No option for Law Firm

This week I caught the news that the ZX81 hit 30 and that got me thinking about the computers I have owned.

• Commodore PET 2001
• Sinclair Spectrum 48K
• Atari 520STFM

Then the fun went out of computers. I mean take a look at the next lot. (don’t believe me, pull out the internet cable and see what you can do with that thing on your desk!)

• PC (386 laptop with a massive 8 inch b&w screen)
• PC (486 compaq from work)
• PC (self built Athlon)
• PC (water cooled over clocked P4)
• PC (i5)

That first Commodore started me on the path to an IT career in applications development. Developing software in BASIC was the only way I could get that PET to do anything useful. The early days of the Spectrum as well led to plenty of coding, mainly due to the magazines at the time having code listings for games and projects. Also the plethora of magazines like INPUT (TV advert), that taught programming for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 amongst others.

These were the early days of home computing when there were many different machines, each with their own operating system. These machines had languages either built in or shipped with them on disks that allowed kids to experiment in programming.

Then came the PC (and to a lesser extent in the early days the Mac) and years of same old same old, with some improvements and iterations in the OS and just a little be faster hardware in each release.

So apart from a little nostalgia what’s the point in this post?

Well it’s tablets. The multiple different devices, the lack of standard operating system, the explosion in software development for them. It reminds me a little of the early days of home computing. The explosion of Apps is encouraging people to develop again. This could lead to a whole new generation of developers who enjoy coding, rather than build a web site in the hope of being the next Mark Zuckerberg.

From the developers of my generation came most of the stalwarts of the current Legal IT portfolio. The developers that come from tablet generation will maybe bring the next wave. I hope so, Legal IT software to me seems old and tired at the moment. It’s iterations of what we have already, better but not revolutionary.  Maybe the tablet will bring the change?

Anyone use Spotify? For those that don’t it is a service that allows you to play thousands of music tracks for free (with adverts) or for a small monthly cost (without adverts).

It recently launched a new version of its application that integrates a range on new social features.

So what’s this got to do with Legal IT? Well Spotify has done what a whole host of legal IT vendors have done for years, they’ve gone and over complicated what was a very simple application!

Software vendors (and I suspect this can be levelled at Legal IT depts too!) tend to feel the need to add functionality on release of a new version. Which is fair enough, but if you do your key task extremely well (like Spotify previously) why add to it?

There is a lot to be said for just keeping applications to the functions they do well, if you want to deliver a new version maybe think ”what can we take away?”. As I quoted in a previous post : “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

When I started work for a utilities company during a placement year from university in 1991/92, all personal calls from your desk telephone were banned. If you wanted to make a personal call you had to use the office payphone. That’s right you had to wander out of the office to a payphone that for us was located on a different floor at the other end of the office. Sounds ludicrous now doesn’t it? I can’t recall the exact reason given at the time, but I’m sure cost and time wasting were quoted.

So I have a wry smile when I see articles like this one “One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites”.

To me the banning of social sites is just a ludicrous as the scenario I encountered in 1991. The common reasons for blocking given are:

1. Time wasting costing firms money
2. Legal risks, i.e. disclosure of confidential or proprietary information

For both blocking sites to me seems totally ineffective. In the age of Smartphones and Netbooks with wireless internet access (either WiFi or 3G) employees can and will use their own personal devices to access sites if they can’t from their work PC.

To me more effective methods are:

1. For the first, surely a much simpler and effective answer is to manage your staff. This was what the utility industry had decided for the telephone by the time I returned to take a full time role in 1993.
2. Surely a good policy written to explain to employees what is expected of them in terms of posting online? If you want to start one for your firm take a look at this great resource of social media policies.

I know first hand how social media can be a big distraction if not managed (I’ve started turning off my RSS reader during the day for this very reason), but it can also be a valuable source of information if used the right way. For law firms, in an age where we need lawyers to be as “clued up” as possible on social networks (see my last post!), banning them seems a step backwards!

So what does your firm do? Post in the comments and let us know (you can leave the firm name out if you wish).

Almost every day on twitter or in the legal press there are stories of law firms cutting lawyers and/or staff. As I write this post according to The Lawyer the total UK legal redundancies stand at 2727. In fact it may be easier to reel off a list of those firms that haven’t yet made layoffs (note I say yet, I would bet that layoffs are being considered across all firms)

So is this recession worse than 1980’s? Are companies really in bad shape?

I read an article recently on two types of recession:

• “boring recession” – troughs in the business cycle e.g. 1989-1992
• “dramatic recession” – big transformations in the economy. e.g. 1980-1982

The article above points out that the early eighties recession stripped out much outdated manufacturing, mining etc. The recession forcing the market to do exactly what markets do and correct itself.

So what category is this recession? Boring or Dramatic? I’m going to take a guess at dramatic, but this time it’s not blue collar industries that the market is correcting, but white collar ones!

This is the reason we’re seeing so many law firms shedding jobs. Though it’ll probably take more than this wave of layoffs to “correct the market”. I don’t think we’ll see another wave of redundancies, as I think a lot of firms will have stripped out the numbers they can afford to lose without compromising the organisations. What I do think though is that we’ll start to see radical changes in law firms; new billing models, exploitation of technology (to take a quote “no longer need clerks and pupils to search libraries, copy forms and wrap bundles in pink ribbon”), commoditisation of legal work etc.

But I think the biggest impact we’ll see though is in the upturn. This time there are many more well educated, ambitious, highly talented people that have been made redundant. Some of these will “rebel” against the old way of doing law, they’ll not go back to working for one of the old firms and they’ll start new firms. There was a wave of small business entrepreneurs that came out of the last dramatic recession, this time those entrepreneurs could end up completely reshaping delivery of legal services. (it may not take the upturn to bring this about, I saw an article today which shows this could be already starting to happen!)

It’ll be interesting to see how the current Lawyer UK 100 and AmLaw 100 keep up! Who’ll do a Microsoft and shift like they did when they turned 180 degree and embraced the internet and who will be the Lotus sitting back complaining that that upstart Microsoft didn’t do things their way and took their business away?

Caught a tweet from @DavidGurteen yesterday linking to a blog post he’d set up to log KM twitterers/tweeters. He also linked through to another site already listing “Must-Follow Twitterers on Twitter | Knowledge Management“.

I’ve had a look around and can’t find an equivalent for twitterers in Legal IT, so I thought I’d start to compile one (if there is one out there already then let me know!).

So if you work for a law firms IT department or you’re a lawyer, KM practitioner, legal librarian, ex-employee of law firm or whatever with an interest in legal IT and you have a twitter account, then let me know.

Either comment on this post, DM or @ me on twitter (@nooption) OR use the contact page on this site to email me.

My intention is to create some high level groupings of twitterers on the page, something like:

• IT Management/Project Management/Risk
• Applications/Business Systems/Desktop
• Infrastructure/Network/Servers
• Front Line Services/Help Desk/Support
• Training
• General interest in Legal IT

So when you contact me if you can let me know the grouping you’d like to appear (or more than one if you like)?

UPDATE:

The page is now up, I haven’t broken it down as above as I decided against such a rigid structure. If you’re on the list and want to be removed -or- if you want to be added to the list, then contact me and let me know!

Legal IT twitterers

Enjoy!