles of those at the coal face. The service desks and IT support staff. They are unaware of the size and roles in the rest of IT.

Now this may have just been the situation in that particular law firm, but I doubt it. The challenge that stands out to me from this is twofold:

1. The struggle of getting the old lawyers to use computers is going to change rapidly into a demand from new lawyers to use the latest computers and software. This I’m sure is starting to happen already, but it will only increase. Why shouldn’t a lawyer be able to do with his work kit what I’m doing now with my own kit (writing a blog post on my laptop travelling up the M5 whilst connected to the internet via my windows phone which is acting as a wireless hotspot! **).
2. There needs to be better engagement at the trainee stage with IT. Get the trainees involved in the IT strategy early in their careers may reap benefits later.

Things are not going to get any easier for Legal IT, the demands on the corporate IT dept won’t drop off they’ll just be different.

Oh and the challenges for Law Firms generally won’t get easier either. This guy got disillusioned with the long hours, no life culture of city law and quit to pursue other interests. Generation Y is going to shake things up in law in more ways than one!

** to the iPhone users out there. That windows phone is not only acting as a wireless hotspot, it’s also playing MP3’s through the car stereo and scrobbling to tracks to last.fm. That’s multitasking!

The business headlines though have been full of the cost to the UK economy, quotes range from a general £1.2bn cost to the economy to a daily cost of £0.5bn due to absenteeism. The feeling from a lot of these articles is that it’s the employees fault for not trying or the local governments fault for not gritting the road, but it never seems to be the employers fault…no they’re the ones suffering.

Wakefield under snow

Isn’t it about time we had a revolution in work days in the UK? A move from the practices and procedures in place to support an office in a city centre with set working hours? An abolition of the 9 to 5 … and for those who are about to say “if only” can I say we should also do away with the long hours culture too. Sure, work the long hours when you need to (finishing projects, completing deals) but not to impress your boss or worse, just to be seen in the office.

I mean this week how many like me have spent hours wasted standing on freezing platforms? Or struggling to get through the roads on buses and in cars? If you managed to get in at all, how many have been “late in”?

So will this cold snap finally kick start a new wave of forward thinking employers that shift to a flexible working model, not just in terms of working hours but also in working location? Law firms are ideally placed to take advantage as they don’t have the necessity of a set working hour like say retail.

The technology is there to enable lawyers to work anywhere:

• Remote access – how many firms don’t have some form of remote access to either connect your work laptop from your home broadband or even to use your home PC to connect through to your work environment?
• IM (Instant Messaging) – on my top 5 for 2010, IM has the ability to replace those adhoc chats in the office. Also bringing video to the desktop makes communicating more successful than with just the telephone. Also when you consider Skype’s recent announcement for their HD video it’ll be much better than the grainy pictures of old.
• Workflow – in dictation and other systems, workflow is built in. Meaning you can do your dictation or task, submit it and it can go on to a pool of people to complete (either in their home, another office or another country).

The benefits during this last week are so obvious!

Your employees firstly can get to work (no snow between bedroom and study and even if for whatever reason there is, then just use the laptop in your bedroom!). Your employees who got to work this week were probably late, cold and rather un-motivated due to expending all their energy on their commute!

The cost benefits are there too. By providing flexible working a percentage of the firm will always be working out of the office, this should enable firms to redesign their office space requirements to utilise less desks and less space. Less space = less cost, a big saving for a lot of law firms whose offices tend to be in prime real estate locations.

Yes there are the common complaints:

• People aren’t working, but having a “jolly” at home. This perhaps will require the most effort to resolve as it will require a shift in the way we manage people. But surely we should be managing for results/deliverables anyway, rather than by how long someone is at their desk or in the office? After all lawyers work with clients very effectively and they’re offsite, so surely it’s as easy if not easier to do that with colleagues?
• Missing the day to day chats. This can be alleviated with IM as previously mentioned, but I’m not advocating sole home working. So the adhoc chats will still happen when people are in the office. If there is a need for a team to keep in regular contact then the team probably needs to be together in the office but it won’t be all the time.
• Some people can’t due to the nature of their work. That’s right, but my answer is so what? Why should there be one policy for all employees? In Law firms more can. Take Legal IT departments as an example:
  • Help Desk – there is technology to allow switch board numbers to be routed to any phone any where. The AA do this for their call centre operators, as do many other forward thinking companies.
  • Server Support – a lot of firms utilise remote data centres anyway, so what is the difference if their “home base” is elsewhere?

So stop the complaining about the cost of the snow and do something about it. It’s time for a flexible working revolution. Let’s get rid of 9 to 5 and get rid of the concept of needing a permanent desk in an office to do your work!

Has your law firm got a social media policy or a set of social media guidelines?

If not it is surely only a matter of time before they do. The rise of the risk management function in firms (not just law firms) means that as social media takes off, guidelines and policies will be put in place (take a look at this site for a raft of policies out there for various companies!).

I’ve been blogging (on this site) for a little under a year now and have already fallen foul a number of times, I have posted something I maybe shouldn’t have or ended up agreeing that it may be best I didn’t say what I had. So I think it’s in the interest of the blogger as well as the firm to have a few guidelines in place.

I recently caught a tweet that led me to a web page that outlined the guidelines for ABC in Australia, these were the best guidelines I have yet seen! The beauty is the simplicity:

• Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
• Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
• Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
• Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

That’s it! Four bullets, brilliant!

If I had abided by these guidelines I would have checked myself in all my afore mentioned cases. As well as offering a good guideline for social media use they underline a trust and belief in the professionalism of their staff.

Those that are following this blog and/or my twitter feed know that I’m working on a number of things around email management at the moment. And this set of guidelines got me thinking, maybe this is the way forward for all policies?

So I had a go at a few points for managing the electronic file:

• File electronic documents and email in a manner:
• that would allow you to find and display any document/email on your PC should your client call unexpectedly and refer to that document/email
• that you’d be happy to show your clients the electronic file

I think that would be enough to ensure a full and proper well organised electronic matter file, stored with others in an easy to find structure.

“Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away", Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

"Simplify, and add lightness", Colin Chapman.

or simply KISS! (Keep it Simple, Stupid!)

Now I’m not going to get into political commentary (if you want to read the political blogosphere’s take on the story try Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes blogs) or touch on the legal ramifications, I wanted to do a quick post on it from a Legal IT point of view.

In fact one twitter post stood out for me yesterday and this kind of sums up my thoughts:

The Carter-Ruck/Guardian/Trafigura press censorship story is classic example of what happens when old time lawyers meet Web 2.0 media

It’s not about actually using web 2.0. I really don’t believe that every lawyer should have a blog, be on facebook or linked in, update twitter, use instant messaging (IM). To me these are all just tools, just as the old telephone is. In fact think about it, you wouldn’t evangelise about the telephone and how everyone really must use it would you? People either use it or they don’t. The key point is that they know what it is and what it is useful for (and as important what it’s useless for).

The same goes with blogs, micro blogs, wikis, social networking, IM etc. Lawyers need to know what it is, how it is used and how it is now mainstream (don’t believe me? Read “Youth can’t live without web” and “Finland makes broadband legal right“). If they choose to use it great, but it doesn’t matter as long as they know and understand what it is.

And this is where I believe Legal IT departments can help.

I remember, back in the late 90′s when the Internet was still fairly new, doing a series of presentations with a colleague around our firms UK offices. The aim was to talk to lawyers about the technology behind the web. This was mainly for technology and media lawyers, but it was giving them an insight into the technologies that their clients would be talking about. This is what law firm IT people need to be doing now. Not necessarily advocating they use it, but talking to lawyers and helping them to understand the web 2.0 technologies, how they are used and in this case how it is impossible to “gag” a story anymore (the “Streisand effect”).

Final thought, the term “web 2.0″ or “new media”. Is it me or does this seem really dated? Surely it’s just “web” and “media” now?

I see from today’s Legal Week that Allen & Overy are looking at an initiative to bring in flexible working. Now whether this is a true move to flexitime for all staff (including support staff),  just general flexibility for partners or meeting the 2003 legislation for parents you can’t really tell from the article. But the fact it’s in the press to me shows at least law firms are starting to think about it.

Looking at Legal IT in particular, what are the benefits of flexitime? As well as the afore mentioned obvious benefits to the employee it also has benefits for the employer.

Key at the moment are the cost savings you could get immediately by extending the core hours:

Say your current hours are a usual 9 to 5. To get staff to work long after 5 you’ll either have to have very well motivated willing staff or more likely you’ll have to pay overtime.

In a flexitime environment you could extend core hours to 6 to 8 (staff chose which 7/7.5 to work in this time), staff know that if at busy periods they work a 10 hour+ day they will be able to work shorter days when it isn’t busy. The employer gets the savings in reduced overtime pay.

Another benefit of the extended core hours is you widen your coverage in the day for customers as some will rather come in early and some will rather stay late.

Productivity usually increases as people maximise the work when it is required. They will put in the effort to reach milestones, get pieces of work done etc as they know that in the lulls they can claw the time back.

Personally I think the UK has an unhealthy focus on just the hours you’re in the office. These being more important than the work you do in those hours. Two stories stick in my mind regarding this:

• First was from a friend of mine who went to work in Germany, he told me the story of a British manager who had gone to work for the same company. The manager did the usual British thing of staying in the office late, after a few weeks his boss had pulled him to one side and told him if he couldn’t do the work in the hours allotted he clearly wasn’t the man for the job.
• The second I heard was of a manager who spoke up when challenged by the boss on the reasons why there was no one in the office late. Clearly this was an indicator that the dept needed to be busier. The manager responded by asking whether he (the boss) wanted an office where people came in and simply sat at their desks from 7 to 7 or where people were in (maybe for less time) but got the job done?

Yes there are times when extra hours are needed to get jobs done, but as I’ve pointed out flexitime helps this by allowing employees to be somewhere else when there isn’t the demand. Most employees when they feel they are being looked after will give a lot in return.

Have a look at this great post by Adrian Dayton that highlights the generational difficulties in adapting from the old way to the flexible way.

Will it happen in Legal? I recall when I first started in a law firm, the working week for support staff was 37.5 hours, thanks to competition in the London firms support staff (secretaries at the time) this was reduced to 35 hours to keep the good people. If more city firms look at flexitime then it could ripple through the top 200 fairly quickly!

I looked at this in context of an article I posted a link to on twitter yesterday “Overworked corporate counsel cut back on use of outside firms”.

Then thought to myself: Is there going to be enough legal work to go around?

I mean if the work has dried up to such an extent, are firms wise gambling that levels of work will pick up to pre 2008 levels?

What if the corporate counsel continues with the primary firms and never goes back to using larger numbers of firms? What if the general drive to keep costs low in business continues and puts pressure on law firms? And then it is highly likely we will have a change in government in the UK , one that will maybe reverse the current situation where the solution to all problems is more laws and legislation being introduced, easing the red tape on business.

The question then becomes: Will we simply have too many law firms for the work out there?

I’m guessing therefore that we will start to see a fair bit of consolidation in the legal industry in the coming years.

A series of mergers outside the top 20? Perhaps it wouldn’t interest the magic circle but maybe others in the Top 20 will refocus back on the UK and absorb some of the mid range players? I just can’t see there being the number of firms there are now around the £150m revenue mark and so I’m guessing 2010 will be a bumper year for mergers leading to a whole range on new brands in “The Lawyer UK 200 – 2010”.

I predicted Clarke and Haddin would go early on Monday this week and England would wrap up the Lord’s test early afternoon, will this be another case of a great prediction or will it be a Tony Meehan (Decca) moment? Time will tell.

First off was a post I caught on Larry Bodine’s blog entitled “Forget Twitter, Go Back to Email Marketing”. Now I don’t necessarily agree with the title, but there is a point in the article that I do agree with. The fact that “There is limitless opportunity for real interaction with your customers sitting right there in your email database” i.e. start using email better to interact rather than just ‘tell people’ and the fact that in most law firms CRM systems I bet there isn’t one twitter username, but there will be hundreds of email addresses.

Second was that I attended the inaugural user group for the Tikit eMarketing product yesterday (this is basically a bolt on to InterAction that manages email marketing activity) and I was surprised at the turn out. It shows that email marketing is still big for law firms.

So does the Tikit product address the direction of the blog post? i.e. the ability to react and engage with those you are mailing?

The upcoming release (v4.6) looks promising.

As well as consolidating the user interfaces of the current version and improving the technical side. There are changes proposed to enhance the reporting to generate metrics from multiple mailings and compare. So you can start to see what content is relevant to which clients. All this can be linked back to InterAction data to categorise by contact types, folders etc

These changes are setting the platform to build on the product in 2010 to allow enhanced process flows and multiple page events (allowing choices to be made by the recipient and different content delivered). There are also plans to enhance the ability for fee earners to deliver dynamic content to clients simply through the InterAction interface. There was also a session at the end on Spam. And this is the difficulty in trying to get personal in email marketing, especially if you go down the articles path of emails from partners addresses rather than “noreply@bigcompany.com”. Last thing you want is a badly formed email broadcast resulting in the partners email address being added to a spam list!

Email marketing though is still widely used and is definitely here to stay for a while, products like this are allowing you to make it more individual and relevant by track the metrics and allowing dynamic personalised content.

I did ask the “Twitter” question to the product team in a coffee break and although it isn’t planned I did get the impression that discussions about it had taken place internally. But the feeling they had was one I can see, how would you integrate twitter campaigns into CRM systems? I had an initial think on the way back and came up with:

• You could broadcast links to content and track clickthru’s, can’t really see real benefits of that as you could gain this from web stats.
• If twitter usernames were collected in the CRM system then you could @ or direct message your customers?
• Maybe you could add to the first point a tracking of RT’s of your articles and collate this information as to which twitter users are interested in what content?

But I concluded that I’m still not sure twitter is tuned to traditional eMarketing, it’s less a centralised marketing function and more an individual tool. I’m sure though there is some way to link the two, but haven’t thought of it yet. Any ideas?

Blogging is old hat, the term was first coined back in 1997. However this doesn’t mean they are obsolete by any means, in that time they have grown to the position where they are starting to really challenge television and newspapers when it comes to breaking and shaping news stories.

In the US blogs have been used widely in business for a number of years and with great effectiveness in politics. In the UK there are some great blogs out there and bloggers (especially political bloggers) appear regularly on the 24 hour news channels now. However I would argue that blogs really haven’t hit the mainstream in business and certainly not in UK law.

There are some UK legal bloggers out there, but your average big law partner isn’t blogging. It’s probably a similar argument that a certain MP for Salford used “I’m not against new media. YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre”, this may be true but why not use both?

So to all the lawyers, what’s stopping you?

And if your IT dept hasn’t given you the software or shown you how here are some resources:-

What is a blog? Watch this video “Blogs in Plain English”

How do I start? Start by setting up a blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com

That’s pretty much all you need.

So go on give it a try I’m sure your clients would appreciate hearing from what you have to say, you never know it may also lead to some business coming your way!

The Spectator points out that the business model isn’t necessarily that new, but what is new is it’s less a marketing trick to get your product out there but a new economy, in the words of the Wired article :

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

In the UK an ISP revolutionised the market in the early days of the internet boom. Traditionally (before broadband) you would pay a monthly fee for your ISP and then your phone calls on top of that. Freeserve came on the market and dispensed with the monthly charge, making its money from a proportion of the call charge. Within a year it had grown to 1.5m subscribers and changed the market forever.

So my question is can this business model be translated to legal work?

From a consumer point of view I remember buying my first house in 1995 and getting the conveyancing for nothing (thanks to the builder).

But could a law firm really offer services for nothing?

Could we every get to the point that the knowledge systems in law firms become so good that a simple search could trawl thousands of precedents and cases in a firms KM (Knowledge Management) and DM (Document Management) systems and bring you back the agreements that could be used with virtually no partner/associate billable time. Meaning very low costs that could be covered elsewhere (e.g. by adverts)?

I imagine the response now is “Don’t be stupid!” but then I’m sure if I stood in “Our Price” or “HMV” music stores 20 years ago and said “in the future you’ll be able to get every record and tape in this store in far better audio quality, for free!”

I’d had said the same thing back then “Don’t be stupid!”. And now we have Spotify!

So it comes as a shock when people question its value. And judging by recent articles and posts on the web the time is ripe to try and knock twitter from its podium:

• The recent Neilson reporting on the “twitter quitters”
• The big furore in the legal twitterverse with Larry Bodine’s article “Twitter Not Effective for Law Firm Marketing”
• And today Charles Christian posts he’s had enough with twitter (I would link to the post but it looks like he’s deleted his twitter account altogether too!)

And thus it get’s articles written about it, repeated and quoted in blogs and twitter itself (yes I understand the irony!)

To me though people are missing the point, twitter isn’t facebook or myspace so comparisons with them doesn’t work.  It is just a brand for micro blogging (there are plenty of others out there: kwippy, plurk, jaiku, identica etc). Yes, twitter as a brand may fail but micro blogging is here to stay.

Face-to-face, letters, telephone, fax, email, instant messaging (IM) and twitter (micro blogging)

They’re just all just forms of communication, nothing more nothing less. People will prefer one over the other, over a period of time one form may get used much more than others. But none of them are going away.

IM has been around for years, but it’s only just starting to move into the business world (outside IT depts). But in a short time it will take off in businesses and we’ll see email usage fall away, just as we saw the use of telephones fall once email exploded on the scene (don’t believe it, just ask any 16 year old how much they use email!).

Micro blogging will start to appear too in corporate environments as people experiment with laconi.ca and jaiku.

My guess though is that Larry Bodine doesn’t necessarily think twitter is a waste of time, he’s in marketing and one sure fire way to get your name out there is to shout the opposite to what everyone else is shouting (after all it was only 5 months ago that “Twitter is valuable to legal professionals”) . And everyone has taken notice, I bet Larry has more speaking engagements and requests for articles than at any time in the last 12 months!

He may actually be right on twitter not being an effective law firm marketing tool, but as for being “sucked into the black hole of buzz about twitter” it isn’t a black hole, twitter or micro blogging will be just like the telephone here to stay for a long time!