No option for Law Firm

Well after a week of snow and disruption it’s back to work today (or perhaps not as for some of the UK there is forecast for another day of snow).

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!

Looking back on 2009 there seems to be a few familiar names that have branched out from the large Legal IT companies to set up their own businesses aimed at Legal IT.

I mentioned Paul O’Connor from Interwoven/iManage UK and the GS Link Warden product he’s been working on for Grant Select back in August.

There are two more that I thought worth pointing out.

The first is Simon Ellison-Bunce who some of you may know from Tikit. He has started a company called FellSoft Limited. They are focused on CRM and in particular InterAction and have recently released a product called Feed Watch.

Feed Watch is an add-on product for InterAction that basically can bring in content from the web (via RSS) into InterAction.

The second is Keith Lipman who some may know from Interwoven/iManage. He has started a company called Prosperoware. They are focused on information management and have a product available called Milan.

Milan is an add-on for Autonomy iManage WorkSite and adds a number of useful tools for managing the environment.

I think 2010 will be an interesting year for Legal IT as there does seem to be a wave of new software companies providing innovative add-ons and expansions to the “core” Legal IT products.

Happy New Year to you all!

Hope you had a good 2009 and I wish you all a great 2010. For me what better way for me to start the blog this year than conforming with a blogger tradition and compiling a list.

I thought I’d try a prediction of the technology areas that I will be big for Legal It in 2010, so here it is my top 5 list of legal IT technologies for 2010.

#5 Mobile Applications

The Smartphone is well and truly main stream now (thanks mainly to the iPhone, but also Windows Phone, BlackBerry’s and Android phones). And 2010 will be the year it moves from just being an email device in the hands of fee earners. It’ll be the year of an explosion of business applications on mobile devices.

#4 – Search

I think this will be a big year for search technology, in particular IDOL. This will initially be driven by the numbers of firms on Autonomy’s iManage WorkSite product moving to the latest 8.5 version with IDOL. But once it’s in I think search will start to grow as a key technology in 2010.

#3 – Office 2010/Windows 7

After 18 months of “make do” most firms will start to look at these two products together. After all I suspect almost all law firms are on Windows XP still and Office 2003, right? I also think there will be a fair few mid-sized firms who go down an alternative route and go to OpenOffice in 2010 (like Ford & Warren Solicitors in the UK. A Law Firm in Leeds with 200 desktops are using Openoffice 3.0 now).

#2 Instant Messaging

MSN Messenger comes to Legal IT! After years of being the #1 consumer product for Generations Y & Z this will be the year Instant Messaging breaks into the corporate world in a big way (including Legal IT). There will be lots of arguments against, but 2010 will be the year for IM starts becoming a standard business tool.

And Finally……

#1 Speech Recognition

I remember this being touted as the killer technology back when I started in Legal IT in the mid to late 90’s. But the technology has advanced sufficiently to warrant a return in a big way in 2010 (Nuance have been working on the technology and have acquired all those names of old, IBM ViaVoice, Dragon Dictation etc – just this week they bought SpinVox).

I think also the general shift in secretarial/fee earner ratios will mean fee earners will do more of their own document production (also I think younger lawyers are more comfortable doing this anyway). Speech recognition is perfect for addressing this, giving you a quick start on your document. 

So that’s my list, one for a review at the end of the year. What do you think? A accurate list or a sure fire way to get myself on a list of infamous quotes on 31st December 2010?

It’ll take a lot to beat this quote, my favourite from a list circulated this week on twitter:

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” 1977 — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) 

Although when you think about it now, he’s probably right. Do we really want a computer or just an internet device in our home?

A return of the WorkSite hints and tips series to end 2009!

Following a question today I found a neat way of adding a shortcut to another folder from within your matter file. This is pretty straight forward when you think about it within WorkSite, but it’s worth noting as it’s always handy to be able to link to a folder of documents from within your electronic file (e.g. to link to common client documents within a client folder from within each matter file relating to that client).

This is what you end up with (where Client Documents is located in another file, i.e. the shortcut):

Shortcut to a folder within a matter workspace

To do this all you need to do is the following:

• Right Click on the Tab (Matter Management in the above example)
• Select Add Shortcuts

How to add a shortcut to a folder from within a matter workspace

• In the resulting pop up, browse to your required folder.
• Then single click on the folder (i.e. highlight it, not go into the contents of it)
• Click Select
• That should be it, the shortcut should be added 

Given the relevant access rights (see explanation of WorkSite security here and here) you can also add shortcuts to folders at a Workspace as well as Tab level.

There is one piece of news this week that may have finally brought home to those in business how important social media is, the Joe McElderry v Rage Against the Machine story. It’s one that all lawyers and law firm marketing depts will hopefully be taking note of.

Before you stop reading let me say this isn’t going to be a blog post campaigning to get us all go web 2.0 and set up internal facebook systems. No, this is simply to raise awareness. As I’ve mentioned before Legal IT’ers need to be educating their lawyers (and perhaps some of their colleagues) about social media. It isn’t just generation Z posting pictures of themselves and their friends in uncompromising positions on open facebook accounts or posting about what you had for breakfast on twitter. No, this is about helping your firm and your clients to understand how social media could see their services or products destroyed in a tsunami of negative online comment!

It only took just two people and a facebook group to wreck Simon Cowell’s hold on the Christmas #1, a zero cost campaign against weeks of million viewer pulling X Factor “adverts”.

But still it’s amazing at how few businesses really “get” social media and prefer to just ignore it, rather than engage with it. Even in the IT industry! There are few Legal IT vendors that really ”get it”. But they all need to, it’s no longer about good press releases and a good website, it’s about comment, engaging with your customers through interactive online content.

So I’m going to sign off with a challenge to the Legal IT vendors. If you read blogs for comment on your firm, how about letting us know that you’re a step ahead of most IT companies and post a simple comment on this post? Go on, given the time of year ow about just a simple “Happy Christmas from xyz plc”!